Girls from Yde

Head and torso of the girl from Yde

Information board at the place where the girl from Yde was found

The Yde Girl ( Dutch Meisje van Yde ) is a bog body , which in the 1897 Moor Stijfveen near the Dutch town Yde in the province of Drenthe was found. The bog body is now in the Drents Museum in Assen .

Find

According to their information, the two peat cutters Hendrik Barkhof and Willem Emmens found the girl on May 12, 1897 in the Stijfveen moor between Yde and Vries, which is now part of the nature reserve . They hid the find under some peat plagues and fled home in horror. Three days later a newspaper found out about the bog body and spread the news. According to the discoverer, the body, especially its hair , was extremely well preserved.
Location: 53 ° 5 ′ 49.2 ″  N , 6 ° 35 ′ 6 ″  E Coordinates: 53 ° 5 ′ 49.2 ″  N , 6 ° 35 ′ 6 ″  E

Salvage

On May 21st, the mayor of neighboring Vries informed the Provincial Museum in Assen, today's Drents Museum. In his letter he described the body in great detail. He reported a bluish discoloration of the skin. Only the right cheek was injured on the head. The mouth was open and the teeth were visible. The hair was apparently shaved off on the right side, but long on the left. Neck, shoulders and torso were compactly together. The arms were partially preserved, as well as both feet, partially with toenails and one hand with all fingers and the thumbnail. A thigh bone and other bones lay loose next to it. The mayor also described a processed piece of fabric and a ribbon that was wrapped around the neck a few times. In the two weeks after the discovery, however, the originally still good condition of the remains had deteriorated due to the lack of conservation and the uncontrolled drying out. When the mayor and museum director Joosting visited the body a few days later, other parts of the body had been damaged and looted by the peat graves. The thigh bone was missing, all but one of the teeth, and the hair had been torn out or fell out due to drying. The remaining remains were packed in a box and transported to the museum in Assen; only an oak trunk lying next to the girl was left behind. In the museum, the finds were spread out on the floor to dry. Joosting informed the renowned archaeologist Dr. W. Pleyte from the Dutch Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden and asked for the remains to be taken over to Leiden. However, this was prevented by the veto of the board of directors of the Provincial Museum in Assen, who wanted to exhibit the body in their own home.

The girl from Yde was initially exhibited in the museum without further investigation.

Findings

General view of the girl from Yde in the presentation

The body of the girl from Yde was wrapped in a woolen cloak. A belt was in three loops around her neck, the slip knot of which was under her left ear. Josting initially estimated the age of the corpse at about six centuries. After consulting with Johanna Mestorf from the Kiel Museum of patriotic antiquities , who, after comparing the data of 21 northern European bog corpses, suggested dating from around 200 to 400 AD, Josting accepted her suggestion.

Anthropological findings

The girl, estimated anthropologically at around 16 years of age, was around 1.40 m tall at the time of death. Its hair is about 21 cm long and red-blonde in color due to its storage in the bog. The right half of his head is bald, which can be attributed to shearing before death or to a slightly longer exposure of this side to the air. The original hair color could be determined with a high degree of certainty as blonde by an electron microscopic examination of the hair pigments. A lateral curvature of the spine prevented the girl from walking or standing straight. His pelvic bones were not symmetrical and his right leg was likely turned inward. There was a stab wound below the left collarbone, which was certainly not the cause of his death. As with other bog corpses, soft tissues and hair were naturally preserved by the action of the tannins from the bog , but not uniformly. The soft tissues of some parts of the body, especially the upper body, were better, but those of other regions, such as the abdomen, were not preserved at all.

A pollen analysis carried out in 1955 on a peat sample taken from the girl's foot showed that she must have died between AD 200 and 500. A radiocarbon dating ( ¹⁴ C dating) of a skin sample carried out in 1988 was able to narrow down this period between 54 BC and 128 AD. The ¹⁴ C-dating of six wool samples and one hair sample using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) in 1994 gave the even more precise period between 40 BC and 50 AD. These samples all showed great similarities, so that this dating was assumed to be relatively reliable can be.

