Lindow Manchester

Several months after the opening, a review of Lindow Man A Bog Body Mystery has appeared in this month’s (July) Museums Journal. Written by Stuart Burch, who is a lecturer in museum studies at Nottingham Trent University, the review is perceptive, thoughtful and fair in its criticism. The reviewer picks up on the fact that human remains are a subject of quite intense debate in museums at the moment and says it is ‘to the Mancheter museum’s enormous credit that it has sought to tackle these issues whilst stressing there are no “right” answers… it is impossible to accuse this exhibition of being simplistic or shallow. It manages to convey intellectualy challenging information and balances often contradictory inteprreations’. Stuart notes that much of the information is tucked away in folders or sound booths and worries that some visitors might leavethinking there was nothing to see. He suggests placing a visitor assistant at the entrance to the exhibition to help visitors. In fact this is one of the things that we looked at recently when we evaluated the exhibition and proposed some improvements. One of them was to make sure our Visitor Services Assistants engaged with visitors more directly about the exhibition, and to explain why it was presented in this way. Another planned improvement is to re-write and re-position the introduction to the exhibition, again to help visitors orient themselves. The reviewer says this isn’t a perfect exhibition - though he says he thinks it is excellent - but then there is no such thing as a perfect exhibition. All are of their time, representing the pre-occupations of the moment, contingent and not definitive (is that perhaps why some of our visitors have struggled with the exhibition, because they expect museums to tell them objective facts?). Reading out a selection of comments from the review to colleagues at the diary meeting last Wednesday I felt a real sense of pride that another museum professional had understood what we were about. Read the full interview in the Museums Journal for July (pages 50-51). If you are a member you can access the review electronically at this address - http://www.museumsassociation.org/ma/7758.

A couple of months ago I gave a talk about Lindow Man and sacrificial theory. After the talk one of the audience came and introduced himself to me as J.B.Bourke, one of the co-authors of the 1986 report  Lindow Man the Body in the Bog. We arranged to meet again to discuss a number of points raised in my talk and  yesterday we had a very interesting discussion about Lindow Man and the forensic evidence. Mr Bourke is a fully qualified trained surgeon and worked for the Department of Surgery, University Hospital, Nottingham before he retired. One of the unanswered questions from my talk was whether it was likely more bodies would come to light at Lindow Moss. Whilst the late Iron Age and Roman peat horizons have been extracted it is not inconceivable that bodies from these periods will turn up in lower (archaeologically earlier) levels. Van der Sanden in his authoritative survey of bog bodies Through Nature to Eternity refers to earlier bog bodies, of Neolithic and even Mesolithic date, going back some 10,000 years. The latter are more likely to be accidental drownings than ritual deposits. 

Mr Bourke joined the forensic team led by Don Brothwell at the British Museum within a few weeks of Lindow Man’s discovery.  Mr Bourke believes the evidence supports garrotting. This would have ended Lindow Man’s life instantaneously, whilst the blow to the head would have killed him within half an hour. Though other experts have interpreted the forensic evidence differently, it is not contested that Lindow Man went into the bog very quickly after his death because there were no insects that feed upon corpses associated with his body.

Mr Bourke also shed light on whether Lindow Man was the clothed or naked when he entered the bog. When you see him on display at the Manchester Museum, Lindow Man’s body is naked but for a fox skin arm band around his upper left arm but it has been suggested that he might have been wearing linen clothing, which would have dissolved in the acidic water. Mr Bourke thinks it unlikely Lindow Man would have been so well-preserved if he had been wearing clothes, even linen garments, because the material would have shielded bacteria on the body from the antiseptic water and enabled decomposition to set in. Mr Bourke told me of two books about the Continental bog body evidence: - Grauballe Man-An Iron Age Bog Body Revisited by Pauline Asingh and Niels Lynnerup (ISBN 978-87-88415-29-2), 2007; and, The Scientific Study of Mummies by Arthur C. Aufderheide (ISBN 0 521 81826 5), Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Talking to Mr Bourke reminded me that the techniques available for forensic study were in their infancy over 20 years ago and that some of the  technology used in the study of Lindow Man was hard to find. Barts Hospital had the only CT scanner wide enough to take Lindow Man’s body and Wembley was the only place for an MRI scan at that time. Nowadays we more or less take this technology for granted. This reminds me that some months ago we talked about setting up a Collective Conversation to explore Lindow Man’s impact on the awareness of environmental  archaeology in the North West. This fascinating discussion makes me think we should  extend the conversation and include forensics too.

