Wife of Meenybraddan

The wife of Meenybraddan is a bog body , the 1978 Meenybraddan Bog ( Irish Mín Uí Bhradáin ), near the village of Inver ( Inbhear ) in Irish County Donegal was found. It is now in the Irish National Museum in Dublin .

Location

The Meenybraddan Bog (moor) is located in the middle of an extensive high moor landscape with an extension of about 400  km² . Peat was extracted here for the first time in 1942 . Mining began in 1974 in the area of ​​the site. The moor was more than two meters deep here. The site itself is 300 m from the Ardara - Inver road and about 60 m west of a dirt road called Bog Road between Dunkineely and Glenties.
Location: 54 ° 43 ′ 47.4 ″  N , 8 ° 19 ′ 19.6 ″  W Coordinates: 54 ° 43 ′ 47.4 ″  N , 8 ° 19 ′ 19.6 ″  W.

Find history

Meenybraddan's wife was discovered by farmer Frank Battles and a few neighbors in the early afternoon of May 3, 1978. While manually digging peat , they came across the corpse, which was wrapped in a piece of cloth, at a depth of about three feet. She was recovered and taken to Sheil Hospital in Ballyshannon , where she was examined by a Mountcharles police officer in the late afternoon. On May 5, the police chief reported the find to Forensic Medicine and the National Museum of Ireland, and the next day two forensic doctors and a National Museum curator examined the body and the site. The coroner Dr. Harbison took a few more x-rays, and the same evening the find was transported to Dublin , where it was stored in a cold store in the city morgue .

Scientific processing

On May 23, the body was examined by a team of nine interdisciplinary experts. Since she was already showing slight changes from thawing and drying, she was taken to St. James Hospital in Dublin and frozen in a mortuary refrigerator at −4 ° C. In the following days, a computed tomogram of her body was made. On June 6, 1978, a dentist examined the teeth, and a superficial examination of the skin revealed mold growth for the first time . On June 13, 1978, an endoscopic examination revealed a further deterioration in the state of preservation , whereupon all further planned examinations were canceled. For stabilization, the body was stored in a freezer at the Dublin Forensic Medicine. Seven years later, on July 22nd, 1985, Meenybraddan's wife was transported to the British Museum's organic conservation works in London in a custom-made, dry-ice- cooled shipping container . In August 1985, the body was thawed and re-examined. The internal organs were removed from her for later preservation and preserved separately. The woman's body was impregnated with polyethylene glycol and freeze-dried . Conservation was completed on November 11, 1985, and the find was transferred to the National Museum of Ireland on May 28, 1987.

description

The woman was sprawled on her back with her head three inches deep, while her feet rested three inches in the bog. It lay in a northwest-southeast orientation with its head pointing northwest. Her head was tilted slightly down to the left and rested with her lower jaw on her left collarbone . Her right arm was stretched out along the side of her body, her hand resting on her right thigh , and her fingers curled into a loose fist. Her left arm was bent almost at a right angle at the elbow , her forearm lay across her stomach, and her slightly bent fingers touched her right arm. Her legs were stretched out parallel to each other. The layer of peat above her was undisturbed, so it has not changed since the body was laid down. There were no signs of an excavation at the site. The woman was apparently naked, but wrapped in a woolen cloth like a shroud. Her torso and head with a mop of hair were well preserved, but parts of the arms and legs were more skeletonized. No injuries or wounds were externally visible. In the surrounding peat layer, no stones, branches, wooden poles or other objects were found.

Findings

At the first forensic examination, the woman's body was about 150 cm long. Her sex could be determined as female based on the preserved breasts . Based on the available anatomical features and the dental status , the age of the woman is estimated to be around 25 to 35 years. The skin was discolored dark brown from the moor acids and was better preserved on the back than on the front. There were still large amounts of corpse wax under the skin . Many areas of the skin were covered with plant roots, some of which had penetrated through them into the interior of the body. The bones were severely decalcified from being stored in the bog and were soft and pliable before freeze-drying, but firm again after the treatment. Parts of the legs and feet were only skeletonized, which can be attributed to the fact that peat had been cut near the legs the year before. As a result, the peat layer here dried out, which promoted the decomposition process of the soft tissues. The legs were sawed off shortly after the rescue for transport. The bones of the skull were relatively well preserved. The skin of the face had passed from the nose to the upper lip, this region was densely interspersed with peat moss roots that grew deep into the skull. The woman's dentition was complete, the teeth were completely decalcified by the action of the acid moor environment and were deep brown in color. Because of the dissolved enamel layers, they appeared smaller. The teeth were only minimally to moderately chewed and corresponded to the typical teeth of a 25 to 30 year old young, healthy woman. The woman's main hair was wavy, about four to six inches long, and dark brown in color. The reddish coloration of the hair often observed in bog bodies was not present. Eyebrows and eyelashes were also present. The eyelids were closed except for a small crack. Remnants of tissue from the eyeballs could still be seen behind it . The fingernails were in situ. Under the electron microscope, fine scratches were visible on the surface, suggesting that the workload was only moderate, possibly in the home.

