What was tollund mans job

However, people did eat other kinds of food, too. When cultivating the fields the iron-age farmer used an ard — a special kind of plough, pulled by oxen. He had cows, sheep, goats, pigs and horses, and the dog was his trusted companion. People worshipped many gods, but we do not know for certain exactly who the gods were. Sacrifices were made to the gods in the bogs in order to stay on good terms with them. Usually the sacrifices were earthenware vessels containing food, but also livestock or parts of the livestock was sacrificed.

Maybe they carried out special celebrations and rituals in honour of the gods. Discoveries of bog bodies are, among other things, interpreted as human sacrifice. When somebody died in the Early Iron Age, the body was cremated in the funeral pyre. Ashes, bones and grave gifts were placed in an urn and buried. Why did Tollund Man have to die? Excavation, investigation and conservation What did Tollund Man look like when he was found?

When did Tollund Man die? Under Gratis. Lokalarkiv Blicheregnen Tirs: kl. Under 30 kr. Welcome to the story about Tollund Man On May 8, the police in Silkeborg received an alarming message. A body was found in the bog but fortunately it was old. Apparently, this happens frequently. What really gets you is his lovely face with its closed eyes and lightly stubbled chin. It is disconcertingly peaceful for someone who died so violently.

Reluctant perhaps, but not altogether unwilling. Where did you come from? How did you live? Who murdered you and why? But the way the researchers ask the questions, using new forensic techniques like dual-energy CT scanners and strontium tests, is getting more sophisticated all the time. To the people who put him there, a bog was a special place. While most of Northern Europe lay under a thick canopy of forest, bogs did not.

Half earth, half water and open to the heavens, they were borderlands to the beyond. They were fairies. Today we go about things entirely differently. The questions go on and on. Lately, Tollund Man has been enjoying a particularly hectic afterlife. In , he was sent to the Natural History Museum in Paris to run his feet through a microCT scan normally used for fossils.

By analyzing how minute quantities of strontium differ along a single strand, a researcher in Copenhagen hopes to assemble a road map of all the places Tollund Man traveled in his lifetime. But his age makes him an outlier. Radiocarbon dating tells us that the greater number of bog bodies went into the moss some time in the Iron Age between roughly B.

The best-preserved bodies were all found in raised bogs, which form in basins where poor drainage leaves the ground waterlogged and slows plant decay.

Over thousands of years, layers of sphagnum moss accumulate, eventually forming a dome fed entirely by rainwater. A raised bog contains few minerals and very little oxygen, but lots of acid. Add in low Northern European temperatures, and you have a wonderful refrigerator for conserving dead humans. A body placed here decomposes extremely slowly. As the sphagnum moss dies, it releases a carbohydrate polymer called sphagnan. It binds nitrogen, halting growth of bacteria and further mummifying the corpse.

This helps to explain why, after a thousand or so years of this treatment, a corpse ends up looking like a squished rubber doll. Nobody can say for sure whether the people who buried the bodies in the bog knew that the sphagnum moss would keep those bodies intact.

It appears highly unlikely—how would they? Still, it is tempting to think so, since it fits so perfectly the ritualistic function of bog bodies, perhaps regarded as emissaries to the afterworld. Along with wooden and bronze vessels, weapons and other objects consecrated to the gods, there was also an edible waxy substance made out of dairy or meat. Just this past summer, a turf-cutter found a pound hunk of bog butter in County Meath, Ireland. It is thought to be 2, years old, and while it smells pretty funky, this Iron Age comestible would apparently work just fine spread on 21st-century toast.

Like the vessels and weapons, bog butter may have been destined for the gods, but scholars are just as likely to believe that the people who put it there were simply preserving it for later. And if they knew a bog would do this for butter, why not the human body too?

Much of what we know about bog bodies amounts to little more than guesswork and informed conjecture. The Bronze and Iron Age communities from which they come had no written language.

Nearly all appear to have been killed, many with such savagery that it lends an air of grim purposefulness to their deaths. Some victims may have been murdered more than once in several different ways. Scholars have come to call this overkilling, and it understandably provokes no end of speculation.

We may never get a clear answer, and it now seems unlikely that a single explanation can ever fit all the victims. But the question keeps gnawing at us and gives bog bodies their clammy grip on the imagination. For some strange reason, we identify. They are so alarmingly normal, these bog folk. You think, there but for the grace of the goddess went I. Seamus Heaney felt it, and wrote a haunting and melancholy series of poems inspired by the bog bodies. Before that, bodies found in bogs were often given a quick reburial in the local churchyard.

To the extent that peat still gets cut at all—environmentalists oppose peat extraction in these fragile ecosystems—the job now falls to large machines that often grind up what might have emerged whole from the slow working of a hand spade.

The search for the origins of bog bodies and their secrets goes back a fairly long way, too.