Girls from the Bareler Moor

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The girl from the Bareler Moor (also woman from the Bareler Moor ) is a female bog body , which in 1784 Bareler Moor in Dötlingen in Lower Saxony, district of Oldenburg was found. This is the earliest finding of a bog corpse, parts of which are still present.

Bareler Moor

The Bareler Moor is the largest of a series of around 80 small moors, so-called Schlatts in the Delmenhorster Geest about 15 kilometers southwest of Delmenhorst . The area surrounding the moors was fully cultivated and cultivated. Most of these small bogs had an average diameter of less than 100 meters and were pelted over time and leveled to gain arable land. Other Schlatts were in forests and were not cultivated. The Bareler Moor measures an area of ​​around 250 × 190 meters and formed a shallow, 179 centimeter deep hollow in the adjacent sandy soil. The oldest peat bog layers were dated to the 7th millennium BC by pollen analysis .

Find history

Schematic representation of the documented body parts
red: still existent
yellow: found, but lost
blue: found, whereabouts unknown
white: not found

During their work in the Bareler Moor, peat cutters came across the first remains of the girl at a depth of around 70 to 80 centimeters. They hid parts of the torso, a leg with a foot and a forearm with their hands, and placed the parts in the sun to dry. The Oldenburg medical officer Kelp, who examined the excavated parts, was commissioned with the examination of the corpses . Since at the time and in the foreseeable past no missing person from the area was reported or known, he was able to rule out a crime. The remaining parts of the bog body remained in the bog because the peat cutters were not able to do it or they were not interested in digging them up any further. Kelp then took the body parts with him to his private collection of curiosities in Oldenburg. Shortly after the discovery became known, the forester Ahlers, interested in natural history, traveled to the area and had the parts of the corpse that had remained in the bog, including the back of the head, the skin of the upper torso up to the navel and half a loin and leg, recovered. All these parts had been completely dismembered by the workers and curious peasants. Ahlers also took all the parts home with him.

Since the main interest of the museums at that time was less the ancient science aspects than the preserving and tanning properties of the moor , Ahlers sent the leather-like tanned pieces to numerous institutes as illustrative material. The back of the head with the hair went to the Royal Chamber of Art in Copenhagen , where it could no longer be found in 1953. They were probably destroyed in 1807 during the English siege of Copenhagen or in 1858 in the castle fire. He sent the loin and leg pieces to Clausthal . These pieces were probably disposed of along with other bones of unknown origin when the local history museum was set up in Zellerfeld in 1927. The Society for the Promotion of the Arts and Useful Crafts received additional dried pieces of skin , whose collections were transferred to the State Library at the turn of the century, and from there to various Hamburg museums. The files of the Patriotic Society were completely destroyed by the effects of the war in 1943, and the whereabouts of the pieces of skin could no longer be clarified in the Hamburg museums either. Institutes in Göttingen and St. Petersburg received additional skin pieces , which were also unable to provide any information on the whereabouts of the pieces.

In 1791, some parts of the bog body were still in Dr. Kelps private property. The piece of skin on the right breast was given to Dr. Kelp later to the Oldenburg pharmacist Dugend, whose heirs handed the chest piece over to the Museum Oldenburg in 1883. The whereabouts of the remaining pieces from Kelp's private collection could no longer be determined.

The find was first published in detail by Martin Friedrich Pitiscus in the Oldenburg magazine Blätter mixed content .
Location: 53 ° 0 ′ 4.5 ″  N , 8 ° 25 ′ 58.9 ″  E Coordinates: 53 ° 0 ′ 4.5 ″  N , 8 ° 25 ′ 58.9 ″  E

Findings

Medical officer Kelp described the newly found body parts as soft as rags, brown in color and without a rotten smell, which could be cut smoothly with a knife. Fat and muscle tissue were gone. The bones were soft and decalcified, but were still in their natural shape. Hair, fingernails, cartilage, and sinews were well preserved. Based on the anatomical features and experience-based comparisons, Kelp estimated the age of the girl to be around 14 to 16 years, without possibly taking into account the shrinkage of the tissue caused by the storage. No other objects such as clothing or jewelry were observed on the corpse.

