![]() “If you put a body in the bog, it would not decay - it would stay between the worlds of the living and the dead,” Aldhouse-Green said. Bogs were seen as gateways to another realm. The preservational properties of bogs were well known to people in the Iron Age - many archaeological objects from that time, including pieces of expensive pottery, were also deliberately deposited there - and it could be that the preservation of a bog body was intended to keep it from joining its ancestors. They were mummified in the bogs by the low oxygen levels, low temperatures and water turned acidic by the layers of decaying vegetation, or peat, that are found there. The Tollund Man is one of dozens of bog bodies from the Iron Age between about 2,500 and 1,500 years ago that have been found throughout Northern Europe. They also found he was suffering from several parasitic infections when he died, including tapeworms - probably from a regular diet of undercooked meat and contaminated water, Nielsen said. So that means that we could get more information out of it.”Īs well as revealing the clue of the threshing waste added to his last meal, the researchers found it was probably cooked in a clay pot - pieces of overcooked crust can be seen in the traces - and that he’d also eaten fish. “But now we have better microscopes, better ways of analyzing the material and new techniques. “Back in 1950, they only looked at the well preserved grains and seeds, and not the very fine fraction of the material,” Nielsen said. ![]() But the new study refines that initial examination with much improved archaeological techniques and instruments. The contents of the Tollund Man’s preserved intestines were examined soon after he was found. ![]() “Was it just an ordinary meal? Or was threshing waste something you only included when people were eating a ritual meal?” Nielsen said. That suggests it was part of “threshing waste” that was added to the porridge deliberately - perhaps as part of a ritual meal for those condemned to die by human sacrifice. The plant grows wild among barley crops, but evidence from Iron Age grain storage shows it was usually cleaned out as a weed during threshing. The seeds of pale persicaria are the clue to this Iron Age murder mystery, said archaeologist Nina Nielsen, the head of research at Denmark’s Silkeborg Museum and the lead author of the study published Tuesday. The suggestion that the Tollund Man was killed as a human sacrifice has now been reinforced by a study of the condemned man’s frugal last meal, made from a detailed investigation of the contents of his digestive tract: A porridge of barley, flax and pale persicaria.
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