Man from Bernuthsfeld

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Schematic representation of the location of the man and his clothes with yellow marked bone parts, drawing from 1925 by Hans Hahne

The man of Bernuthsfeld is a certificate from the late 7th or early 8th century bog body , which in 1907 in Moor Hogehahn at Tannenhausen in the district of Aurich was found. A special feature of this archaeological find is the extremely well-preserved woolen clothing of the man. In more recent publications, the man from Bernuthsfeld is also referred to as Bernie .

Location

The site is also located in an extensive raised bog complex, in which the Eternal Sea is about 2 km away . In the course of time there have been various archaeological finds in the area, such as the boardwalk in the Meerhusener Moor or the plow from Walle in the original area of ​​the moor. The closer location is the Hogehahn moor, part of the Meerhuser moor not far from the Bernuthsfeld residential area north of Tannenhausen, which consists of a few homesteads.

Finding circumstances

The 16 and 18 year old brothers Rolf and Ehme de Jonge from Bernuthsfeld came across a corpse while cutting peat on May 24, 1907 . Fearing that they would be involved in a murder case, they buried the body again in a neighboring parcel several hundred meters away. The news that the two youths had been found also reached a responsible police officer. He reported the matter to the Aurich District Court, which charged the police with the investigation. The policeman asked the de Jonge brothers to show him the new burial site that had been uncovered. Since the clothing of the corpse did not seem up to date, it was reasonable to assume that it was not a current case. Thereupon Franz Wachter, the archivist of the Aurich State Archives, was called in, who examined the find in detail and, in addition to the skeleton, also found other hair, clothing, a knife sheath and a wooden branch.

The skeleton reconstructed by a medical officer with the findings was given to the Society for Fine Arts and Patriotic Antiquities . In the meantime, however, it is no longer possible to reliably identify which of the two places was the place of discovery and which was the burial site.
Location: 53 ° 31 ′ 52.5 ″  N , 7 ° 28 ′ 29.4 ″  E Coordinates: 53 ° 31 ′ 52.5 ″  N , 7 ° 28 ′ 29.4 ″  E

Findings

According to the two Finder's body was in a carefully padded with moss grave pit in north-south orientation buried Service. She was wrapped in a 2 x 3 meter cloak. The bony remains have been preserved several times in the years since they were found . The bones were stabilized with synthetic resin and the fragments of the skull were mounted on a clay substructure .

Recent research

Since 2011, scientific investigations have been carried out on bog bodies by the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf and the University of Göttingen with the affiliated Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine . They are mainly done with non-invasive imaging. First of all, a computed tomographic image was taken at the Hans-Susemihl Hospital in Emden . The investigations also included a DNA determination and an X-ray fluorescence analysis of the bone material. The Lower Saxony State Office for Monument Preservation carried out a conservation treatment in which the restoration history of the bog body was examined. It was restored to its condition at the time it was found.

The reconstruction of the bones of the bog corpse was made possible by the Volkswagen plant in Emden with its rapid prototyping technology, which is usually used there in automobile construction. First, a high-resolution 3-D scan of the bones was carried out in order to obtain a database. In this way, the bone material can be virtually arranged in the correct position, deformations caused by the position can be corrected and missing parts can be compensated for. These data enable later simulation in the digital fabricating process.

Medical findings

The first scientific processing of the find was carried out by Hans Hahne , who published his results in 1925. According to Hahne, the 30-year-old man was killed by a blow on the left side of the skull. Current, interdisciplinary studies from 2011 and 2012 came to different conclusions. According to the first publication of the findings, the medium-sized man with a height of 1.65 meters was between 40 and 60 years old. He had gone through some health or nutritional crises as he grew, as evidenced by the Harris lines on the long bones. He suffered from chronic osteoarthritis in the hip joints and must have been lying down a lot in the last year of his life in order to protect his legs. During his lifetime he had a well healed rib fracture . His spine has a block vertebra caused by an inflammatory disease, which possibly restricted the pain-free mobility of his upper body more. The man's teeth were neat and only moderately chewed compared to his contemporaries . He suffered from a sinus infection that was common at the time . The man's face with its protruding chin is described as distinctive. The skull fracture was ruled out as the cause of death, this probably only occurred due to the pressure of the peat layer on the head. Since there was no further evidence of violence on the remains, the man may have died of natural causes. A high - resolution CT scan of the remains revealed that the man had cancer . Based on the data obtained from this, a reconstruction of the man's entire body is to be made. The question remains open as to why the man received a special burial and was not buried in a regular cemetery or cemetery.

