Lindow man

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Lindow's man

The Lindow Man , official name Lindow II , (Engl. Lindow one or Pete Marsh ) is a bog body from the 1st century. Chr., In 1984 in Lindow Moss in Mobberley on the border with Wilmslow in the county of Cheshire in Manchester was discovered in north-west England .

Lindow Moss

The Lindow Moss bog was jointly farmed as a common land until the Middle Ages . Originally it covered an area of ​​more than 600  hectares . To date it has shrunk to a tenth of its original area. Reports from the 18th century about drowned people show that the moor was known as a dangerous place in earlier times. For centuries, peat was manually extracted from the moor as fuel, until mining was mechanized in the 1980s. On May 13, 1983, one year before the Lindow man was found, the first bog body, Lindow I , was discovered in the Lindow Moss about 250 m further northeast . In 1987 the remains of a third male bog corpse, Lindow III, came to light. Other body parts known as Lindow IV were found on June 14 and September 12, 1988. These may be missing parts of the Lindow man.

Finding circumstances

The Lindow Moss in 2006

The Lindow man was discovered on August 1, 1984 by the peat cutter Andy Mold, who had already been involved in the discovery of the bog body of Lindow I a year earlier. Mold recovered an object that looked like wood from the conveyor belt of the peat processing machine and pelted his colleague Eddie Slack with it. When the object fell to the ground and the peat clinging to it crumbled, a human foot was visible. The police called in to secure the foot for investigation. The district archaeologist Rick Turner was notified of the find and he succeeded in recovering further remains of the Lindow man. Since parts of the skin were already exposed on the surface and starting to crumble, he covered the body with fresh peat to protect it from further dehydration. On August 6, 1984, the bog body was recovered from the block by archaeologists . Until it was clarified whether a recent crime had occurred, the find was temporarily stored under the supervision of the police in the Macclesfield District Council Hospital in a cold room of the pathology department. On August 17, the British Museum's laboratory , which was commissioned with the 14 C dating , confirmed that the body was over 1000 years old, whereupon the coroner released the body to the archaeologists on August 21. In the meantime, the British Museum had a suitable refrigerated transport box made in which the body could be transported and stored at a constant temperature of 4 ° C. A radiologist of the hospital gave the bog body nicknamed Pete Marsh , a play on words from the English words for peat ( peat ) and swamp ( marsh ). The name was picked up and circulated by the local press. Location: 53 ° 19 ′ 17 ″  N , 2 ° 16 ′ 16 ″  W Coordinates: 53 ° 19 ′ 17 ″  N , 2 ° 16 ′ 16 ″  W

Findings

The right foot

During the uncovering from the bog in the laboratory, a narrow bracelet made of fox fur, preserved in several fragments, was found in the area of ​​the left upper arm. Apart from this bracelet, no other clothing could be found on the body. More precise examinations for traces of past textile residues made of vegetable fibers such as linen or nettle turned out to be just as negative as analyzes to detect remaining dyes such as woad or indigotine from clothing that may have been past. It can therefore be assumed with a high degree of probability that the man entered the moor naked.

The evaluation of the pollen and plant remains recovered from the Lindow man's site showed that he came to the moor at a time of profound changes in the landscape, which was characterized by a sharp decline in forest areas and intensification of agriculture. Several decades earlier, the moor was significantly drier with a water level of only 5 to 10 cm below the surface. In the years before the Lindow man's death, the moor became significantly more humid due to a drastic change in climate with temperature drops averaging 1 ° C and 10% higher rainfall. Numerous ponds filled with water formed. This change in climate must have had a dramatic impact on agriculture at the time. At that time it was probably hardly possible to walk on the moor surface without sinking in at some knee deep.

