Just been watching the Gardeners’ World programme on BBC1 and was appalled at the complacency of people who make use of peat in their gardens despite knowing that this is damaging a precious and vulnerable habitat. The presenter rehearsed the reasons why peat bogs are important, one of which was the archaeological. At one point the presenter got down in a trench to look at a peat section that went back to the Bronze Age. For me that represents a compelling reason not to use peat compost in gardens. Something that is potentially thousands of years old shouldn’t be extracted on an industrial scale to the detriment of the archaeological record and the wildlife. If this represents a loss to the economy what compensation is there in using the bogs for eco-tourism; and, if another Lindow Man came to light during sustainable extraction, what benefits might there be to the cultural economy? I have recently been thinking about how we might demonstrate a Lindow Man effect for the cultural economy of the North West. Surely that represents a wiser use of this resource than mindless, immoral extraction. No apologists for the peat industry will convince me otherwise.
Lindow Man book cover
Wendy in the Museum shop rang me late this afternoon saying that I probably woudn’t be interested and it was probably too late but that she had received a newly published book on Lindow Man. I took myself down to the shop and am now the proud owner of Jody Joy’s Lindow Man (The British Museum Press, 2009). The author needs no introduction to those of us who worked on the Lindow Man exhibition at the Manchester Museum. Jody is responsible for European Iron Age collections at the British Museum and gave us every assistance when we were preparing our exhibition Lindow Man a Bog Body Mystery.
Like other books in the series (which includes one on an Easter Island statue and the Gayer Anderson cat) this is a highly readable and beautifully illustrated account of the “artefact” in question. Indeed it is almost too well-illustrated with detailed views of Lindow Man’s body. It sets Lindow Man in the context of other discoveries at Lindow Moss, the contemporary murder investigation and the wider pattern of European bog bodies. Although radiocarbon dating showed the body to be ancient, Lindow Man’s death some time between 2 BC and AD 119 raises the question whether Lindow Man died in the Iron Age or some time after the Roman Conquest of northern Britain. Separate chapters discuss how Lindow Man was preserved, how he was investigated forensically and what he looked like. The account notes the more recently discovered Irish bog bodies and refers tantalizingly to the future analysis of Lindow Man’s hair, the kind of research, writes the author that is only possible if human remains are stored securely by museums…
Perhaps the most interesting part of this fascinating little book is the final chapter about reconstructing Lindow Man’s death. After giving the orthodox account of Lindow Man’s death, other interpretations, notably Robert Connolly’s critique, are given, but without reaching a definitive conclusion. And there is a brief discussion of Ronald Hutton’s challenge to previous accounts of Lindow Man’s death. Last but not least there are photographs of BM staff preparing Lindow Man for his temporary exhibition at the Manchester Museum. This book would have benefited from touching on the current debate about human remains in museums and the 1980s repatriation campaign to bring Lindow Man back to the North West but this being a British Museum publication, this omission is hardly surprising. All-in-all this is an attractive and highly readable little book that neatly summarizes the current state of knowldege about Britain’s best-preserved bog body. For £5 it represents excellent value.
The death of Lindow Man by Aoife Patterson
A couple of months ago student Aoife Patterson visited the Manchester Museum to find out more about the circumstances of Lindow Man’s death. She kindly let me post some of her early “work in progress” on the Blog and has just sent me image above in the graphic novel style. Aoife says she thinks the image is getting there but that it may need to have a more traditional illustrative influence. By this she means that it will be more pen and ink style and less computer orientated, because she feels at the moment it looks too mechanical and life less. But she is working on that. She says she understands that the garrotting may not have occurred but she is experimenting to see how the story works.
For me there’s a kind of Ralph Bakshi “Lord of the Rings” quality about the image, you know, the bits where they were running out of time and decided to do overlays of real live actors (not cartoon characters) acting out the scenes. I’m looking forward to seeing the next version and thanks to Aoife for sharing this with the Blog. Comments, as ever, are very welcome.
