IN FEBRUARY 2001 an armoured vehicle drew up outside the hospital at Aarhus University in Denmark, amid a flurry of media attention. It was met by a group of the country鈥檚 best medics who would spend the next three days examining the man inside in the most minute detail possible with modern, non-invasive medical technology.
After many months of planning they had finally got their hands on this extraordinary patient, a remarkably well-preserved 2000-year-old corpse known as Grauballe Man. His short stay at the hospital marked the beginning of a two-year project to re-examine the mummy before he was reinstated in the city鈥檚 Moesg氓rd Museum in a brand new exhibition hall last month.
鈥淲e were so afraid that the body might fall apart when we moved him that we spent a year planning his hospital visit,鈥� recalls chief radiologist Anne Grethe Jurik. A box had been cast in his exact shape, so that they could transport the body without disturbing it. 鈥淏ut the fear evaporated when we saw how robust he was,鈥� Grethe Jurik says. 鈥淥n the last day, we laid him down on an ordinary hospital bed.鈥�
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Still, the caution was understandable. Grauballe Man is one of only 10 complete bog bodies housed in museums in Europe and he is among the best-preserved and most complete. When his body was unearthed in a Danish peat bog in 1952, a local archaeologist immediately recognised its importance, and Grauballe Man was whisked away to the Moesg氓rd Museum. There he was examined and preserved with an 18-month-long bath in tanning solutions. But after spending most of the past half-century languishing in a glass case in a dark corner of the museum, archaeologists decided it was time to see whether 21st-century technology could shed new light on one of the most important finds of the last century.
Over the years, partial remains of hundreds of Iron Age bodies have been found by peat cutters, miraculously preserved by a natural tanning process and the complete lack of oxygen in such bogs. The bog-body phenomenon is puzzling: these are not people who happened to die while crossing a bog, or bodies that were buried there. They are only found in northern Europe, and rather than being spread across history, they mostly date from a 350-year period around the time of the birth of Christ. What鈥檚 more, it is clear that many of them died in violent circumstances. Often they were brutally murdered 鈥渕ore than once鈥� 鈥� garrotted, hanged, decapitated, beaten about the head and stabbed. Some had half their heads shaved. Others may have been given a fatal concoction of drugs.
The consensus among most archaeologists is that these were ritualised sacrifices to the gods. They occur at a time when Iron Age Europe was under threat from the powerful and expanding Roman Empire. And most were carried out at the harshest time of year, at the end of winter or in early spring. It seems likely that the victims were taken to bogs because these were holy places 鈥� impassable, unproductive and mysterious, halfway between land and sea. 鈥淲e know that early Iron Age people put offerings of stones, pottery and sculpture into the bog, so why not people?鈥� says Pauline Asingh, an archaeologist at the Moesg氓rd Museum. It is unlikely that the human remains are there by accident or coincidence. 鈥淭here are too many similarities between these bodies,鈥� Asingh says.
Grauballe Man seemed to be a typical example. Even to the peat cutters who found him, it was obvious how he died: his throat was gaping open, slit from ear to ear. X-rays and an autopsy performed on the body in the 1950s indicated that he also had a broken leg and a fractured skull. And his stomach contents suggested he had died when there was no seasonal fruit available.
The original investigators concluded that Grauballe Man had been thrown naked into a pit in the peat in late winter. They speculated that he may have been fed a ritualistic meal before sacrifice, so he would die in a shamanic trance: his stomach contained spores of a fungal rust called ergot, which infects cereals and can cause hallucinations and induce coma. Archaeologists already had a vague notion of Grauballe Man鈥檚 life and death. But could 50 years of progress in medicine help them construct a more detailed picture?