The Lindow man was sunk in one of these ponds filled with bog water, which only gradually silted up due to the deposition of plant material. The types of remains of beetles , insects and crustaceans such as water fleas that were found confirm the theory that the man's body was still underwater on the bog for some time before it was completely enclosed by the bog. This layer of bog was in its original state with no signs of human cultivation, only the layers of finds above show such traces. Due to the inhomogeneous composition of the moor layers around the body, with different chemical and physical properties, the conservation status of the various body regions was also correspondingly different. After death, the peat layer continued to grow over the corpse by around 3 cm per year.

The Lindow man was measured photogrammetrically in order to document the exact shape and spatial dimensions, as well as to make later plastic changes to the find detectable . A contour diagram and a three-dimensional digital model were created from the data obtained from the top and bottom in a 10 mm grid .

Physical findings

The man's face

The Lindow man was lying face down in the moor at a depth of about 250 cm. The head, upper body, arms and parts of the right foot and lower leg were recovered. The lower body, including the genitals and legs, was severed by the peat cutting machine below the 5th lumbar vertebra and the missing parts could not be found at first. Parts of the forearms and finger bones have passed. The man's skeleton is decalcified and softened from being stored in the bog. The body was flattened a little by the weight of the peat covering it. The intact skin has a soft leather-like structure and is dark brown in color. The Lindow man's body shows strong muscles, but no signs of heavy physical work. The fingernails still make a well-groomed and manicured impression today . The hair, beard, mustache, and the sideburns are carefully trimmed and were originally dark brown. His neck is sharply angled and the strikingly large head is tilted extremely far forward. The chin is depressed by the right shoulder. The right auricle is deformed due to the past cartilage. The skin of the face has become detached from the nasal cartilage and is wavy. The eyes have passed, but the eyelids and brows are well preserved. When the lips were opened, the tongue and some loose teeth were visible. Despite the damage caused by the peat cutting machine, the right foot is still in good condition. Until his death, the man was in generally good health, of strong, mesomorphic stature and just over 25 years old. Derived from his humerus bones, he was about 168 to 173 cm tall. This made him a little bigger than the average of his contemporaries, but it was also a little smaller than the average of contemporary British men. The body weight of the well-nourished man was around 60 to 65 kg during his lifetime. RAH Neave and R. Quinn assign the man to the "Caucasian race" on the basis of radiological findings and in accordance with Anglo-Saxon usage . The sex was determined on the basis of the body hair (beard), the pronounced muscles and the bone structure.

The parts of the buttocks, left leg and right thigh of an adult man , known as Lindow IV , found in the immediate vicinity in the Lindow Moss on June 14 and September 12, 1988 are possibly missing parts of the Lindow man.

Medical findings

Upper body of the Lindow man with open abdomen

Examinations of the corpse in October and November 1984 with various imaging methods such as X-rays , computed tomography (CT), xeroradiography in various London specialist clinics and magnetic resonance tomography at the X-ray machine manufacturer Picker International , yielded very different results due to the demineralized bones. However, the fractures of the skull, the third and fourth cervical vertebrae and the seventh and eighth posterior ribs on the left side were clearly shown. The rib fractures were only inflicted on the man immediately before death. Four thoracic vertebrae and five lumbar vertebrae showed slight traces of incipient arthritis and Schmorl cartilage nodules , which, however, is within the normal range for a physically active, strong middle-aged person.

Forensic analyzes provided further details on the man's physical findings. So it could be assigned to blood group 0 , as it is common in today's Great Britain, especially among people of Celtic descent. By opening up the severed lower body were on the thorax and the abdomen one endoscopic autopsies are performed without the body having to infringe on intact bodies. In the internal organs, parts of the upper digestive tract such as the stomach , duodenum and jejunum were preserved, the tissues of which were only very thin and had little intact collagen and cell material. Other organs such as the lungs, heart, liver or gall bladder could no longer be detected. The mouth and throat were endoscoped through the mouth up to the constricted point of the neck. The constriction of the trachea and esophagus proved to be so tight that penetration of bog water into the stomach and consequent contamination of the stomach contents via this route could be excluded. The endoscopic examination of the skull through the open fracture at the back of the head showed that the brain was only present as a small, shrunken, misshapen and tough mass.

