Description

Known for his red hair, day-old stubble, and uncannily preserved two-thousand-year-old physique, Tollund Man—a mummified body discovered in 1950s Denmark—was an instant archaeological sensation. But he was not the first of his kind: recent history has resurrected from northern Europe’s bogs several men, women, and children who were deposited there as sacrifices in the early Iron Age and kept startlingly intact by the chemical properties of peat. In this remarkable account of their modern afterlives, Karin Sanders argues that the discovery of bog bodies began an extraordinary—and ongoing—cultural journey. 

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Sanders shows, these eerily preserved remains came alive in art and science as material metaphors for such concepts as trauma, nostalgia, and identity. Sigmund Freud, Joseph Beuys, Serge Vandercam, Seamus Heaney, and other major figures have used them to reconsider fundamental philosophical, literary, aesthetic, and scientific concerns. Exploring this intellectual spectrum, Sanders contends that the power of bog bodies to provoke such a wide range of responses is rooted in their unique status as both archeological artifacts and human beings. They emerge as corporeal time capsules that transcend archaeology to challenge our assumptions about what we can know about the past. By restoring them to the roster of cultural phenomena that force us to confront our ethical and aesthetic boundaries, Bodies in the Bog excavates anew the question of what it means to be human.

About the Author

Karin Sanders is professor of Scandinavian at the University of California, Berkeley.

Praise for Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination…

“A rare conjunction of brilliant research with lyrical feeling. At once gripping, enlightening, and deeply moving, this stunning book offers a mind-boggling trek across space and time, life and death, torment and ecstasy. By turns ventriloquist and taxidermist, Karin Sanders resurrects bog beings from the limbo of their burial. They are reborn through the curious eyes and creative hands of poets and painters, sculptors and scholars, as both saints and ghosts—like saints miraculously indestructible, like ghosts haunting us with eerie memories. And her fabulous bog bodies at length mirror ourselves. They are our own doppelgängers, doubles displaced from time immemorial.”—David Lowenthal, University College London

-David Lowenthal

“What a wonderful, wonderful book this is. I absolutely loved Bodies in the Bog and everything about it, from the thoughtful approach and beautiful writing to the well-contextualized discussions of bog bodies in psychology, poetry, art, museum display, and facial reconstruction. A truly interdisciplinary study clearly based on years of passionate research, it offers a rich and nuanced explanation of what makes these bodies so fascinating, appealing, and troubling.”—Stephanie Moser, University of Southampton

 


-Stephanie Moser

“For me, archaeology has its muses; in Karin Sanders’s hands, these muses are very much with us, for she understands archaeology in relation to the literature, the poetry, the historical trajectories of each and every find. In her study of bog people, Sanders has brought together many voices that are not usually in conversation, presenting a dramatically new set of interlocking perspectives—a new kaleidoscopic pattern. This book is a delight to read, a skillful and ingenious accomplishment, a dexterous weaving of new ideas about a much-debated phenomenon that has long sparked our imaginations.  What Sanders has done here makes me rejoice in what a creative mind can do, and in how readers will inevitably come away with all sorts of new understandings. Brava!”— Margaret Conkey, University of California, Berkeley

-Margaret Conkey