What We Do and Don’t Learn from Bog Bodies
By Giulia Alvarez-Katz
Bog bodies are, visually, rather striking, having been preserved, some in almost perfect condition, in the highly alkaline waters of a peat bog. This particularly Northern European alkalinity, among some other chemical conditions, preserves human bodies more wholly than essentially any other form of mummification. Photo by Chocho8, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
It began rather innocuously with an Eyewitness picture book about mummies—a perfect gift for child who, like many others before and after her, was plagued by a fixation on Ancient Egypt. The book naturally featured those Egyptian mummies I was so familiar with, but also included photographs of several other kinds. I turned a fateful page to the face that would forever live in my memory: Tollund Man. This was a naturally preserved cadaver, known as a “bog body.”
These mummies are, visually, rather striking, having been preserved, some in almost perfect condition, in the highly alkaline waters of a peat bog. This particularly Northern European alkalinity, among some other chemical conditions, preserves human bodies more wholly than essentially any other form of mummification. Where Egyptians disemboweled, peat bogs pickled.
The majority of bog bodies date to the Iron Age, a time when Europe was positively drowning in peat bogs. There are many, sometimes contradicting, theories as to why people were buried in peat bogs, but one thing these early Northern Europeans seemed to believe was that bogs were a sort of liminal space between Earth and some other realm. I don’t entirely disagree.
The Tollund Man quickly became my favorite of the bog bodies. There is a strange serenity in his face. I like his outfit. Most naturally occurring mummies lose their clothes over their thousand-year slumbers, but peat bogs are capable of preserving skin, nails, hair, wool and leather (all of which contain keratin, which doesn’t seem to enjoy degrading in highly alkaline conditions). This kind of preservation results in eerily lifelike cadavers, whose faces feel very present.
My perverse desire to know more of him didn’t fade with age. I found myself thinking of him in moments that surprised me. A nutritional anthropology class (particularly the lesson about how bone structure changed our species’ relationship with speech and cooking) led to questions about what one could learn from the body of such a well-preserved person, especially about the food he and his contemporaries ate.
Tollund Man lived in a time that predates written record. Without visual or written evidence of food habits, food historians are forced to identify the truth using archeological puzzle pieces. Sometimes you’re lucky and unearth an entire kitchen, and what survives reveals key information about how people in that period cooked. Tools, structures and vessels that suggest the use of certain cooking techniques; bones and plant fragments that indicate what was eaten and how it may have been prepared. More cultural questions like food’s presentation, what it’s served with may be lost in time. Later periods in history offer us art, illustrations and texts that describe how food was served. We don’t have much of that from this period.
So, we combine what we know about ingredients and technique and pair it with evidence of the meal after it’s been consumed. There are two ways to find post-consumption evidence—in latrines or by examining the guts of Iron Age cadavers. Tollund Man didn’t know how important his last meal would become, how much it would reveal about how he and his contemporaries ate. Because this knowledge is so valuable (and so rare), Tollund Man and other bog bodies have been examined more than once.
In 1951, Danish scientists examined Tollund Man’s stomach and intestinal tract to understand what his last meal may have been. Forensic analysis was still relatively new, but the quality of preservation of bog bodies meant at least some examination could be achieved, even with the methods of the time. They found plant macrofossils, which are preserved plant remains visible to the naked eye, like seeds, leaves and needle/cone/stem debris. They’re used in an archeological context to identify plants in a given historical environment. Here, the environment is Tollund Man’s belly and presumably his kitchen. Those macrofossils included cereal grains and seeds from wild plants, both whole and fragmented. They then identified several of the wild seeds and the majority of the grain content, and concluded that Tollund Man’s last meal was a barley, flax and wild-seed porridge. Given the fact that barley porridge is a very old Danish dish, this conclusion seems reasonable.
The 2021 re-examination of these gut contents elaborated quite a bit more on these initial discoveries, using contemporary methods to clarify the exact type and proportion of wild seeds in the porridge as well as looking for protein, parasite and steroid contents to see if any animal products were also consumed.
I mentioned before that bogs are associated with magic, with the other side. There is plenty of evidence that Tollund Man and some other bog bodies were indeed ritual sacrifices, or something like that. The discovery of these wild seeds was interpreted as more evidence supporting that theory, and the later examination sought to identify any more ingredients not typically found in barley porridge recipes that could indicate the same. The noose around his neck and the fact he was placed in a sleeping position certainly supported this hypothesis; traditional burial in this era was cremation on dry land. But the seeds identified in his gut in 1951 aren’t known today for being medicinally (or magically, as the two are deeply intertwined) valuable.
