5 A Look at Archaelogy

Lindow Man

 Well, you always wanted to know what people looked like in the past, so here's something to haunt you. When normal people stumble over corpses, they turn pale, call the police and have nightmares for months. Not so the archaeologist. Before you can turn round they have decamped with the body, examined the stomach contents, checked the length of the fingernails and done a reconstruction of the head. Voila!

Now you know what the Celts looked like, in Cheshire, two thousand years ago. Lindow Man was dug up in 1984 during peatcutting at Lindow Moss. Other bodies have been discovered in the same bog. He has been dated as living somewhere between 2BCE and CE 119, died at the age of 25, was about 168 cm in height. He was probably upper class. His hands and fingernails showed no signs of manual toil, his moustache and beard were neatly trimmed. He had eaten an oat and wheat bannock, cooked on a heather fire.

Lndow Man:Reconstruction

He died a horrific death. There were two blows to the head, followed by strangulation. His throat was possibly slit. It is thought he might have been a ritual sacrifice to the gods. He has similar injuries and similar stomach contents to other bog bodies, with th exception of the beard.

Other bodies have since been dug up in the Moss. Was it a religious site?

Bog men -and women have been found throughout Germanic Europe, in Denmark, Holland, and Germany. Julius Caesar and other Roman writers observed that the tribes indulged in human sacrifice. People have speculated that the killlings were to please the Anglo-Saxon goddess, Eostre, but what is this custom doing in Celtic Britain? Was he part of a tribe of illegal immigrants who had dodged immigration? They have even dug up bog men in the Outer Hebrides, where no Germanic tribe arrived until the Vikings hit the scattered churches and pillaged their wealth.

Was he simply a murder victim?

It just goes to show that history is much more complicated than we think. And one should thank the archaeologists for blowing away some of the false theories that have been around.

When there are few written records, it is difficult to peel away the layers and find the truth. it's all right to speculate, but tomorrow, something else might turn up and destroy our most cherished misconceptions.

But at least we know now what people looked like, what food they ate, and, in the case of some of the continental bodies, what clothes and ornaments they wore.

I just wish I knew why we find Celts practising what was supposed to be a Germanic rite.

A curious footnote to this story is that the police were hunting for the body of a woman suspected of having been murdered. When the body of a woman was dug up in Lindow Moss, the murderer confessed to killing his wife. The corpse was 1800 years old!

I hope you did not mind this little diversion! Back to the Saxons and more archaeology!