Richard Nave from the University of Manchester examined the skull of the corpse using computed tomography in 1993 and was able to confirm its age and historical age. He made a facial reconstruction based on the data obtained and with knowledge from forensic medicine and plastic surgery . This is shown next to the bog body in the Drents Museum and significantly promoted the girl's international fame.

textiles

The belt, which was still 215 to 220 cm long when it was found, with which the girl was strangled, is about 4 cm wide and made of 37 warp threads using the jumping technique . Only a 125 cm long piece remains of the belt. The woolen coat in which the girl was wrapped, still preserved in two pieces, is carelessly worked and has numerous spinning and weaving defects. The now brown cloth was torn in numerous places and patched several times. Originally it was light in color and decorated with several interwoven strips of different colored, presumably red, yellow and blue thread.

interpretation

The noose around her neck is definitely evidence of the violent killing of the girl. A killing as punishment for any kind of misconduct or a sacrifice can not be clearly deduced from the context of the find . However, the puncture under the collarbone and the half-shaved skull could indicate a ritual reference, which may also be related to an oak trunk found nearby. However, it is also possible that the girl was expelled from the community due to her physical anomalies, or that she was killed due to social stigmatization .

Varia

As part of the German Mummy Project at the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museum , the girl's body was scanned by Yde using a hand-held 3D laser scanner. The data are used on the one hand for long-term archiving of the status of the find at the time of investigation and on the other hand for further use of the data for a wide variety of purposes. On the basis of the data obtained, it is possible to use color 3D printers to produce true -to- shape and color replicas of the find. These replicas can be used instead of the very fragile original for loan , research or exhibition purposes.

Alleged eyewitness report

On March 19, 2009, the daily newspaper Dagblad van het Noorden reported on the discovery of an alleged eyewitness report. The two finders of the bog body, Hendrik Barkhof and Willem Emmens, had willingly told their story to anyone who was interested, what the then twelve-year-old neighbor Bennink is said to have processed in a school essay . Bennink's son Piet presented this work in 2009. According to Bennink's essay, the two workers' horses ran over that day and their wagon crashed into a pingo ruin . Both had to wade into the water to retrieve their tools from the car. There they stumbled upon what at first glance looked like a piece of leather or a jute sack, but which turned out to be the girl's preserved body.

However, later investigations revealed that the essay is most likely a forgery . The term “pingo ruin” used in the article after Wijnand van der Sanden was not yet established at the end of the 19th century and also did not fit the language used by a school child. The article also reported on a landfill , which did not exist at the time the bog body was discovered and was only created in the 1920s.

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 (Dutch, original title: Vereeuwigd in het veen . Translated by Henning Stilke).
• Provinciaal Museum van Drenthe / Lower Saxony State Museum (Hrsg.): The temple in the moor . Catalog for the international traveling exhibition Der Tempel im Moor . Waanders, Zwolle 2002, ISBN 90-400-9665-1 , p. 107-109 .
• Wijnand van der Sanden : Het meisje van Yde . Drents Museum, Assen 1994, ISBN 90-70884-61-5 (Dutch).

Web links

• Dimphéna Groffen: YDE, the girl of. In: Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland. DVN, een project van Huygens ING en OGC (UU), February 10, 2012, accessed on February 15, 2012 (Dutch, description of the find in the women's lexicon of the Institute for Dutch History). 
• Drens Museum Assen. Retrieved December 5, 2011 (Dutch, currently no information on the find). 
• Yde Girl 100 BC-AD 50. In: The Perfect Corpse homepage. NOVA PBS, accessed December 5, 2011 (photo of the facial reconstruction). 
• Meisje van Yde. In: Encyclopedie Drenthe Online. Retrieved December 7, 2011 (Dutch). 

Individual evidence

1. ^ Wijnand van der Sanden : Men en moeras: veenlijken in Nederland van de bronstijd tot en met de Romeinse tijd . In: Archeologische monografieën van het Drents Museum . No. 1 . Drents Museum, Assen 1990, ISBN 90-70884-31-3 , p. 61, fig. 12 .
2. ↑ C. Bergen, MJL Th. Niekus, VT van Vilsteren: Shadows uit het Veen . Ed .: Provinciaal Museum van Drenthe. Waanders, Zwolle 2002, ISBN 90-400-9662-7 (Dutch).
3. ↑ 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]).
4. ^ 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 169–171 (English).
5. ↑ Peter Pieper: Moor corpses . In: Heinrich Beck , Dieter Geuenich , Heiko Steuer (Hrsg.): Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde . tape 20 . de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2001, ISBN 3-11-017164-3 , p. 225-226 .
6. ↑ Wilfried Rosendahl, Stephanie Zesch, Doris Döppes, Vincent van Vilsteren: A mummy from the 3D printer - archeology and high-tech for the bog body of the Yde girl . In: Ancient World . No. 6 , 2016, ISSN  0003-570X , p. 30-34 .
7. ↑ Maaike Wind: Opstel uit 1897 werpt nieuw licht op veenlijk . In: Dagblad van het Noorden . March 19, 2009, p. 2 (Dutch, dekrantvantoen.nl [accessed January 12, 2019]).