dress

The front of the smock
Distribution of the pieces of fabric on the front of the gown

The man's extraordinarily well- preserved clothing provides information about the manufacture and way of wearing textiles in the early Middle Ages. As outerwear, he wore an often patched, knee-length, long-sleeved woolen smock with a side neckline. The heavily worn smock was composed of 45 individual scraps of fabric like a patchwork carpet . The scraps of fabric came from 20 different fabrics , in nine different weave patterns . All seams were made from the warp threads of the fabric in a uniform quality and all fabrics were reused. More heavily worn pieces of fabric were sometimes doubled and sewn. The fabrics had different colors and patterns, but precise color analyzes are still pending. Over the smock he wore a blanket-like coat about 200 cm long and 170 cm wide, which was sewn together from two different fabrics. The basic material of the coat consisted of a thick, loosely spun yarn made of sheep's wool, with a long staple length in a herringbone pattern . The warp threads have a diameter of 0.8 to 2.8 mm and are twisted irregularly in the Z direction . The weft threads have a diameter of 2.0 to 4.0 mm and consist of loosely but evenly twisted yarn in the S direction. The weave density was five to six threads and three threads per centimeter in the weft. The surface of the cloth was brushed after weaving, whereby individual fiber ends were pulled out of the fabric, which gave the fabric a slightly fur-like surface. The now coarse-looking fabric must originally have been particularly soft. This piece of cloth has been extended by another sewn L-shaped, canvas-binding piece of fabric. The warp threads consist of about 0.8 to 2.0 mm thick Z-twisted, natural brown sheep's wool of different shades, which were drawn in without any recognizable pattern. Often the shade of a thread changes within the fabric. The weft was formed from two S-twisted weft threads, approximately 0.9 to 5.0 mm thick, shot alternately. The weaving density is 5 threads per centimeter in the warp and only 0.75 threads per centimeter in the weft. This fabric has a 90 mm wide starting edge whose transition to the side selvedge has not been preserved. Two more sections from this piece of fabric were sewn as patches on worn areas of the base fabric of the coat. Both jacket fabrics came from other uses and were badly worn and worn through long use. Seam residues from their first use were no longer visible. The fabrics are now only physically and chemically strongly weathered. According to the textile archeologist Heidemarie Farke, the coat was made from a practical rather than a decorative point of view. There were gaiters around the legs .

Dating

The first dating was based on textile typological considerations in the Roman Empire , but this was refuted in the 1990s. A 14 C-dating by accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) of some scalp hair, from the estate of Alfred Dieck , a potentially unsafe source, resulted in a time of death about 680-775 n. Chr.

presentation

The remains of the man from Bernuthsfeld, along with his clothes, are shown in the East Frisian State Museum in Emden . The bog body has not been in the exhibition since 2011, as around 50 scientists from external institutions carried out further investigations on it. After graduation, she returned to the museum in 2016. The man from Bernuthsfeld received his own exhibition there, which opened on August 14, 2016 on the subject of “Living and Dying in the Early Middle Ages”, which is said to have cost around 250,000 euros. The bog body is presented in an air-conditioned environment.

  • Back of the smock

  • Distribution of the fabric patches on the back

  • Drawing clothing reconstruction from 1910 (outdated research status)

  • Graphic clothing reconstruction from 1925 (outdated research status)

  • Information board at the site

literature

  • Hans Hahne : The bog body from the high moor "Hogehahn" near Bernuthsfeld, district of Aurich . In: Provinzialmuseum Hannover (ed.): Prehistoric finds from Lower Saxony, Part B - Moor corpses from Lower Saxony . Lax, Hildesheim 1925, p. 49-64, panels 1-14 .
  • Jürgen Bär: "Bernie" rediscovered - The Bernuthsfeld bog body in the focus of interdisciplinary science . In: Reports on the preservation of monuments in Lower Saxony . No. 4 , 2014.
  • Marion Heumüller, Jan F. Kegler: The man from Bernuthsfeld and his time. The new exhibition in the East Frisian State Museum Emden . In: Reports on the preservation of monuments in Lower Saxony . No. 4 , 2016, ISSN  0720-9835 , p. 178-184 .
  • Robert Lehmann , Mark Viebrock, Christian Wolfgang Karl, Hans-Jörg Schmidt, Dagmar Wengerowsky: Dye analyzes. HPLC-ESI-MS, GC-MS, LC-MS and ATR-IR dye analyzes on the patch tunic of the bog body from Bernuthsfeld in: FAN-Post 2018 of the Friends of Archeology in Lower Saxony , p. 36 ( online , pdf)

