Man from Emmer-Erfscheidenveen

The remains of the man from Emmer-Efrscheidenveen

The man of Emmer-Erfscheidenveen is a Late Bronze Age bog body , which in 1938 Emmer-Erfscheidenveen in the Netherlands of part Bourtanger Moores in the province of Drenthe was found. This find is the oldest bog body recovered in the Netherlands to date.

Find

On October 22nd, 1938 A. Middeljans came across the remains of a human corpse as well as some remains of clothing and some sticks while digging peat on his plot of land, about 110 m north of the Groenendijk. The informed police advised him to bury the find again. However, Middeljans packed the find in a box and took it home. On October 24th, the teacher JH Botterwang found out about the find and persuaded Middeljans to wait to bury the parts until employees from the museum in Emmen have seen the finds. The very next day, employees of the museum inspected the find, photographed the site and searched it for any remains. A leather hat, remnants of textile fabrics and fur, and putty-like substances were recovered. The finds were then brought to the Museum Emmen with the help of the police. On October 28, the archaeologists Albert van Giffen (1884–1973) and Hendrik Brunsting (1902–1997) from the Biological-Archaeological Instituut in Groningen, who were in Denmark at the time, arrived. They examined the site, asked Middeljans to describe the exact details of the find and were able to recover further fragments of clothing, the hyoid bone , as well as finger and foot bones. On November 2nd, another large delegation of archaeologists, anthropologists and biologists from various Groniger institutes arrived , they re-examined the site and took samples for later laboratory analyzes. Initially, the find was kept in Museum De Hondsrug in Emmen and in 1986 it was passed on to the Drents Museum in Assen , where the find is now kept. This bog corpse is the earliest Dutch find that was scientifically looked after shortly after it was found.
Location: 52 ° 47 ′ 51 ″  N , 6 ° 58 ′ 48.7 ″  E Coordinates: 52 ° 47 ′ 51 ″  N , 6 ° 58 ′ 48.7 ″  E

description

The body was about 90 cm below the surface in the transition layer from white to black peat. She was lying with her feet facing south and was wrapped in a coat of fur together with two long, parallel sticks made of alder wood . The feet were wrapped in a fine piece of wool. Several hazel sticks lay over the body . The exact position of the cap could no longer be determined, but it is said to have been near the head. The remains of the bog body show numerous recent damage, which can be traced back to improper salvage. Due to the different conservation status of the front and rear side of the body and the recent injury patterns, it is assumed that the dead man was lying prone on the moor.

Findings

Larger areas of skin are preserved from the corpse's body . The skin of the body is almost completely preserved from the middle of the chest to the ankles on both sides, as well as the underside of the attached right foot. It measures about 86 cm from the foot to the top and is dark brown in color. The skin areas are leathery, hard and strongly shrunk. The piece of skin recognizable in an early photo from 1938, which was then interpreted as part of the upper arm, is no longer present, as are other small, isolated fragments of skin. All that remains of the corpse's head is a piece of scalp with a tuft of hair attached. The hair is now dark brown and was only trimmed shortly before the man's death, it is 2 to 4 cm long and 9 cm at one point. There is also the broken hyoid bone and a bone in the hands and feet. The gender diagnosis as male was based on the observations made by the finder during the rescue, where the scrotum is said to have still been recognizable, as well as the clothes found. The age of the dead is given as adult because of the growth traces on the foot bones . A blood typing revealed the B blood .

The abdomen of a male human flea ( Pulex irritans ) was found on the body. However, this individual finding is not sufficient as evidence of an acute parasite infestation.

The cause of death has not yet been determined. The broken hyoid bone could be an indication of strangulation in the man, but this cannot be confirmed without further evidence.

dress

With the body parts, an almost complete set of clothing was recovered, which in addition to a fur cape consists of fragments of the woolen undergarment, a waistband shoe and a leather cap. The coat consists of at least five pieces of fur, which are sewn together with narrow strips of leather. The fur is most likely calfskin . The fragment obtained is still 76 cm high and 112 cm wide. The eyelets cut into the neck area along the edge indicate that it was closed with a leather strap about 60 cm long. Some repair areas can be seen on the coat, which are distinguished from the other seams by coarser seams with wider leather strips. The man's undergarments consisted of a loosely woven fabric that is still in four fragments. All fragments come from a single cloth woven in plain weave . The warp and weft threads of the fabric have a diameter of 0.8 to 1.3 mm and are spun from very fine sheep's wool in the S direction . The small number of pigments in the wool fibers indicate that the garment was originally light, white, light gray or light brown in color. Due to the long storage in the bog, it now has a medium to dark brown color. Each of the individual fragments has one or two-lined cutting edges, the folded mm to 5 to 10 and a twist are serged from wool. This thread consists of two S-spun yarns twisted with a strong Z twist of 15 turns per centimeter . The fragments suggest that they belonged to a woolen wraparound skirt that reached from the chest to the knees, was thrown around the upper body about one and a half times and attached to the body via two elongated corners of fabric that reached over the shoulder. Possibly this was also held in the hip area by a belt. Similar wraparound skirts are found in the Bronze Age men's burials in Muldbjerg and Trindhøj in Denmark. The waistband shoe consists of a 26.5 cm long and 17 cm wide piece of deer fur that was worn with the hair side inwards. The piece of leather has a series of holes along the edge through which a narrow leather band was pulled and the leather was fixed around the foot. The left shoe is now 22 cm long and 4.5 cm high at the ankle. The man's hat consists of a piece of fur from the back of a sheep that was worn with the hair side inwards. The piece of fur was pulled off along with the tail, which forms a kind of corner on the cap. The hat was adapted to the shape of the head by means of three seams made with fine leather strips.

It can no longer be clarified whether the present items of clothing included other items made of vegetable materials such as linen or nettle , as these cannot be preserved in the acidic environment of the moor.

The extensively preserved remains of clothing make this find an important source for textile archeology and traditional costumes from the Bronze Age.

Dating

The first pollen-analytical dating of the samples obtained from the peat profile was carried out in 1953. It showed that the man from Emmer-Erfscheidenveen is the oldest bog corpse in the Netherlands, dating back to the 14th to 9th centuries BC. A ¹⁴ C dating of hair, textile, skin and fur samples carried out in 1994 using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) was able to narrow down the period of deposition to 1370 to 1215 BC.

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).
• Wijnand van der Sanden : Mens 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 (Dutch).

Web links

• Man van Emmer-Erfscheidenveen. In: Encyclopedie Drenthe Online. Retrieved December 5, 2011 (Dutch). 
• James M. Deem: Drents Museum in Assen, the Netherlands: Emmer-Erscheidenveen Man. In: Mummy Tombs. Retrieved December 5, 2011 (English, the website is aimed primarily at children). 

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. 67, fig. 21 .
2. ^ Van der Sanden: Mens en moeras . Pp. 168-173
3. ^ Van der Sanden: Mens en moeras . Pp. 174-180.
4. ↑ 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]).