The star of Landesmuseum's
collection of bog bodies is Windeby Girl.
Discovered in a small German bog in
1952, the Windeby find consisted of two bodies. The better preserved proved to be a
teenage girl who was killed some 2,000
years earlier and buried in the bog. P. V. Glob in his classic work The
Bog People described her this way:
"She lay on her back, her
head twisted to one side, the left arm outstretched. 
Between it and her hip was a large block of stone. The right arm was bent
in against the chest, as if defensively, while the legs were lightly drawn
up, the left over the right. The head with its delicate face and the hands
were the best preserved; the chest had completely disintegrated, and the
ribs were visible. The lower abdomen had also gone. The hair. reddish from
the effects
of the bog acids but originally light blond, was of an exceptional
fineness but had been shaved off with a 
razor on the left side of her
head. Here it was less than a tenth of an inch long. On the right side of
the head, in contrast, it was cut to a length of an inch and three
quarters to two inches. The skin, where present, was well preserved. The
bones, though much calcified, still retained their shape."
Her
eyes were blindfolded with a strip of cloth woven from brown, yellow, and
red threads. She had drowned in the first century A. D.
and her death was not an
accident--her body was anchored by a large stone and branches from a birch
tree. Glob imagined her being "led naked out on to the bog with
bandaged eyes ... and drowned in the little peat pit, which must have held
twenty inches of water or more."
No one 
knows why she was
killed, but it is clear that someone wanted her dead. And her body was kept at the bottom of the bog with
birch branches and rocks. Clearly, the people who buried her never wanted to see
her again.
Her head was reconstructed to
determine what she might have looked like when she was alive, and a photo
of this is displayed at the museum.
Damendorf Man died about
300 B.C. and was discovered thousands of years later in the Eckernförde
district of Germany. Unlike some other bog bodies, he was flattened by
the weight of the peat. Only his skin, nails, and hair (as well as his
leather belt and shoes) were preserved. As Glob wrote in The
Bog People, "The rest of him has completely disappeared
as if by magic. A split nearly an inch long in the region of the heart
may indicate how he was killed."
Discovered
in 1871 in a fen near Kiel (Germany), Rendswühren Man died when he
was 40-50 years old. Here is how P.V. Glob in The
Bog People described the find.
"[the]
exceptionally well-preserved man lay an an angle in the bog, 
face
downwards. He was naked, except for the left leg, on which lay a
piece of leather, with the pelt facing inwards, bound with leather
thongs in a sort of cross-gartering. Clothing, however, consisting
of a large rectangular woolen cloth and a cape made of pieces of
skin sewn together, covered the man's head, which had a triangular
hole in the forehead as though from a powerful blow.
"This well
preserved human body naturally aroused much interest and before
being dispatched to Kiel it was exhibited on a farm cart in a nearby
barn. During this period visitors helped themselves lavishly to
souvenirs both from the body itself and from the clothing. The dead
man became the first bog man to be photographed--being stood up on
the tips of his toes for the purpose. Preservation of the body was
carried out by smoking, for other methods of conservation were not
then envisaged."
