Bog bodies from Wijster

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The bog bodies of Wijster ( English Wijster four ) is a group of four bog bodies from the 16th century , which were found in 1901 in a bog near Wijster in the Dutch province of Drenthe . The items recovered with the bodies are kept in the Drents Museum in Assen .

Find

On June 5, 1901, while working in the Oostwestveen bog near Wijster, the peat cutter Lenze Bakker came across the remains of several corpses and clothing remnants that had been mummified in the bog . He immediately notifies the mayor, WC de Vidal de Saint Germain, and the police officer J. Mulder. After brief investigations, both realized that this was not a modern crime. Mayor de Vidal suspected a special find and immediately had parts of the clothing sent to the Provinciaal Museum van Oudheden , today's Drents Museum, in Assen. He hired workers to bury the bodies again. Tax officer GJ Landweer learned of this find from a newspaper note. Landweer was a historically interested layman who had been traveling through the province of Drenthe since 1892 as a liaison for the Provincial Museum in search of clues to archaeological finds in order to secure them for the museum and to photograph the sites. He arrived there on June 6, but found that the site had already been dug up by curious people who had taken parts of the bodies and found objects with them or had cooled elsewhere. Landweer managed to unearth three skulls , some bones and remains of tissue . In a hollow he found a well-preserved hand that was probably severed from a body by cutting peat.

A few days later, a copper kettle and 16 coins were recovered from the peat in the immediate vicinity of the site .
Location: 52 ° 49 ′ 13 ″  N , 6 ° 32 ′ 38 ″  E Coordinates: 52 ° 49 ′ 13 ″  N , 6 ° 32 ′ 38 ″  E

Findings

The body parts that Landweer recovered were three skulls, that of an adult and two of younger individuals. The adult's skull was that of a strong person, but it was destroyed after the excavation. Remnants of the brains were present in the skulls as a white mass. The skulls of the younger individuals were badly affected by the long storage. Parts of the spinal column with attached ribs , larger parts of the skin and remains of internal organs were still attached to one of the skulls . All bones were severely decalcified and softened by storage in the acidic moor environment. After they were taken out of the bog, they dried up and shrank very badly. Only a few fragments of the body parts still exist today, including a small number of skeletal parts and the right hand of a person, which now looks very delicate and small due to the long storage in the bog and the subsequent drying. All individuals died before they were 25 years old. One of the men wore a woolen, red jacket with sleeves in the style of a doublet with a leather waistcoat or jacket pulled over it, the sleeves of which are lost. Another man had woolen, dark green breeches , but it can no longer be reconstructed which of the men wore them. In addition, other textile fragments and the remains of a leather belt were found. Remnants of a lining were no longer visible on the fabric parts of the doublet, as the clothes were thoroughly washed after they were found. The doublet was adorned with sewn-on, serrated, narrow strips of fabric on the collar and cuffs. The woolen clothes consisted of a medium fine woolen cloth in a plain weave . The type of clasp cannot be clearly identified, it may have been due to small hooks and eyes made of old metal. The fabric of the doublet had a weaving density of 13-14 warp threads and 18-19 weft threads per centimeter, the fabric of the trousers was somewhat coarser with 11-12 warp threads and 10-11 weft threads per centimeter. The warp threads of both cloths were Z-twisted and the weft threads of the trousers S-twisted, whereas two threads twisted in the s-direction were inserted in Z-twisted yarns in the case of the doublet's cloth . The circumference of the trouser fabric is 225 cm at the waistband, but the lack of edging on the waistband prevents the reconstruction of the original waist size of the trousers, which are strongly gathered in the waistband. The leather jacket or vest is not completely preserved, only both front parts and the lower part of the back part have been preserved. The leather was not of good quality, it shows strong signs of wear and seams from subsequent changes. A row of small buttonholes run along the front edges of the front parts, but these do not allow any clear indication of the type of fastener. The other items were a little boiling pan of copper and nine silver and seven copper coins. On-site observations showed that the dead did not end up accidentally in the moor or had an accident there. After the bodies got into the bog, they were covered with twigs, possibly to keep them underwater.

interpretation

There are numerous hypotheses about the cause of death of bog corpses, none of which can be confirmed with certainty. A robbery can be ruled out with a high degree of probability, as they entered the moor with valuable coins and a copper kettle. The simultaneous death of the four and the fact that attempts were made to keep their bodies submerged suggests that they did not die of natural causes and that they were dumped here. The recovered coins and the copper cauldron led to a theory that the death of the four people had a magical or cultic background and could possibly have been related to a pagan sacrificial ritual that survived Christianization for several centuries. The relatively simple and partially worn clothing suggests that the wearers were members of simple social classes, possibly craftsmen.

Dating

The youngest of the 16 coins ( final coin ) was minted in 1585, which is why it can be assumed that the corpses could not have reached the moor before this year. A 14 C-dating of 15 samples from the bones, the skin, the woolen clothing and the wood by means of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) showed a date of death around the year 1600 AD. The result confirmed the textile-typological dating of the clothes as well as the coin dating. In contrast, the samples from the peat showed a date to the 8th or 9th century, which is why it can be assumed that the corpses ended up in an old layer of bog when they were sunk. A 14 C dating attempt of several skin and hair samples confirmed this dating.

Comparative finds

There are similar finds of several people sunk together in the moor, including the men of Weerdinge from the Bourtanger moor and the men of Hunteburg from the Großer Moor in the district of Osnabrück .

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).
  • SY Comis: Zestiende-eeuwse want en leren kledingstukken uit het veen bij Wijster . In: Nieuwe Drentse Volksalmanak . No. 115 , 1961, pp. 171-197 (Dutch).

Web links

  • Veenlijken. In: wijster.info. Retrieved December 7, 2011 (Dutch, find history).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Find place according to 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 , p. 61-62 . Former moor Oostwestveen 2 km NE of Wijster, can no longer be determined more precisely.
  2. ↑ a b S. Y. Comis: Zestiende-eeuwse want en leren kledingstukken uit het veen bij Wijster . In: Nieuwe Drentse Volksalmanak . No. 115 , 1961, pp. 171-197 (Dutch).
  3. ↑ Veenlijken. (No longer available online.) In: wijster.info. Formerly in the original ; Retrieved December 7, 2011 (Dutch, find history).  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.wijster.info  
  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]).