When we were working on the Lindow Man exhibition last year, at one point I got very interested in poetry and the way archaeological discoveries often inspire poets. One has only to think about Seamus Heaney and the bog poems for example. For various reasons we didn’t pursue the poetry angle but now there’s a chance to look at poetry again.

A lady called Joan Poulson has contacted the Manchester Museum about the Lindow Man exhibition. She expresses mixed feelings about showing the remains of the man she knows as Pete. He has been one of her four favourite ‘exhibits’ in the British Museum for many years and in fact she rarely goes to London without paying him a visit. Joan is intending to visit the Museum soon.  Joan has built up her own story around this man and was a little worried to find out Pete was displayed at another museum. She says she was relieved to find out that the Manchester Museum aims to treat human remains with respect & dignity.  Joan has been working on a poem called ‘Relics’ which focuses on Lindow Man. Two years ago, in 2005, it was entered in a national poetry competition organised by Scintilla (the annual literary journal) and it came 2nd. Joan has very kindly allowed us to post it on the website. My sincerest thanks to Joan for agreeing for us to reproduce her poem here. 

Joan Poulson

Some more Collective Conversations dealing with Lindow Man have been posted recently on You Tube.

The idea of the Collective Conversations project is to facilitate interactions between individuals or groups and objects in the Manchester Museum collections, to film them and make them available on the internet. The idea is to allow participants to share new and meaningful insights about the objects with a wider audience and stimualte further discussion.

The recently recorded conversations include an interview with Andy Mould, who found Lindow Man’s leg on a conveyor belt in August 1984, and an interview with Neville Jones, a retired member of Cheshire C.I.D. and Mr Robert Connolly of the Department of Human Anatomy of the University of Liverpool.

If you are interested in seeing more of our videos on Youtube look up;

http://www.youtube.com/user/ManchesterMuseum

Meanwhile the public programmes associate with Lindow Man are continuing. On Saturday I went out to East Manchester with Pippa, who is Schools Outreach Co-ordinator here at the Museum, and Erin, one of volunteers to support a Refugee Week festival. We took the Lindow Man handling objects with us, including Roman pottery, jewellery and replica clothing and despite the rain we spoke to 120 people. There were stalls, music and dancing and a world food lunch.

Many people we spoke to were amazed by the quality and age of the objects. One lady from Ethiopia immediately recognized a spiindle whorl used for making thread to make cloth. Our example dated from the Iron Age but she was very familiar with objects like this. That sense of continuity and finding links between objects in the collections and people is a real pleasure.

Saturday 3rd May was Lindow Man Big Saturday, one of the days when we organize family friendly events and activities in the Museum. I worked on the object handling table. Visitors could see and hold a range of Iron Age and Roman artefacts including a horse bridle bit, a plough tip, Roman coins, hair pins, brooches, iron nails and a range of pottery. We also displayed the recently discovered  altar , the first Roman inscription from Manchester in 150 years and, amazingly, still only the second example of an inscription naming an individual from the settlement.

Whilst doing my stint at the handling table I spoke to a gentleman who had come to review the Lindow Man exhibition for Antiquity. He was very interested in how we had gone about putting the exhibition together, the public consultation, and the multiple voices approach.  Some visitors have come to the exhibition with a preconception of what the Lindow Man exhibition should be about, but given all the questions raised about the interpretation of Lindow Man it seemed to us to be honest to say there is much that we just don’t know. People coming to the museum in the expectation of finding a single story or interpretation are bound to be disappointed but that is what life is like. It’s messy and complicated. CSI on television may find the guilty party every episode. With Lindow Man it really is a question of different people interpreting the evidence in different ways. 