The radiological findings revealed no fractures, injuries or degenerative changes. The skeleton showed no signs of malnutrition or disease. Only the spine showed increased bone density in some regions , the cause of which is still unclear. On the x-rays of the head, the severely shrunken brain in the cranial cavity was visible. The lower jaw was deformed by the pressure of the earth masses on the corpse.

Most of the internal organs could be identified endoscopically. Their collagen structure was almost complete, but severely shrunk and sunken. However, the endoscopic examination of the thorax turned out to be difficult because the slumped body made it difficult to reach some areas. The histological examination of the lung tissue revealed a completely dissolved cell structure without any recognizable cell nuclei. In the samples, a high proportion of soot particles was found in all parts of the lungs. During her lifetime, the woman must have been exposed to high levels of smoke, possibly from the hearth fire at home. However, no pathological changes could be observed in the histological samples.

dress

Meenybraddan's wife was wrapped in a woolen semicircular cloak 243 cm wide and 130 cm long. The body had been laid across the coat. The corners of the cloak were placed over her head and feet, and the long edges were tucked in to the right and left. This package was held together by a 60 cm long woolen cord, which was pulled through slits roughly cut into the fabric on the long, straight edge of the coat and in the lower third of the cloth and knotted. The completely obtained coat was sewn together from four strips from a 50 cm wide piece of woven fabric. The top strip was 50 cm wide and had straight ends. The second strip was sewn onto its lower longitudinal edge, the ends of which were cut off in an arc. The remaining two strips had different sizes and were a maximum of 30 cm wide. The smaller of the two pieces had a small darning point. Otherwise, the coat showed only moderate signs of wear and tear at the corners. The present coat is the best preserved of a number of other finds of the same type from Irish moors.

Cause of death

Neither the medical nor the archaeological findings provided evidence of an unnatural death of the woman. There is also no medical evidence that she died in childbed . The fact that the wife of Meenybraddan lay carefully wrapped in a woolen cloak in the bog suggest that she was intentionally buried here . It is possible that this find is an emergency or poor burial on unconsecrated ground, as was common in many regions for suicides, for example.

Dating

The ¹⁴ C analysis of a sample from the left femur resulted in 1986 including new calibration data on an age of 730 ± 90 BP, 1050–1410 AD with a probability of 95%. This dating apparently contradicts the textile typological features of the coat. Fabrics of this type are said to have been manufactured between the late 16th and late 17th centuries.

literature

• Wijnand van der Sanden : Mummies from the moor. The prehistoric and protohistoric bog bodies from northwestern Europe . Batavian Lion International, Amsterdam 1996, ISBN 90-6707-416-0 , pp. 71 (Dutch, original title: Vereeuwigd in het veen . Translated by Henning Stilke).
• Máire Delaney, Raghnall Ó Floinn: A Bog Body from Meenybraddan Bog, County Donegal, Ireland . In: Richard C. Turner; Robert G. Scaife (Ed.): Bog Bodies - New Discoveries and New Perspectives . British Museum Press, London 1995, ISBN 0-7141-2305-6 , pp. 123-132 (English).
• Arthur C. Aufderheide: The Scientific Study of Mummies . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003, ISBN 0-521-81826-5 , pp. 180-182 (English).
• Charlotte Wilcox: Mummies, bones & body parts . Carolrhoda Books, Minneapolis 2000, ISBN 978-1-57505-428-5 , pp. 18-19 (non-fiction book in English for children and young people).

Web links

• Meenybraddan Woman AD 1500-1600. In: The Perfect Corpse homepage. NOVA PBS, accessed December 1, 2011 (photo of Meenybraddan's wife). 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Máire Delaney, Raghnall Ó Floinn: A Bog Body from Meenybraddan Bog, County Donegal, Ireland . In: Richard C. Turner; Robert G. Scaife (Ed.): Bog Bodies - New Discoveries and New Perspectives . British Museum Press, London 1995, ISBN 0-7141-2305-6 , pp. 123 . (Indicated as National Grid Ref. G 793 869, converted via Irish Grid Reference Finder .)
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Máire Delaney, Raghnall Ó Floinn: A Bog Body from Meenybraddan Bog, County Donegal, Ireland . In: Richard C. Turner; Robert G. Scaife (Ed.): Bog Bodies - New Discoveries and New Perspectives . British Museum Press, London 1995, ISBN 0-7141-2305-6 , pp. 123-132 (English).
3. ^ ^{A b} S. Omar, M. McCord, V. Daniels: The conservation of bog bodies by freeze-drying . In: Studies in Conservation . No. 34 , 1989, pp. 101-109 , JSTOR : 1506225 (English, Lindow Mann, Meenybraddan).