On the afternoon
of May 6, 1950, two brothers were working in the Bjaeldskov
bog, an area about 6 miles west of the Danish town of
Silkeborg. They had already planted their spring crops on
their nearby farms and were taking time that afternoon to cut
some peat to use for heating their houses and cooking their
meals.
As their bog
shovels sliced through the peat, they struck something hard.
After more digging, they came upon the lifeless body of a man.
He was quite dead, but his face appeared so fresh that they
immediately thought he had been murdered recently and dumped
in the bog. They contacted the police, and soon officers
arrived at the site. But the police knew the history of the
bog. They remembered that two other bodies had been found in
the same bog, once in 1927 and again in 1938. Rather than
start a murder investigation, they called an archaeologist at
a nearby university and invited him to see the body of the man
who would soon be named Tollund Man, after the village in
which the brothers lived.
Late that same
afternoon, archaeologist P. V. Glob got a good look at the
well-preserved man in the fading light of the day. By now, the
man had been uncovered from his resting place eight feet deep
in the bog. Glob realized that the man had been in the bog a
long time. He noted that the man’s skin was coffee brown,
and his short hair was red, both colored by their contact with
the water of the bog. He wore only a cap on his head (made
from eight pieces of sheepskin, the wool inside) and a leather
belt around his waist. Otherwise, he was naked, although any
fabric clothing he wore would have dissolved over time in the
bog. He looked as if he were sleeping, laying on his side.
When a small piece
of peat was removed from his neck, however, the professor saw
something else: a two-strand leather rope tied in a noose was
tightly closed around his neck. Tollund Man, Glob realized,
had been killed and buried in a grave that had been cut from
the peat.
To 
study the body further, Glob would have to move Tollund Man to
a museum. He had workers build a wooden box around the dead
man so that he could be transported exactly as he had been
discovered to Copenhagen’s National Museum. After a weeklong
train ride through Denmark, Tollund Man arrived at the museum
where he was eagerly examined. They quickly concluded, by
analyzing the age of the peat that surrounded him, that
Tollund Man had been killed some 2,000 years earlier, during
the early Iron Age. Later, results from Carbon-14 dating
indicated that he had died about the year 350 BC.
They examined
every inch of his body, noting that his head and feet were
much better preserved than the rest of his body. His legs and
arms, for example, had mostly turned to skeleton; the soft
tissues there had deteriorated. By studying his bones, they
determined that he was about 40 years old when he died. He
stood slightly over five feet tall. He walked barefoot
sometimes, they decided, for there were scars on the bottom of
one foot.
Scientists were
particularly interested in his stomach and intestines, for
they wanted to know what he had eaten before he died. They
washed these organs, then removed their contents for analysis.
Inside the stomach they found very little, but the large
intestine contained the remains of gruel, a coarse vegetable
soup made in this case from some barley, 30 types of seed, and
many weeds. The fact that the meal had entered the large
intestine told scientists that Tollund Man had eaten his last
meal at least some 12-24 hours before he died. Later, when two
archaeologists tried to use the list of ingredients and cook
the same gruel in 1954, they were unpleasantly surprised by
the terrible taste.
By the end of
their examination, scientists were fairly certain that Tollund
Man had been sacrificed to the gods for a number of reasons.
First, he was buried in the type of watery place where the
early people of Europe believed they could communicate with
their many gods and goddesses. Second, the contents of his
intestines appeared to indicate that he was killed in the
winter or early spring, a time that human sacrifices were made
to the goddess of spring. Finally, his body was well treated
after he was hung, something that wouldn’t have happened if
he were a common criminal. He was picked up and carefully
placed in his grave. The people who buried him, scientists
believe, also closed his eyes and mouth after he died.
Following the
lengthy examination, Tollund Man’s body was in pieces and in
danger of decay. Preserved in an anaerobic (that is,
oxygen-free) environment for 2,000 years, he had once again
been introduced to a bacteria-filled atmosphere. His body had
already begun to deteriorate. Scientists decided to preserve
only his head and one foot. The rest of him had become
dehydrated and was sent away for further study. After a year
of preservation baths, the head and foot were sent to the
Silkeborg Museum where they were placed on display. In 1987,
the dehydrated parts of Tollund Man were returned, restored,
and reassembled once again, so that a cast could be made of
the body.
This
account originally appeared as "Tollund Man" (by
James M. Deem) in Dig
magazine (September 2005).
