The Bog Bodies of Northern Europe

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have been carefully excavated and preserved, so that the circumstances surrounding their death and unusual burial could be studied in detail. Those bodies have provided the archaeologists and scholars with a lot of information but rather than lead to any uniform conclusion, they have sparked much debate and speculation. The bog bodies were subjected to burial practice that differed from the common one in the Iron Age. A society which usually cremated its dead must have had a serious reason to treat the bog bodies differently. Apart from that, there is hardly a common pattern between them. Some features appear in a number of finds and usually they are taken into consideration when trying to explain who the bog people were and why they met such an end. Those common features though apply to a very limited number of finds. That is why initially researchers had to turn to textual sources in order to put the bog bodies in some kind of comprehensive context. Unfortunately, the written ...

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once again that both of them are based on the number of well-studied finds, and they not necessarily need to apply to all of the bog bodies. In order to understand how the two theories formed, we need to look at the written evidence as well as what researchers concluded from studying the bodies themselves and see how it combines to give us a clearer picture of the world the Iron Age bog people lived and died in.

What exists as literally sources of life in Iron Age North-West Europe is rather scanty and often of questionable reliability – the accounts were either not contemporary, or not first-hand, or both. Nevertheless, the closest we get to a contemporary description of the Iron Age ...

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