The use of modern medical technology to analyse bog bodies kicked off in the 1980s, when some perfectly preserved, dismembered bodies appeared in Lindow Moss, a peat bog in Cheshire, north-west England. This was the first bog mummy find in Britain for over a century, and archaeological scientists went into overdrive. 鈥淣owadays, you can鈥檛 do an invasive autopsy on a mummy because they are recognised as invaluable archaeological specimens,鈥� says Niels Lynnerup, an anthropologist at the University of Copenhagen, who has helped coordinate the research on Grauballe Man. 鈥淏ut you can get a very long way with non-invasive techniques.鈥�
The Lindow bodies were subjected to every possible kind of analysis. Their hair, skin, teeth and internal organs underwent detailed investigations, providing information not just about how they were killed, but about their lifestyle and diet. One of the newest techniques available at the time was computerised tomography, or CT scanning. This uses X-rays to generate 3D images of various body tissues, including muscles and tendons, which can be used to build up a virtual reconstruction of a body. 鈥淲ith CT scanning you can document exactly what the body is like,鈥� says Lynnerup. 鈥淯sing these images, other people can do research on a body without touching it at all.鈥�
Recognising the power of CT, the Danish team made it central to their reanalysis of Grauballe Man. But the team of radiologists were in for a surprise when they set about analysing the 1362 X-ray cross sections taken through the body. The computer is programmed to recognise different tissues according to their densities in living patients. Bog bodies, as they discovered, are a little different. 鈥淧ress the button marked 鈥榮keleton鈥� on the scanner,鈥� says Lynnerup, 鈥渁nd the screen goes completely blank.鈥� That鈥檚 because Grauballe Man鈥檚 skeleton is demineralised 鈥� the acidic bog has leached away its calcium, leaving it more like rubber than bone.
Once the radiologists had adjusted their scanner, there was still another shock in store. 鈥淲e found things like blackboard rubbers stuffed inside his thorax, and layers of putty under the skin on his face,鈥� says Lynnerup. Unknown to museum staff, the body had been completely remoulded by the conservators of the 1950s who presumably felt that it was too gruesome to put on public display as it was. 鈥淵ou would never dream of doing this to an archaeological specimen now,鈥� says Lynnerup. But the discovery has solved at least one mystery. 鈥淣ow we know why his nose looks so silly,鈥� quips Asingh.
Forensic pathologist Markil Gregersen from Aarhus University was first to see the processed images. The CT scans showed that the blow to the head described by a radiologist who X-rayed the body in 1952 was nothing of the sort. 鈥淭here was a soft impression in the cranium caused by pressure in the peat,鈥� says Gregersen, 鈥渘ot a fracture line or defect.鈥� This underlines how difficult it can be to distinguish between injuries that happened before and after death. In the case of Grauballe Man, however, the cause of death is beyond dispute, thanks to modern methods that shed more light on how his throat was slit. The doctors used an endoscope to look inside the wound and found that his tongue and the associated hyoid bone and larynx were intact. Such a cut could only have been made from behind, with the head pulled right back.
How old was he really?
Further analysis suggested that Grauballe Man might have been killed in his prime. He was originally thought to be at least 30 because he had rheumatoid arthritis in his spine, which would not normally have afflicted a younger man. Using the CT scans, however, anthropologist Jesper Boldsen at the Odense campus of the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) estimated his age from the shape of the pelvic joints, which degrade in a regular way with age. Boldsen concluded that Grauballe Man was in his late twenties when he died. But a second study contradicts this.
Using a new technique, Lene Warner Boel from SDU Odense microscopically examined sections of the pelvic bone removed through the old autopsy wound in the abdomen. The spongy part of a bone contains layers where the bone is constantly renewed, and the density of the layers indicates the age of the person, because renewal slows as they age. Warner Boel鈥檚 analysis indicated that Grauballe Man was 34 years old, give or take a couple of years. That鈥檚 right back with the estimate of the 1950s. So which is correct? Boldsen points out that both estimates have wide error ranges that actually overlap. Still, it鈥檚 disappointing that in this respect at least, today鈥檚 precise mathematical methods seem little better than the visual guesswork of 50 years ago.
But there was better luck uncovering more about Grauballe Man鈥檚 life, thanks to a thorough dental examination made by Dorthe Arenholt-Bindslev from Aarhus University. 鈥淗is mouth is slightly open, so you can get a light and a mirror in, but you could not see very much,鈥� she recalls. The teeth lost all their enamel to the peat, and were small and loose in the jaw when the body was found, so they were removed and stored in little vials at the museum. These, together with the CT scans of the skull and a plaster cast of the jaw taken during the original examination, provided a wealth of information.