The man's skin was leathery tanned by the moor acids . Only the upper epidermis was gone. The skin surface showed no pathological changes that occurred before death. Some parts of the body showed pockmarked surfaces, which, however, had only formed post mortem through reactions in the moor. The man's main hair was extremely well preserved, with clearly delineated hairlines. The hair showed no noticeable changes compared to recent hair material. The short, smooth hairstyle was about 10 mm long in the front and on the sides and up to 50 mm long in the back. Green traces of color visible under UV light , initially interpreted as a copper-based pigment for coloring the hair, turned out to be a reaction product of the keratin of the hair with the moor acid. Hair dyes were not detected. Electron microscopy showed that the man's 6 to 20 mm long whiskers had been trimmed shortly before his death, but the mustache was trimmed more negligently than the hair on his head and had a few cut corners. The cut surfaces of the individual whiskers had steps, as they arise when using scissors or tweezers . However, the spread of scissors in Britain has only been proven later, since the Roman occupation . The fingernails that have been preserved have come off the fingers and were found to be slightly displaced from the position of the fingers, presumably due to movements in the pool water. The electron microscopic examination of the fingernails showed that they had been cut for the last time a long time before death. The cut edges of the nails were evenly rounded. The nail surfaces showed no signs of decomposition due to long storage in the bog. However, they were discolored brown and looked like they were from a living person. The surfaces were intact, looked polished and, at 1000x magnification, showed only a few slight scratches perpendicular to the direction of growth, which ran parallel to the edge of the nail. The cuticle was missing in places on the nail beds, and only there the nails showed a frayed, weathered surface. Comparisons with the nails of modern people lead to the conclusion that the Lindow man did no physical or manual work with his hands. However, due to a lack of published comparisons, the cause of the scratches could not be determined more precisely.

The 30 teeth of the Lindow man were free of caries and periodontitis and only moderately chewed . Only two were not found again, but were there until the end of his life. One of the molars had a major lateral chipping, probably caused by the strong blows to the man's head. Due to the storage in the acidic moor environment, the enamel layers and parts of the dentin layers were dissolved, so that the teeth appear smaller and are dark brown in color. The fracture of the lower jaw may have been caused post mortem by the storage in the bog and the pressure of the surrounding soil. Based on the characteristics of the teeth, the age of the man is estimated to be 25 to 30 years.

Last meal

The acidic peat has the contents of the stomach and upper small intestine preserved . It was a well-chewed, fine-grain brown mass of about 20 g, in which the remains of about 16 different plants could be detected. The main ingredients were toasted cereals (wheat, rye, oats) and bran of wheat, oats and brine . Various other herbs were also detectable. In addition, there were numerous hairs of small, indeterminate mammals as well as some rock flour, which most likely came from the abrasion of a grain mill and got into the diet with the ground grain. The stomach contents also contained numerous pollen, mainly from cereal plants, which indicate a time of death in spring. In addition to the grain pollen, four mistletoe pollen could be identified. However, there were no other parts of the mistletoe plant such as seeds or berries. Mistletoe, which is poisonous to humans, can cause seizures if consumed. This small amount of mistletoe pollen was likely inhaled or accidentally ingested through food. It suggests that the Lindow man died in March or April. There were also spores of smut fungi , with which the grain that was consumed was infected. Due to the small amount of stomach contents, the Lindow man can only have had a small snack before his death . Most likely this last meal consisted essentially of toasted bread, probably in the shape of a flat cake. The grain residues found indicate that the grain was heated to 200 to 250 ° C during preparation. Last meals with a similar composition were also found in other murdered bog bodies such as B. the Grauballe man from Denmark, in whose stomach, however, more than 60 different plants have been identified. In addition to the food residues , fertilized and unfertilized eggs from spool ( Ascaris lumbricoides ) and whipworms ( Trichuris trichiura ) were present in the Lindow man's intestinal tract . Numerous other bog bodies such as the men from Tollund and Grauballe also had a similar worm infestation . A moderate infestation hardly causes any health problems for a healthy carrier, but the number of eggs found suggests that the Lindow man had noticeable complaints such as loss of appetite, bleeding, diarrhea or slight pain during his lifetime.