Yesterday I gave a talk about using Rene Girard’s Mimetic or Sacrificial Theory to make sense of Lindow Man as part of the Museum’s Showcase seminar series. At the end a gentleman in the audience complimented us on the exhibition and asked a very interesting question about the implications of moving away from the “single authoritative voice” approach. Is it a ‘cop out’? Is it saying ‘anything goes’? I don’t believe so. There is obviously a lot of variety in the possible responses on a spectrum that runs from ’single authoritative voice’ to ‘anything goes’. The Museum as an organization has a lot of control over what appears in the exhibition but we decide in collaboration with contributors.  That seems to be an adult and mature way forward.

Cat (Lead Educator, Secondary Humanities) came to see me with some of the responses to the Lindow Man teaching session that I mentioned in a recent blog. Abraham Moss High School came to the Museum last week and their students really enjoyed “the Verdict”, the courtroom scenario in which groups of  kids had to argue a particular interpretation of what happened to Lindow Man. These are some of their responses: -

“It was gripping and exciting”

“I didn’t realise it would be this challenging”

“I didn’t realise all of the facts and opinions”

“I didn’t realise I was gonna become a lawyer”

“I hope that we get to do something like this again”

“By the end I was feeling very proud and felt I had accomplished something”

“At the beginning I didn’t know a thing about Lindow Man and didn’t expect this to be so interesting. By the end I didn’t know that time went so fast and I was fully involved”

“I ended up knowing a lot about him”

“I hope I can do it again”

 Teacher’s comment: - “I was amazed to see the level of concentration  & that it was sustained. FAB, thorough, well thought-out & disciplined”

This is really encouraging because the kids seem to have got the point of the exhibition:- to question  and debate the assumptions we make about his body by looking at Lindow Man from different perspectives, using different interpretations of what happened to him. They clearly enjoyed the adversarial setting of a courtroom to debate the different theories. The ritual sacrifice argument won the day but other groups did well too. It’s enshrined within the National Curriculum that students should question and debate the nature of the evidence and not be spoon-fed. “The Verdict” seems to have succeeded on both counts.

A fortnight on and the comments are still coming in. Some say we have covered the various themes in a simplistic way but one of the Museum’s target audiences is families with young children so we wanted to make the text and ideas accessible. If people want to delve into things in more detail, however,  there is more information in supporting files and transcripts of the interviews and in the associated programme of events and activities and the education programme.

I believe there is some interesting material in the exhibition. Melanie Giles raises the possibility that the story of Excalibur from Arthurian legend may have originated in discoveries of ancient artefacts in watery places. Things like swords were not understood as material evidence of people who’d lived centuries before, but weapons from a different world entirely, the world of the spirits. It made them magical. J.D.Hill talks about the significance of water birds on the Wandsworth shield and the St Albans knife. Lakes, pools, rivers and springs were interfaces with a different world and the creatures that live in that environment were sacred and magical by association, hence their appearance on high status votive metalwork. The relatively modest bird figurines we found in our own collection may be further evidence of these prehistoric beliefs.  New approaches like this give the objects new significance. 

Susan’s photograph of the Lindow School choir and her repatriation t-shirt document Lindow Man’s social impact, a subject interesting in its own right.  When J.D. showed me his wonderful “Excalibur” letter opener in his office at the British Museum I immediately asked if he’d consider lending it to the exhibition because it encapsulates so many of these stories: offerings of  metalwork in watery contexts, prehistoric ritual and belief and how those beliefs may have survived in myth and legend.

Myths and legend influenced one of the thinkers whose work I read in researching the exhibition: Rene Girard. Girard’s theory of  scapegoating may offer yet another avenue of research on Lindow Man and other discoveries at Lindow Moss. It may even help to make sense of the Alderley Edge wizard but that’s a story for another day.

Going into work on Monday morning was like coming downstairs to open your presents on Christmas morning when you are a child. The sense of anticipation, the excitement, the not knowing what to expect. Karen on reception told me how it had gone over the weekend: about 750 people per day and an amazing £1500 spent in the shop each day, which is great news.