The only part still preserved today is a piece of skin that, according to early publications, comes from the right breast of the bog body and is kept under the inventory number 1687 in the Oldenburg State Museum for Nature and Man . All other parts were lost over the years. The chest piece that has been preserved is now 35 cm long. It extends from the shoulder over a straight cut above the former breastbone to just below the breast fold. The leather-like tanned skin has a thickness of about 1.5 mm and is brownish-black in color. The drying caused cracks that were visibly sewn. The nipple can no longer be seen. The previous gender assignment as female and the localization of the piece of skin as part of the breast were primarily based on the old publications. However, according to more recent investigations by the Institute for Forensic Medicine at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in 2010 , these findings could no longer be confirmed with absolute certainty, since neither a nipple nor a areola could be reliably identified on the piece of skin. At one point on its back, structures could be seen that can be interpreted as the remains of mammary glands .

The original location of the young woman in the moor can only be vaguely reconstructed today on the basis of the observations and records made by Kelp and the forester Ahlers, as well as the order of the body parts found.

A 14 C investigation carried out on the find revealed a date between 260 and 395 AD, so the girl lived in the Roman Empire .

literature

  • State Museum for Nature and Man (ed.): Museum journal Nature and Man: Natural history, cultural studies, museum studies . No. 6 . Isensee, 2010, ISSN  1862-9083 (current test results on the remains of the piece of skin, pages 159-186).
  • Frank Both, Mamoun Fansa (Ed.): Fascination Moor Corpses: 220 Years of Moor Archeology . Zabern, Philipp von, Darmstadt 2011, ISBN 978-3-8053-4360-2 , p. 87-94 .
  • 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. 19, 32, 39–40, 48, 81 (Dutch, original title: Vereeuwigd in het veen . Translated by Henning Stilke).
  • Hajo Hayen: The bog bodies in the museum on the dam . In: Publications of the State Museum for Natural History and Prehistory Oldenburg . tape 6 . Isensee, Oldenburg 1987, ISBN 3-920557-73-5 , p. 13-20 .
  • Hajo Hayen : On the knowledge of the Bareler Moor (Gem. Dötlingen, district Oldenburg / Oldb.) And the local moor corpse find from 1784 . In: Oldenburg Yearbook . No. 60 , 1961, ISSN  0340-4447 , p. 69-73 .
  • Martin Friedrich Pitiscus : Something about the properties of the peat bog, especially the preparation of mummies, about its antiseptic healing powers, and about the art of tanning leather in it . In: sheets of mixed content . tape 4 , 1791, pp. 52–72 ( uni-bielefeld.de - first publication of the find).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Martin Friedrich Pitiscus : Something about the properties of the peat bog, in particular to prepare mummies, about the antiseptic healing powers of the same, and about the art of tanning leather in it . In: sheets of mixed content . tape 4 , 1791, pp. 52–72 ( uni-bielefeld.de - first publication of the find).
  2. ↑ Hajo Hayen : To the knowledge of the Bareler Moor (Gem. Dötlingen, district Oldenburg / Oldb.) And the local moor body find from 1784 . In: Oldenburg Yearbook . No. 60 , 1961, ISSN  0340-4447 , p. 73 .
  3. ↑ Falk Georges Bechara: Histological, electron microscopic, immunohistological and IR spectroscopic investigations on the skin of 2000 year old bog corpses . Medical Faculty of the Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum 2001, p. 32–33 ( ruhr-uni-bochum.de [PDF; accessed on December 21, 2009] Diss.).
  4. ↑ Frank Both, Mamoun Fansa (Ed.): Fascination Moor Corpses: 220 Years of Moor Archeology . Zabern, Philipp von, Darmstadt 2011, ISBN 978-3-8053-4360-2 , p. 87-94 .
  5. ↑ Johannes van der Plicht, Wijnand van der Sanden , AT Aerts, HJ Streurman: Dating bog bodies by means of 14 C-AMS . In: Journal of Archaeological Science . tape 31 , no. 4 , 2004, ISSN  0305-4403 , p. 471–491 , doi : 10.1016 / j.jas.2003.09.012 (English, ub.rug.nl [PDF; 388 kB ; accessed on June 2, 2010]).
personal data
SURNAME Girls from the Bareler Moor
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Woman from the Bareler Moor, Bareler Moor 1784
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Bog corpse
DATE OF BIRTH 3rd century or 4th century
DATE OF DEATH between 260 and 395
Place of death near Dötlingen