Cause of death

Open fracture skull

The Lindow man was killed in at least three ways, each of which would have been sure to cause death in itself. The back of the head was struck by two blows in quick succession with an ax-like object, the skull received a meandering fracture and a fragment of bone penetrated deep into the brain. The beating left a 35mm open wound on the scalp, the edges of the wound showing clear signs of swelling, so he must have received the beating well before he died. This injury certainly led to a prolonged loss of consciousness that he could have survived for several hours. Depending on the location of the wound, he was killed from behind either standing or kneeling.

The neck showed deep strangulation marks made from a string of animal tendons . The cord, about 370 mm long and 1.5 mm in cross-section, made of two tendons twisted in a strong S twist , was knotted tightly around the man's neck. It has an overhand knot at both ends , which are connected to one another by a third overhand knot designed as a running knot, with the loose end only being stopped by its end knot. The man's neck may have been broken ( rotated ) with this cord . If the cord served as a garrote, the knot technique at hand would be extremely unsuitable for this and suggest that it was carried out by a layman, but it finds numerous parallels in recent homicides. The origin of the tendon could not be determined, but tests on cattle, horses, pigs, deer, sheep and humans were negative.

The third injury, also fatal, was a deep knife stab in the right front of the neck, which left a 6 cm long wound and cut the right part of the larynx cartilage and the jugular vein . In the case of another possible stab wound in the upper right chest, it can no longer be confirmed with certainty whether this was brought about before death or whether it occurred much later, possibly through the rescue.

Several hypotheses exist to reconstruct the circumstances of death. The coroner Iain West reconstructs the process as follows: First, the standing or kneeling man received two powerful blows to the head with an ax-like object, causing him to lose consciousness and fall forward. Next, he received a violent blow on the back that broke the ribs and another on the back of the head. Thereupon the tendon cord was knotted around the man's neck and twisted with an inserted object until his cervical vertebrae broke. He was then taught to stab the neck. The incised jugular vein in connection with the congestion by the rope favored the bleeding of the body.

Robert Connolly, an anthropologist at the University of Liverpool , put forward another theory that the Lindow man received multiple blows on the head, causing him to pass out. Afterwards, his cervical vertebrae were broken with another blow on the neck. In his opinion, the tendon cord was only a collar, as the ends of the tendon were cut very close to the end knots, which would speak against its use as a choke cord. In his opinion, the other injuries to the neck and chest only occurred post mortem.

Dating

Answering the question of when the Lindow man lived turned out to be problematic. The radiocarbon dating ( 14 C-AMS accelerator mass spectrometry ) of several samples from the peat, in which the dead was revealed to be about v to 300th In contrast, the samples from the body such as bones, skin and hair imply a time of death between 20 and 90 AD. The British Museum gives the date around 2 BC to 119 AD. Further analyzes would be necessary for a more precise definition. However, the Lindow man can certainly be dated to the Roman Empire , with the killing of the Lindow man often being discussed in connection with the Roman occupation of Britain.

