A New Bog Body: “The Girl of the Uchter Moor”
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There are a number of well-known bog bodies; the most recent, and the one we have the best data on, is Lindow Man. But recently a body was found in a peat bog in in the town of Uchte, in Lower Saxony (that’s in the northern part of Germany). Peat bogs are now mined with heavy machinery which remove blocks of peat for fuel. That means that bog finds, usually the remnants of Iron Age sacrifices, of humans as well as objects, are damaged. In this case, the bog has given up the preserved body of a young girl between 16 and 20, committed to the bog about 650 BC, earlier than both Lindow Man (between AD 20 and 90) and Denmark’s Tollund man (c. 350 B. C.).
The full article about “The Girl of the Uchter Moor,” as journalists are already calling this latest bog body, is here; there’s a lot more data to come, I’m sure. It’s a shame the body is in pieces—nonetheless, we might still learn how she died, whether she was killed as a sacrifice, and perhaps data about how she lived, based on things like her tooth enamel and clothing.
