Bog body from Pangerfilze

The bog body from Pangerfilze also bog body from Kolbermoor was found in 1927 in the Panger Filze bog near Kolbermoor in the Upper Bavarian district of Rosenheim . The corpse, which dates from the 18th century, is one of the few documented finds of bog corpses from Bavaria , along with Frau von Peiting .

Location

The moor Panger Filze, whose older names are also Pangerfilze or Hochfilze , is located in the vicinity of today's Kolbermoor district of Schlarbhofen . The raised bog has been drained and used for peat extraction since 1889. Due to the drainage, the moor surface sank by up to 80 centimeters until the 1920s and was about 2.50 meters deep at the site. In the 1950s, the moor was finally reclaimed as arable land by new settlers.

Find

On June 11, 1927, two workers came across a human corpse while cutting peat . They suspected a crime and immediately notified the police. The find was recovered by an investigative commission of the criminal police. The body lay on its stomach at a depth of 75 centimeters below the surface and was covered with a few branches of spruce. According to the finders, no traces of digging were visible in the peat. The corpse was dressed in a loden coat, jacket, vest, and felt hat. In addition, some leather straps were found in the neck area, parts of leather shoes, the wooden handle of a pocket knife, rotted sackcloth and about two dozen acorns . The finds were packed in a box and brought to the forensic medicine department in Munich for further examination . Location: 47 ° 50 ′ 0 ″  N , 12 ° 2 ′ 20 ″  E Coordinates: 47 ° 50 ′ 0 ″  N , 12 ° 2 ′ 20 ″  E

Findings

The body was well preserved and compressed to a thickness of five to eight centimeters by the pressure of the layers of moor above. The body size of the bog body from Pangerfilze was about 170 centimeters. Due to the prone position, the front half of the body was better preserved than the back. The soft tissues were discolored dark brown and of a leather-like consistency. The sex could be determined as male due to the broadly squeezed external genital organs clearly visible in the pelvic area . During the rescue, a thigh was cut off by the stab of a log. As with other bog corpses, the bones were strongly decalcified due to the storage in the acidic bog fluid, dark to black-brown in color, flexible and easy to cut with a knife. The skeleton was present completely in much, only a few hand and tarsal bones were not preserved. The cartilage layers were in good condition. The soft parts of the head were more severely worn. The physician from the Traunstein public prosecutor's office, Prof. Merkel, who was present at the time of the rescue, reported that the soft parts of the head slipped off the skull like a face mask. The bones on the left side of the skull were far less decalcified and also less discolored than the other bones. The man's head hair was again in good condition . They were curly, were about 15 centimeters in length, were discolored from dark to reddish brown and only sat very loosely on the scalp. The medullary canals were visible under the microscope, but no pigment deposits could be identified. In the man's dentition, there were two molars in the left upper jaw and three incisors in the lower jaw , all of which, however, were severely chewed . Internal organs could no longer be detected; Remnants of the brain were only present in the skull as a pulpy mass. The skin consisted mainly of the dermis , the epidermis of which had almost completely disappeared. In addition, the skin had been damaged by the recovery and subsequent removal of adhering peat layers. The fatty tissue was only recognizable as a crumbly mass in a few places. The muscle tissue was largely preserved and numerous strands of muscle fiber could be clearly traced over long distances; however, the connective tissue surrounding the muscle fibers was dissolved.

dress

A nearly complete set of clothing was found with the body . The clothing consisted of:

• A large, brown, broad-brimmed hat made of thick felt, originally black or green in color.
• Parts of a loden coat made of a coarse yellow-brown wool fabric, with regular darker impressions on the left edge, which were probably part of a fastener. The coat had two cuts 13 and 15 centimeters long on the left front part, one 4 cm long on the right front part and one 13 cm long on the right lower sleeve.
• A yellow-brown jacket , without collar, pockets, buttons, buttonholes or cuffs, which was also made of a coarse woolen material. It had two cuts of 7 centimeters and four of 4 centimeters in length on the back.
• A red-brown vest with a length of 70 centimeters on the front, 33 centimeters on the back and shoulder straps 4 centimeters wide. The back of the vest had three incisions 5 to 6 centimeters long.
• A pair of leather suspenders made of brown leather strips, which were connected at the front and back by a crossbar and sewn under with red felt.
• Loose parts of a pair of brown loafers .
• A chest pouch made of brown leather.