Preservation

Since bog corpses quickly dry out and disintegrate after being exposed, the Lindow man was kept in the refrigerated transport box until the decision on the final preservation method was made. After consultation with the Danish National Museum and other institutions experienced in the preservation of bog corpses, it was decided not to dry or tan the Lindow man conventionally, as was previously the case , as these procedures would change the corpse too strongly and irreversibly. Instead, the conservators opted for freeze-drying . In order to reduce the shrinkage and deformation of the body during the drying process, it was  soaked in a solution of 15% polyethylene glycol 400 and 85% water. This tried and tested method, especially in the preservation of wood, had not yet been practiced on bog corpses, which is why the conservators carried out numerous tests on pig skin and bones, which were stored in the bog for a few months in order to test the optimal method in advance. After preservation, the Lindow man only showed a shrinkage of less than 5%, the soft tissues still remaining flexible and the skin becoming somewhat lighter in places. Skin samples from the Lindow man that were dried on a trial basis without pretreatment, however, shrank by more than 50%. Since then, the Lindow man has been kept in an air-conditioned showcase at 19 ° C and 55% relative humidity in the British Museum in London . From April 2008 to April 2009 the remains of the Lindow man were on loan at the Manchester Museum .

Based on the relatively good state of preservation of the corpse, a facial reconstruction was made in order to be able to present a possible appearance of the Lindow man during his lifetime. However, this project turned out to be difficult due to the softened, decalcified bones, the numerous fractures of the skull and the flattened corpse, as the original skull shape had to be reconstructed from the displaced and severely deformed fragments.

interpretation

The multiple killing of the Lindow man provides material for numerous attempts at interpretation that have not yet led to a definitive and unambiguous result in science. The reasons for the death of the man can be that he was sacrificed to higher powers, voluntarily offered himself up as a human sacrifice, was the victim of a robbery or that he was executed as a prisoner or convicted criminal . The multiple killing of a person strongly indicates a ritual murder , but the opinions in science differ as to whether it is a human sacrifice, an execution or both. With more than 100 comparative finds, multiple killings of people deposited in bogs are a well-documented practice of historical societies.

According to Don Brothwell, the Lindow man is one of the most complex examples of a person's "overkill". He suspects a ritual background for the act. He considers multiple homicides as a punishment for a simple murder or as a result of a robbery to be too unusual. The charred remains of bread in the man's stomach may also have a ritual background, which means that they were not accidentally eaten. Anne Ross and Don Robins suspect, due to the lack of traces of hard physical work and the good state of health in the Lindow man, a high-ranking druid who may have been sacrificed to Celtic gods at the Beltane festival on April 30 because of the Roman invasion in the 1st century. The killing of the man in three different ways can, in Ross's opinion, also indicate that three different gods should be addressed with the victim. In contrast, the writer John Grigsby suspects a kind of king sacrifice as part of a fertility cult, similar to the Attis and Osiris cults in ancient Greece and ancient Egypt.

