Grauballe Man

OVERVIEW

Grauballe Man is an Iron Age bog body found on 26 April 1952 in a peat bog near the village of Grauballe in Jutland. He dates to between 321 and 261 BC, in the early Germanic Iron Age, and is one of the best-preserved bog bodies ever found: skin, hair and internal soft tissue survive, making him among the most intensively studied human remains from prehistoric Europe.

HISTORY

He was found by peat diggers. One of them, Tage Busk Sørensen, put his spade into something he knew was not peat; as they uncovered more, a head appeared out of the ground. The local postman, passing, fetched the doctor and an amateur archaeologist, Ulrik Balslev.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

He died from a single deep cut to the throat that severed the trachea and the oesophagus. His naked body was put into the bog, where cool, acidic, oxygen-poor water preserved it for more than two thousand years. The circumstances remain uncertain: archaeologists have read it as an execution, a judicial punishment, or a human sacrifice, and the disagreement is part of a wider argument about violence and ritual in Iron Age northern Europe. Two bodies, two miles and sixty years apart, both killed deliberately and both placed in water — the entry records the pattern as much as the man.

VISITING

The body is on permanent display at Moesgaard Museum outside Aarhus. The find site at Nebelgård Fen is ordinary farmland and bog.