All the seams of the clothing were dissolved, which was due to the use of linen thread as sewing material, which is not preserved in the acidic moor environment. The loose parts were sewn back together by an expert. The garments were examined by various experts for folk costumes , who unanimously confirmed that the costume found in Passeier , but also in the Sarntal , Pustertal and the Reutte area , was worn by hunters and foresters. Investigations of the fabric samples at the Prussian Higher Technical School for the Textile Industry in Cottbus showed that the wool fibers were in excellent condition. The wool also contained fine hair from the undercoat and coarse, hollow-tube awning or burin hair, which indicated an original breed of sheep that was not bred for wool and that wool was not processed industrially. The wool was not specially prepared before manual spinning and resulted in a noticeably thick and coarse fabric that was also very heavily milled . The weft threads were Z -twisted and the warp threads S-twisted, which was no longer common in modern, industrial fabrics and indicated that the fabric was very old. Likewise, the lack of trousers is probably due to the fact that they were made of linen and were decomposed by the moor acid.

The wooden handle of a jackknife was found next to clothing, the iron components of which had been completely dissolved by the acids in the moor. In addition, severely decomposed remains of a very coarse sackcloth-like fabric were found.

Dating

The dating of the bog body in the 18th century was primarily based on the typology of textiles, based on the clothing features found. In particular, the leather suspenders, which did not appear until the beginning of the 18th century, confirm that the dead could not have reached the moor earlier. According to Dr. Jacobs, the chief curator of the Bavarian National Museum , the time of death of the man could be in the 18th to the beginning of the 19th century. Other dating methods that were used for other bog corpses found at the beginning of the 20th century, such as the depth of the bog layer or pollen profile, could not be used as they were not taken into account when the criminal police were recovered.

Whereabouts

The whereabouts of the remains of the bog body from Pangerfilze and their belongings can no longer be reliably reconstructed today due to lost documents. It may have been handed over to the anatomical institute after the forensic medical examination and the determination of its age , since an unspecified male bog body was kept in the institute's later inventory. According to the contemporary witness Reinhard Aigner, Brigitte Haas-Gebhard, the head of the Middle Ages / Modern Era department of the State Archaeological Collection , suspects that after the destruction of the ancient anatomy, in which the institute's collection was located, during the American bombing of the Munich clinic district on May 22nd September 1944, the remains of the bog body were recovered from the rubble and finally buried due to their severe damage. There are no documents on the whereabouts of the bog body in the rescued archives of the Anatomical Institute or the Forensic Medicine Institute. Only in the archives of the Bavarian National Museum there exists a profile with which to the found person gefahndet was.

interpretation

During the autopsy of the body, apart from the damage apparently caused by the recovery, only a superficial injury to the left shoulder blade could be seen. The cuts in the clothes were most likely due to the peat cutting work, which was confirmed after sewing the clothes together. However, these cuts did not match the cut on the corpse's shoulder blade. No evidence could be found of a violent homicide. The dead man was covered with spruce branches, which spoke against accidental death in the moor. Whether this is possibly a burial of a homeless person outside a cemetery cannot be clarified either.

The find led to the knowledge in the archeology of antiquity that the mummification and preservation processes of human bodies in bogs took place in a much shorter time than was previously assumed due to the prehistoric bog corpses from Northern Europe . Maria Gabriel expressed the opinion that this circumstance could be relevant especially for forensic medicine and suggested experimental investigations into the conservation processes in bogs.

literature

• Maria Gabriel: The previous results of the bog corpse research and communication of a new find of a . In: International Journal of Legal Medicine . tape 15 , no. 1 . Springer, December 1930, ISSN  0937-9827 , p. 226-238 , doi : 10.1007 / BF01751337 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Brigitte Haas-Gebhard, Klaus Püschel : The woman from the moor . In: Commission for Bavarian State History (Hrsg.): Bavarian history sheets . No. 74 , 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-11079-5 , pp. 246 .
2. ^ ^{A b c d e f} Maria Gabriel: The previous results of the moor corpse research and communication of a new find a . In: International Journal of Legal Medicine . tape 15 , no. 1 . Springer, December 1930, ISSN  0937-9827 , p. 226-238 , doi : 10.1007 / BF01751337 .
3. ↑ Brigitte Haas-Gebhard: The mummy from the Inca period: News from the "bog body from the Dachau moss" . In: Rupert Gebhard (Hrsg.): The mummy from the Inca period: News from the bog body from the Dachau moss . Wißner, Augsburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-89639-960-1 , pp. 9–43, here 12–13, notes 7, 9, 10 .