Web links

Commons : Mann von Bernuthsfeld  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ KIDS IN! The bog body from Bernuthsfeld. A criminal case from the early Middle Ages. Ostfriesisches Landesmuseum Emden , August 13, 2009, accessed on December 5, 2011 .
  2. ↑ "Bernie" gets a face. In: Welt Online . February 17, 2011, accessed December 5, 2011 .
  3. ↑ Bog body "Bernie" shows her true colors. (No longer available online.) NDR , February 17, 2011, archived from the original on December 22, 2011 ; Retrieved April 23, 2012 .
  4. Jump up ↑ G. Granite, A. Baueroche: The Research of Portable X-Ray Fluorescence Spectroscopy on the Dental and Skeletal Remains of Bernuthsfeld Man. In press 2013
  5. ^ Hans Hahne : The bog body from the high moor "Hogehahn" near Bernuthsfeld, district of Aurich . In: Provinzialmuseum Hannover (ed.): Prehistoric finds from Lower Saxony, Part B - Moor corpses from Lower Saxony . Lax, Hildesheim 1925, p. 60 and panel XXVIII, fig. 1 .
  6. ↑ Ostfriesisches Landesmuseum Emden : Examination of the bog body in the Emden Clinic attracts everyone's attention , accessed on January 23, 2016.
  7. ^ Hahne, 1925
  8. ↑ State-of-the-art technology helps to decipher a life story ( memento of the original from January 23, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Emder Zeitung April 25, 2012 (accessed May 1, 2012) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / 1820diekunst.de
  9. ↑ Ostfriesen-Zeitung of April 25, 2012: Emden bog body "Bernie" had cancer and osteoarthritis
  10. ↑ Bernie just won't let me go Emder Zeitung November 12, 2011, here on the pages of the Ostfriesisches Landesmuseum. (Accessed May 1, 2012) (pdf, 1.17 MB)
  11. ^ Heidemarie Farke: The men's smock from Bernuthsfeld. Observations during a restoration . In: Bender Jørgensen, Rinaldo (Ed.): Textiles in European Archeology: Report from the 6th NESAT Symposium, 7-11th May 1996 in Borås . University Department of Archeology, Gothenburg 1998, ISBN 1-84217-162-3 .
  12. ↑ a b Heidemarie Farke: A typical costume of the North German Iron Age? Some observations during conservation of the Bernuthsfeld 'plaid' . In: Penelope Walton Rogers, Lise Bender Jørgensen, Antoinette Rast-Eicher (Eds.): The Roman Textile Industry and its Influence - A Birthday Tribute to John Peter Wild . Oxbow Books, Oxford 2001, ISBN 1-84217-046-5 , pp. 129-136 (English).
  13. ^ Wijnand van der Sanden : C14 dating of bog bodies from Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein . In: Lower Saxony State Association for Prehistory (Ed.): The customer NF No. 46 , 1995, ISSN  0342-0736 , pp. 137-155 .
  14. ↑ 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]).
  15. ↑ Bog body "Bernie" can be seen again in Emden on NDR.de on August 14, 2016
  16. ↑ Gordon Päschel: 'Bernie' return to East Friesland back in: East Frisian newspaper dated December 17, 2014
  17. ↑ Bog body "Bernie" still has a lot to tell in Emder Zeitung from August 15, 2016
  18. ↑ "Bernie" gets the most expensive grave in East Friesland ( memento from January 26, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) at ndr.de from January 23, 2015
  19. ↑ Reports on the preservation of monuments 2014/4
personal data
SURNAME Man from Bernuthsfeld
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bernie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Bog corpse
DATE OF BIRTH 7th century or 8th century
DATE OF DEATH between 680 and 775
Place of death near Tannenhausen , district of Aurich