Bog bodies

High-tech tools divulge new information about the mysterious and violent fates met by these corpses

Tollund Man is the naturally mummified body of a man who lived during the 4th century BC, during the period characterised in Scandinavia as the Pre-Roman Iron Age. He was hanged as a sacrifice to the gods and placed in a peat bog where he remained preserved for more than two millennia. Today, the face of the Tollund Man is as preserved as the day he died.

The first comprehensive survey of a 7,000-year-old burial tradition reveals an often violent final ritual.

In 1640, a strange body was discovered in the peat bogs of Shalkholz Fen, Germany. It was intact but ancient, and it became the first documented case of a bog ...

The Weerdinge Men were uncovered by a farmer in 1904 in a peat bog in the Netherlands. They have been radiocarbon-dated to between 160 BC and 220 AD. One of the bodies has a hole in the chest through which the intestines spilled out. The cause of death for the other is unknown. It is […]

Traumatic injuries and frequent burials at some sites hint at ritual sacrifice

Tollund Man is the naturally mummified corpse of a man who died between 405 and384 BC, discovered in 1950 in the Tollund peat bog in the Central Jutland...

(warning: this article features an image of mummified human remains) In general, I don't consider myself to be the morbid type. I've never had a particular fascination with death and the majority of exhibits centered around human remains--like Body Worlds, for example--fail to pique my interest. So a few years ago, when I started researching…

A cavernous wound gapes on Grauballe Man’s throat, cut with such force that the blade nicked a vertebra in his neck. Researchers once thought other damage done to the body meant he was tortured before execution. But recent study has shown that his bones broke during long burial in a Danish bog.