After all the excitement of last week it is a relief to be able to sit down in my office without the phone ringing or having to deal with emails that need an urgent response. A number of people call into the office. One of them is Cat (Lead Educator, Secondary Humanities) who’s brought the Lindow Man debate “the Verdict” box in to show me. Cat has taken the Lindow Man evidence and turned it into a brilliant educational activity. This is part of the Manchester Museum’s learning programme designed to enable schoolchildren and students to get more out of the Lindow Man exhibition.

The kids will be given a box containing three sets of legal briefs and supporting evidence. They will be divided into three teams and have to show that Lindow Man was murdered, sacrificed or drowned. Each of the three teams have to present a case using the evidence and a panel of judges makes a decision - the verdict.

It’s amazing how impressive a simple thing like a piece of plastic mistletoe intended for the Christmas party market looks when put in a plastic jar and boxed as evidence. As Paul Newman isn’t appearing in this version of “the verdict” I guess there’ll be no puckering up! Even the dossiers have been tied with a purple ribbon for that authentic legal flavour.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how this works with the kids. With such imaginative  activities in the learning programme hopefully there’ll be no shortage of schools wanting to be involved.  I should say more about this in another Blog.

Lindow Man A Bog Body Mystery opened on Friday night, with over 500 people attending the special opening by Julian Richards. Julian fronts the Meet the Ancestors TV programme in which archaeologists and forensic scientists create a picture of someone who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago. I’ve never known so many people attend an opening event, which must be an indication of Lindow Man’s iconic status here in the North West.

I went in with the first visitors and it was fascinating to see their response to the exhibition. I’m not sure they knew what to make of it. Our comments board captured a selection of their views. Some people said it was “different”; some people liked the respectful approach; some hated the lighting; some liked the freedom of not seeing Lindow Man’s body if they didn’t want to; and one person didn’t understand why the Beano was one of the books available for visitors to browse. One visitor questioned why we’d included an interview with a Pagan (the “hippy Druid stuff”as it was referred to).

We’ll analyse all this feedback statistically throughout the year that Lindow Man is here but there’s already quite a body of information to look at. And Lindow Man himself? I’ve seen him at the British Museum and I have to say I find he has a far more powerful presence here, no doubt because we have a lot more space in which to create a context for him, where many more of his stories can be told. Standing next to his case on Friday afternoon being interviewed by BBC North West it felt quite eery. He seems to be more recognisable as a 3D human body in our case.

Only one day to go before the special preview before our formal opening and it’s all go. I spent most of the morning in the Media Support Unit getting some images from Christine Pemberton and Matthew Hyde’s Lindow and the Bog Warriors printed off. The museum volunteers are going to work with an  album containing these photographs. Last week we did some training with the volunteers and they were asking loads of interested but difficult to answer questions. I did the life and times of Lindow Man and early this week we looked at the objects they are going to present to  the public.

This afternoon I helped Pete fill the “Find out More” files  with Lindow Man related articles and newspaper cuttings. We are putting very short labels in the exhibition itself but more detailed information will be available for those who want it in the files. Nobody wants to see a “book on the wall” but with only 25-30 words per lable how can we convey the complexity, the nuances of what is known about Lindow Man? Well we put it in the ring binders and there’s a large print version for visually impaired visitors.

Tomorrow one of the last jobs will be to print off our extended labels. In some ways this has been the most interesting part of the exhibition. Free of the restrictions of word totals I can give free rein to whimsy, happily including information about mirrors such as the fine example from Aston, Herts., kindly lent to us by the British Museum, and a quote from Cold Mountain. In this novel set in the American Civil War, Nicole Kidman’s character, Ada Monroe, leans over a well and looks at the surface of the water reflected in her  mirror in the hope of seeing the future. Though she doesn’t understand it at the time she sees her lover walking towards her in the snow fatally wounded. What’s that to do with Lindow Man and the Iron Age? The decoration on Iron Age mirrors, such as  the example from Aston, evokes the visual confusion  felt by Ada trying to make sense of her vision in the well.

People in the Iron Age had a special reverence for water, often making votive deposits of metalwork or other objects or people to the deities of the place. Areas of open water such as would have existed at Lindow Moss would have reflected light like a mirror and represented a means of communication with another world if not the afterlife, in the same way Ada’s mirror offers glimpses of the future.  Must do this as a talk in our public events programme.