Manchester Histories Festival
Attended the Manchester Histories Festival on Saturday, where the Manchester Museum, the Youth Board and the Young Archaeologists Club had a stall. Anna Bunney, Curator of Public Programmes, suggested we move into the Banqueting Hall where there was more space. We set out the handling objects for Lindow Man and for several hours I chatted with visitors about the material, which dated from about the time of the late Iron Age and early Roman periods. We had a Samian bowl, some hairpins, a beautiful little safety pin type brooch, some melon beads and a replica of one of the Malpas gold armillae. Whilst the latter dates from later Bronze Age it made an impressive handling piece to support the Museum’s intepretation panel about treasures in the collection.
A good half of the people who came to our stall had already been to see the Lindow Man exhibition and others said they would definitely come and see him before the exhibition closes. As the new “Our City” gallery opens on 4th April and features the recently discovered Roman altar found in Manchester and the redisplayed skeleton of the Indian elephant, Maharaja, that makes two good reasons to visit the Manchester Museum over Easter.
In the afternoon I spoke to a group of students from the University of Cardiff who were staying in Manchester over the weekend. We looked at the exhbition and then had a chat in the Museum’s Kanaris theatre. Some of them liked what we’d done, others would have preferred it to have covered more of Lindow Man’s life and times.
Filed under: Lindow Man Exhibition
A recent enquiry took me to illustrations of bogs in the Atlas of Irish Rural Landscape, which mentions that the edges of bogland environments attracted marginalized people because turf was the poor person’s fuel.
This reminded me that back in the late 19th century William Norbury, in his article,“Lindow Common as a peat bog”, talked about what he called the ‘peculiar’ race of people who dwelt on the edges of the peat bogs. He felt such people were of a very ancient race, totally different from their neighbours and that they had had marked physical peculiarities and peculiar habits and ways of life.
They were often buck-stealers, poachers and fishermen. “Their handicrafts”, he said, pointed to them being “a primitive people”… “they are experts in using twigs or osiers, in making besoms from birch, also in making straw work, bee hives etc…. in fact in using all kinds of natural and ready products of the country. They were very sly and suspicious…apparently very harmless but not so safe as they appeared to be.” (pp. 71-72). Norbury compares the inhabitants of the mosses to the Euskarians or Turanians, i.e. the Basques.
Heavily laden as these comments are with value judgments (nowadays would making brooms be regarded as ‘primitive’? – rather the reverse I’d have thought!) and special pleading about Lindow Moss as a quiet backwater forgotten by the rest of the world, I fear these comments tell us more about Norbury than the people he purports to describe!
Matthew Hyde and Christine Pemberton explore the rich archive of social historical evidence associated with Lindow Moss. In the pages of their wonderful Lindow and the Bog Warriors the moss is a place where gypsies camp, where shanty town-like dwellings are constructed, where discharged soldiers come to live because they can use peat as fuel for heating and cooking… ‘The whole area was given a wide berth by respectable people’ write Hyde & Pemberton 2002: 65.
It is sobering to think that it was the murder of a prostitute and the discovery and dating of human remains that attracted archaeological interest to Lindow Moss. At that time the woman would have been regarded as living on the fringes of ‘respectable’ society. To use a current buzz word she and her husband were ‘liminal’ characters. The liminality that we perceive in the archaeological record, one could argue, continues or has continued pretty well until the present day.
Yesterday afternoon I saw the first drafts of reports on visitor feedback for the Lindow Man exhibition for the second two quarters of last year. The feedback has been compiled from visitors’ completed comments cards. For the period July to September 2008 806 cards were collected but 79 were rubbish, i.e. they had graffiti, doodles or other meaningless scribbling on them. The comments broadly cover two categories of information: views for and against the display of human remains and responses to the exhibition. The data was lumped together and, of the total comments, 52% of visitors wanted the bodies to be displayed.
But this is misleading because it confuses two categories of information: comments about whether or not human remains should be displayed and responses to the exhibition.
If we unpick the responses a far clearer picture emerges. 375 cards wanted human remains to be displayed, 37 were against. So out of a total of 412 cards, 375/412 x 100 or 91% were for. Compare this with the origianl figure of just 52% of “total comments” wanting the remains to be displayed.