They did a second macrofossil analysis and agreed with the ’51 study that the porridge was mostly barley, and in smaller proportions (9 percent and 5 percent, respectively) included pale persicaria and flax. Any other species they identified accounted for less than 1% of the total, and were all wild seeds. They also found charcoal, sand grains and the type of carbonized food bits that stick to the pan in this gut sample. With this evidence they concluded that threshing waste was included in the barley porridge.
If you’re like me, you might be unfamiliar with threshing waste. To explain it as succinctly as I can, when you process grains to be consumed, you separate the grain from the chaff, or the inedible seed skin. The final step in this process according to archaeobotanical evidence collected by Overbygård [c] was a sifting process, which removed small weed seeds and other impurities. Therefore, the inclusion of sand and wild seeds seems to indicate that threshing waste was used in this porridge.
Analysis of Grauballe Man also found similar evidence of threshing waste in his gut, which is what leads many to conclude these bog bodies are ritual sacrifices. That these wild seeds were ground before cooking only further supports that theory. I thought at this point the conclusion was a bit of a stretch. I imagined the inclusion of threshing waste was more likely a way to stretch a meal in a time of famine, but they accounted for that theory.
The 1951 study asserted that Tollund Man consumed no animal products, but the 2021 analysis proved otherwise. They examined non-pollen palynomorphs (NPPs), which are remains of organisms that represent a memory of environmental conditions in the past. These include bacteria, algae, worms, spores. They show us evidence of a historical environment like plant macrofossils do, but in more microscopic detail. The NPPs found in Tollund Man’s gut gave us a much clearer view of his last meal: 63 percent of the NPPs were microscopic plant fragments (mainly barley and flax), and 22 percent were parasite eggs, which indicate consumption of animal products.
To confirm that Tollund Man had eaten animal products immediately before his death, the 2021 study also analyzed steroid biomarkers levels in his body. Levels of steroids in the body are evidence of one’s diet in general, but also of the contents of the last meal; presence of cholesterol and coprostanol indicate that cholesterol conversion has taken place in the gut. While this can be the result of the cholesterol one has in their body and not necessarily of consumption, the study confirmed via zoosterol levels that Tollund Man’s last meal did indeed contain plant and animal (cholesterol-containing) foods.
They further confirmed that the cholesterol-containing food he ate was a fatty fish, because they identified five peptides in the protein analysis that are unique to bony fish. The fact that his meal contained animal products and that the porridge itself, threshing waste included, was quite nutritionally rich for the period, doesn’t suggest that there was a severe food shortage. The 2021 study hypothesizes that maybe the seeds in the threshing waste were added for nutritional value or for flavor. They hope to analyze more bog bodies to better understand this threshing waste aspect specifically. The fish, too, has revealed puzzling questions.
The lipid content in his gut helped specify that it was likely a fatty fish like eel. There is presence of algae in Tollund Man that could mean one of a few things: that the fish itself was cooked in the porridge, that the porridge was cooked in water from a lake or that Tollund Man drank the lake water. We have no real way of knowing which of these is correct, but I surmise that we can at least try and figure out if cooking fish with or in porridge is something anyone in Denmark has ever done. I know, at least, that barley porridge is still a thing.
These days, barley porridge is considered a sort of peasant dish. Fair enough, if it was eaten as early as the Iron Age. In Denmark, savory porridge isn’t the most fashionable thing in the world, but it used to be. There is evidence that fish was eaten alongside barley porridge in the last century or so, but not necessarily that they were ever cooked together. These days, barley porridge, byggrynsgrøt in Danish, is treated like oatmeal; Tiktok is full of byggrynsgrøt recipes that include fruit, honey, nuts and other sweet breakfast-y additions. It took quite a bit of searching to find modern savory barley porridge recipes, and a lot of them were more soupy than anything. Perhaps Tollund Man’s porridge was very soupy! We just don’t know. These details are sadly what we’re missing. In any case, it seems if we’re talking modern byggrynsgrøt, it looks like brunch more than anything else.
Savory porridges are not uncommon, and neither are porridges that include fish, but if there ever were a Danish fish porridge tradition, it has changed and faded with time. Porridge consumption is fairly common across the world, and what we know about worldwide Iron Age diets does indicate porridge was a quasi-universal dish. While porridge itself isn’t lost to time, many of these ancient recipes are. Just because fish isn’t cooked in porridge in today’s Denmark doesn’t necessarily mean it never was. But as far as late 2022 goes, we’re still not sure.
I’ve got a Google Alert set up for bog body gut content updates, and I hope that by now maybe you’re compelled to have one, too. The less we know about something, the more it seems we’re driven to learn about it. How very human. Kind of like porridge.
