Travel, Trade, and Hair
Mesolithic bog people, such Koelbjerg man spent their entire life- and afterlife- in the same area. However, bodies such as Haraldskjaer woman prove that, by the iron age, people were moving much more freely. Strontium is an element present in the teeth and hair which can be used to pinpoint where a person lived during their lifetime by comparing levels in a human body to the known strontium levels of different areas. Teeth form in childhood and so can be used to determine where someone was born. However hair- especially if it is very long- can record different strontium levels to correspond with a person’s movements.
Haraldskjaer woman’s teeth confirmed that she was born and grew up in Denmark. However, her twenty-inch-long hair revealed a complete picture. For although she spent most of her life in Denmark, Haraldskaer woman moved to a more southerly area in the last years of her life- and only returned just before her death. Textiles found on top of her body confirm this. Two out of the three pieces found were local, but a third textile was of foreign origin.
Haraldskaer woman is not the only bog body to yield information about international links. Clonycavan Man was discovered in Ireland in 2003 and dates to a little later than Haraldskjaer woman; sometime between 392 and 201 BC. His hair was found dressed in a type of Iron Age hair gel made from vegetable fat and pine resin. This resin was not local; its source was southwest France or Spain- indicating that quite sophisticated trade links existed between areas previously assumed to be remote and detached from central and southern Europe during the period in question.
The bog bodies’ hairstyles can also be used to determine social standing- and confirm the reliability of the written accounts of outsiders. In the ’40s and ‘50s, two male bogs bodies named Osterby man and Datgen man respectively were discovered in the Schleswig-Holstein area of Germany. Both had hair styled in the Suebian knot; a hairstyle described by the Roman writer Tacitus in his Germania as the traditional hairstyle of free male warriors of the Suebian tribe.
Testing the bog bodies does not just yield information about their society. We can also learn how healthy they were as individuals- and what day-to-day afflictions even healthy people suffered.