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 Manchester 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 interpretations’. Stuart notes that much of the information is tucked away in folders or sound booths and worries that some visitors might leave thinking 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.
Filed under: Lindow Man Exhibition
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