literature

  • IM Stead, JB Bourke, Don Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . British Museum Publications, London 1986, ISBN 0-7141-1386-7 (English).
  • Don Brothwell: The Bog Man and the Archeology of People . British Museum Publications, London 1987, ISBN 0-7141-1384-0 (English).
  • Richard C. Turner; Robert G. Scaife (Ed.): Bog bodies - New discoveries and new perspectives . British Museum Press, London 1995, ISBN 0-7141-2305-6 (English).
  • Wijnand van der Sanden : Mummies from the moor - The prehistoric and early historical moor corpses from north-western Europe . Drents Museum / Batavian Lion International, Amsterdam 1996, ISBN 90-6707-416-0 (Dutch: Vereeuwigd in het veen .).
  • Jody Joy: Lindow Man . British Museum Press, London 2009, ISBN 978-0-7141-2817-7 (English).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Jody Joy: Lindow-Man . P. 23, p. 42 ff.
  2. ^ Excavation, Recording, Conservation and Dating . In: Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . Pp. 9-20
  3. ↑ IM Stead, JB Bourke, Don Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . British Museum Publications, London 1986, ISBN 0-7141-1386-7 , pp. 12, fig. 2 .
  4. ^ Budworth, McCord, Priston, Stead: The Artefacts . In: Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . Pp. 38-40.
  5. ^ GW Taylor: Tests for Dyes . In: Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . P. 41
  6. ^ IM Stead: Summary and Conclusions . In: Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . Pp. 177-180.
  7. ^ NE Lindsey: Photogrammetruc Recording of Lindow Man . In: Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . Pp. 31-37
  8. ^ JB Bourke: The Medical Investigation of Lindow Man . In: Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . Pp. 46-51.
  9. ↑ Brtohwell, Dobney: Studies on the Hair and Nails of Lindow Man and Comparative Specimens . In: Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . Pp. 66-70.
  10. ^ Ann V. Priston: The Hair . In: Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . P. 71.
  11. ↑ Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . P. 42
  12. ↑ Lindow Man. Mid-1st century AD, Cheshire, England. British Museum , accessed December 2, 2011 .
  13. ↑ Reznek, Hallett, Charlesworth: Computed Tomography of Lindow Man . In: Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . Pp. 63-65.
  14. Jump up ↑ Connolly, Evershed, Embery, Stanbury, Green, Beahan, Shortall: The Chemical Composition of some Body Tissues . In: Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . Pp. 72-76.
  15. ^ Cowell, Craddock: Addendum: Copper in the Skin of Lindow Man . In: Turner, Scaife: Bog Bodies. New Discoveries and New Perspectives pp. 74-75.
  16. ^ Ann V. Priston: The Hair . In: Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . P. 71.
  17. ^ Brothwell, Dobney: Studies on the Hair and Nails of Lindow Man and Comparative Specimens . In: Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . Pp. 66-70.
  18. ↑ Connolly: The Anatomical Description of Lindow Man . In: Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . Pp. 54-62.
  19. ^ Ann V. Priston: The Hair . In: Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . Pp. 54–62, here: pp. 60–61.
  20. ↑ Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . Pp. 99-125
  21. ^ Robert G. Scaife: Pollen in Human Palaeofaeces; and a Preliminary Investigation of the Stomach and Gut Contents of Lindow Man . In: Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . Pp. 126-135
  22. ^ Robin, Sales, Oduwole, Holden, Hillman: Postscript: Last Minute Results from ESR Spectroscopy Concerning the Cooking of Lindow Man's Last Meal . In: Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . Pp. 140-141
  23. ^ Andrew KG Jones: Parasitological Investigations on Lindow Man . In: Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . Pp. 136-139
  24. ↑ Holden: The Last Meals of the Lindow Bog Men . In: Turner, Scaife: Bog Bodies. New Discoveries and New Perspectives pp. 76-82.
  25. ↑ Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . Pp. 38-40
  26. ^ Ambers, Matthews, Bowman: Radiocarbon Dates for Two Peat Samples . In: Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . Pp. 25-26.
  27. ^ Lindow Man / Lindow II. In: Collection online. The British Museum, accessed December 19, 2017 .
  28. ↑ Gowlett, Gillespie, Hall, Hedges: Accelerator Radiocarbon Dating of Ancient Human Remains from Lindow Moss . In: Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . Pp. 22-24.
  29. ^ Otlet, Walker, Dadson: Report on Radiocarbon Dating of the Lindow Man by ARE, Harwell . In: Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . Pp. 25-26.
  30. ^ 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).
  31. ↑ Lindow Man: a bog body mystery. The Manchester Museum, archived from the original on October 6, 2010 ; accessed on December 2, 2011 .
  32. ↑ Stead, Bourke, Brothwell: Lindow Man - The Body in the Bog . P. 42ff.
  33. ^ John Prague, Richard Neave: Bodies from the Bog . In: Making faces: using forensic and archaeological evidence . British Museum, London 1997, ISBN 0-7141-1743-9 , pp. 157–171, here 162–165 (English).
  34. ^ Don Brothwell: The Bog Man and the Archeology of People . P. 24ff
  35. ↑ Malcom W. Browne: Back from the Bog. In: New York Times . June 17, 1990, accessed December 2, 2011 .

Web links

Commons : Lindow Man  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Lindow man
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lindow II; Lindow man (English); Pete Marsh
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Bog corpse
DATE OF BIRTH 1st century BC BC or 1st century
DATE OF DEATH between 2 v. Chr. And 119
Place of death near Wilmslow , England