The Peat also Preserves Women and Children
Amongst the solitary bodies found scattered across the peat bogs of Europe are a number of adult women. The oldest female bog body is Luttra woman, a Scandinavian woman dating from the Copper Age between 3105 and 2935 BC. Luttra woman was healthy when she died. Although most of her soft tissues have gone, her stomach remained, preserving her last meal of raspberries, suggesting she died in late summer.
Luttra woman was around 20-25 years old when she died. Some of the female bog bodies, however, were younger. When she died in the Netherlands sometime between 54BC and 128AD, Yde girl was only sixteen years old. However, the youngest bog body was Rost Girl from Germany. Discovered in 1926, she died around 200BC when she was just three years old. Her remains were lost during the Second World War, so no further information is known about her death. However, other, if slightly older children have also been found in the bogs.
Kayhausen boy was between 7-8 years of age when he was discovered in a bog in Lower Saxony, Germany. The child suffered from an infected hip that would have disabled him. His end was not kind. Although he was wrapped in a woolen shawl and the remains of a calfskin cloak before burial in the bog, someone had stabbed Kayhausen boy to death.
Kayhausen’s death has only ever been seen as tragic. However, some of the female bodies have been ‘romanticized,’ with their remains being linked to myths and legends until science revealed the truth. Peat cutters discovered the well-preserved body of Haraldskjaer woman in 1835. The body was that of a well-preserved middle-aged woman, with high cheekbones and long dark hair who had been clamped to the bog by staves through her knees and elbows.
Imagination immediately took over. Danish Historian Niels Matthias Peterson declared the body to be that of the legendary Queen Gunhild of Norway who had died in the tenth century. Gunhild had reputedly married King Harald of Denmark but no sooner had she arrived at her new kingdom; she was killed by him for her cruel, domineering ways. However, once the body was dated, it became clear that the woman could not be Queen Gunhild– because she had died in 490BC.
The reanalysis of Haraldskjaer woman also revealed other interesting information about her life. For she had a connection with ‘foreign’ places- as did other bog bodies.