http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14142846/


‘Bog bodies’ shed light on Iron Age life
Ancient Irish had time for trade, a fancy ’do and fingernail polishing

By Kevin Smith
Updated: 10:42 p.m. ET Aug. 1, 2006

DUBLIN, Ireland - Life in the Iron Age may have been nasty, brutish and
short, but people still found time to style their hair and polish their
fingernails — and that was just the men.

These are the findings of scientists who have been examining the latest
preserved prehistoric bodies to emerge from Ireland’s peat bogs, the
first to be found in Europe for 20 years.

One of the bodies, churned up by a peat-cutting machine at Clonycavan
near Dublin in 2003, had raised Mohawk-style hair, held in place with
gel imported from abroad.

The other, unearthed three months later and 25 miles (40 kilometers)
away in Oldcroghan by workers digging a ditch, had perfectly manicured
fingernails.

“I think the message I’m getting is that although they were living in a
different time, a different culture, eating different things, living in
a different way, people are people — they’re the same in their
thinking,” said Rolly Read, head of conservation at the National Museum
of Ireland in Dublin.

Read is one of a team of experts from Britain and Ireland who carried
out an 18-month examination of the 2,300-year-old corpses and whose
findings form the basis of “Kingship & Sacrifice,” a major new
exhibition at the museum.

Iron Age life
While the last two centuries have seen hundreds of bog bodies recovered
from northern Europe’s wetlands — where they were preserved by the
unique chemical composition of the peat — many were not examined in
detail because techniques to further preserve them had not been
perfected.

Read said the latest finds had yielded precious insights into Iron Age
life.

For example, the hair product used by Clonycavan Man was a gel made of
plant oil and pine resin imported from southwestern France or Spain,
showing that trade between Ireland and southern Europe was taking place
almost two and a half millennia ago.

“We’ve been able to apply techniques that weren’t available back in
1984, so it’s a chance to actually look at aspects of Iron Age people
that haven’t been explored before,” Read said.

Why the bogs?
Archaeologists have always puzzled over why the bodies ended up in peat
bogs and why so many of them show signs of violent death, with much
debate about whether they were executed for crimes or ritually slain as
human sacrifices.

Both Clonycavan Man and Oldcroghan Man — who were in their 20s when they
died — met grisly ends, the latter in particular bearing the scars of
horrific torture, including having his nipples cut almost through.

Like several other bog bodies, Oldcroghan Man had been beheaded. Other
examples, such as Denmark’s famous Tollund Man, discovered in 1950,
still had the rope used to strangle them around their necks.

Manicured fingernails and evidence of good diet — not to mention
Clonycavan Man’s taste for imported cosmetics — seem to indicate that
many of those who ended up in the bogs were from the upper classes.

Appeasing the gods?
Eamonn Kelly, keeper of Irish antiquities at the National Museum of
Ireland, has developed a new theory about the bodies based on his
discovery that nearly all of the Irish examples were placed in the
borders immediately surrounding royal land or on tribal boundaries.

“These people may have been hostages or deposed kings or candidates for
kingship who have been sacrificed to ensure a successful reign for a new
king, and this was done as part of a kingship ritual and as a fertility
offering to the gods,” he told Reuters.

“The king was held personally responsible for the success of the crops
and so on — if he couldn’t guarantee the fertility of the land, he
risked being deposed,” he added.

Another theory, prompted by the writings of Roman historian Tacitus from
around the same era, is that the perpetrators of “shameful crimes” were
put into the bog in order to trap their souls in a watery limbo where
the body did not rot.

The "Kingship & Sacrifice" exhibition includes Iron Age artifacts such
as weapons, feasting utensils, boundary markings and kingly regalia —
all of which are often tied in with bog burials in a number of
locations, according to Kelly.

The two most recent bodies — tanned to a mahogany sheen by acids in the
bog water — have now been freeze-dried for long-term preservation and
have found their final resting place under glass in Ireland’s national
museum.

Copyright 2006 Reuters