Minute inspection of the teeth themselves revealed that Grauballe Man was seriously malnourished as a toddler. There is a developmental defect in the dentine from the age of two or three. 鈥淪ome archaeologists believe it was common for children to be malnourished at this age, when the mother has another child, but we have never seen these defects in dentine before,鈥� says Arenholt-Bindslev. The teeth are also severely worn from chewing grit and rough food. Although there was little sign of decay, the CT scans revealed an abscess that had not been spotted in the 1950s. And it was clear that the man had suffered a blow to his front teeth, with one tooth missing and the one next to it cracked. 鈥淚t probably hurt very much when he was punched,鈥� she says, 鈥渂ut the bone was healed, so it happened about a year before he died.鈥�
One of the most interesting and controversial features of this bog body was the contents of his stomach. Half a litre of brown sludge was flushed out of him in the 1950s and stored at the museum. At the time, it was analysed by a Danish archaeobotanist, Hans Helb忙k, who identified various cereal and weed seeds, as well as the hallucinogenic ergot fungus, which infects barley and other grasses. 鈥淗elb忙k picked randomly through the stuff, he didn鈥檛 quantify the constituents,鈥� says David Earle Robinson, from the National Museum of Denmark, who oversaw the reanalysis of the stomach contents. 鈥淲e didn鈥檛 know how much ergot there was.鈥�
The new analysis shows that, rather than being a ritual meal spiked with large quantities of hallucinogen, Grauballe Man鈥檚 last food was just poor quality fare, typical for the time. 鈥淭he combination of weed seeds and cereals fits with finds from Iron Age granaries,鈥� says Earle Robinson. 鈥淚t was probably just what was available at the end of the winter 鈥� the bottom of the barrel, so to speak.鈥� And the ergot? The quantity falls within current European Union safety standards, so the meal is unlikely to have affected Grauballe Man鈥檚 mental state.
As for the timing of his death, ingenious work on his hair, carried out by Andy Wilson from the University of Bradford, adds to the evidence that he died in late winter. The ratios of different isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in a person鈥檚 hair tell you about their diet, since foodstuffs contain characteristic proportions of these (快猫短视频, 12 December 1998, p 34). So, for example, the hair of a vegetarian will have less carbon-13 and less nitrogen-15 than that of a meat-eater. Wilson discovered two distinct isotopic signatures along the length of Grauballe Man鈥檚 hair, with the end nearest the root showing signs of a diet lower in plants than the tip of the hair. 鈥淭his suggests he was killed at a time when seasonal fruit and vegetables were lacking,鈥� says Wilson.
The game鈥檚 not up
Although Grauballe Man has given up some of his secrets, plenty remains unknown. 鈥淲e were not able to get any of his DNA,鈥� Asingh laments. The acidic peat environment is very detrimental to DNA preservation. 鈥淏ut we will try again. There is no hurry,鈥� she adds, pointing out that it may be a couple of decades before we know enough about the human genome to unleash the full potential of ancient DNA.
Even so, the new studies have shed more light on Grauballe Man鈥檚 life and death. In particular, it seems that he was not killed in so many ways, or as bizarrely, as was thought 鈥� he was not hallucinating, and nor was he hit on the head. It could be the first indication that ritualised bog killings were not as gruesome as we once thought. The Roman poet Lucan in the 1st century AD wrote of human sacrifices to three Gaulish Gods, and scholars have linked these to the triple death apparently suffered by some bog bodies. 鈥淏ut there are not that many examples of multiple death,鈥� says Wijnand van der Sanden, a leading bog-body expert from Drenthe in the Netherlands. 鈥淢ost of the bodies were found long ago and are dried out and deformed. Cuts that were interpreted as stab wounds might have been made during the discovery of the body.鈥� Grauballe Man was only killed 鈥渙nce鈥� after all. 鈥淧erhaps if you looked again at the other bog bodies you would find the same,鈥� Asingh speculates.
And researchers are looking. The team of doctors and scientists who worked on Grauballe Man were so inspired that they are now studying Denmark鈥檚 other fantastic bog body, the Tollund Man. They have already taken 10,000 CT images of his head, and used an endoscope to look at his brain, which is perfectly preserved. 鈥淧erhaps one day we will be able to extract DNA from that brain,鈥� says Christian Fischer, director of the Silkeborg Museum, where Tollund Man is held.
This is undoubtedly the future for bog-body research. 鈥淧eat-cutting these days is by huge machines that quickly destroy a body,鈥� says van der Sanden, 鈥渟o there are unlikely to be any new finds.鈥� That makes the existing mummies more precious than ever, and their reanalysing with modern techniques the only way to learn more about this gruesome part of history.
The Danish team is full of enthusiasm for the task. Last month they began scanning two more bog bodies from the National Museum in Copenhagen. And Lynnerup believes all the bog bodies held in museums should be reanalysed and catalogued with modern imaging. 鈥淲hat we have created is a digital archive,鈥� he enthuses. Who knows how it might be used in the future?