If we look at the cards that record qualitative responses to the exhibition 191 were positive and 48 negative. So if we do the maths, 191 + 48 + 8 (the “not sure”s) = 247. That means 191/247 x 100 = 77% of visitor cards record broadly positive comments about the Lindow Man exhibition.
The figures for the quarter October to December 2008 can be worked out in a similar way and they give an emphatic 92% of comments about human remains want human remains to be displayed in the Museum and 90% of visitiors had a broadly positive view of the exhibition.
I wonder if we’ve been doing ourselves a disservice in the interpretation of the cards? I checked with Cat Lumb, Lead Educator (Secondary Humanities), this morning and she thought it might be a systemic error but felt that sometimes it was difficult to tell the difference between someone wanting human remains to stay on display and responding well to the exhibition. She gave the example of a card saying “Really loved the display of Egyptian mummies”. That seems to be both for displaying human remains and a positive response to the exhibition. Could our visitor satisfaction rating based on the comments cards have been higher than we thought in the 2nd quarter of 2008?
What is even more interesting is the comments themselves. I picked up one today that says: “A body is a machine for living in, not a person. An old dead body is just interesting that’s all! To which I reply, well it depends on your philosophical viewpoint, but to some people the body and the spirit are part and parcel of the same thing. That is why native American Indians or indigenous peoples in Australia feel so strongly that the remains of their ancestors should be returned to them. They are not leftover pieces of no longer functioning machinery but are deeply charged with spiritual importance for these communities.
It’s really interesting how the Lindow Man exhibition has brought out these differences in attitudes amongst our visitors. In the last month or so of the exhibition it makes me think we have contributed to the debate on this issue.
Filed under: Lindow Man Exhibition
Votive deposits in water - a postcard from a previous Lindow Man exhibition. This seems to be based on discoveries at La Tene rather than Lindow Moss.
A member of staff at the museum in Newcastle, where Lindow Man will be going in the spring/summer, recently emailed me asking about artistic reconstructions of the bog landscape. We didn’t use any landscape images in the Lindow Man exhibition and I know this caused some disappointment to some of the visitors I spoke to last summer. I could only think of some postcards made for one of the earlier exhibitions in 1987 or 1991 that show votive deposits in water. Then I remembered colleague Matthew Hyde’s photocopies from a book called Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape by F.H.A.Aalen, K.Whelan and M.Stout published in 1998. On pages 115-6 there is a sequence of drawings showing the changes in an Irish bog from the Mesolithic through to the present day. I guess Figure D depicting the most active phase of growth durign the Celtic Iron Age is most relevant. It is interesting that the caption to Figure D which shows post 17th century exploitation says the bogland edge attracted settlements of marginal people as turf was the poor man’s fuel (pg 116). There is a direct link here with Lindow Moss. More on this anon.
In the last months of the Lindow Man exhibition there has been a revival of interest from people looking at the Blog. As you might expect, back in April/May 2008 there was a peak in the number of hits because of the blaze of publicity surrounding the opening of the exhibition. On the Lindow Man Stats graph there is a peak of around 2700 last April but this rapidly fell to build gradually to about 740 hits in the autumn before falling away again, reaching a ‘low’ last December. Since then, however, the number of hits has increased to around 800 and there have been two consecutive months of growth. This probably reflects renewed interest in the North now that people know Lindow Man is going again – to Newcastle direct or via the British Museum I don’t know at the present time. The winning of the best temporary exhibition award during Design Week must also have helped raise the profile.
Got back to work today after a week’s leave and the first knock on my office door was Stephen Booth, Curator of Temporary and Touring Exhibitions, proudly holding a copy of Design Week Awards 2009. “Look at page 53″ he said. There, as winner of the Temporary Exhibition Design category, was Lindow Man: a Bog Body Mystery. The judges commented that they loved the simplicity and that the exhibition was really well put together. Different layers of information were brought forward which created the concept for the design.
This is brilliant news and everyone who worked on the project, but especially Jeff Horsley, Head of Exhibitions and Presentation, and Stephen Booth, Curator of Temporary and Touring Exhibitions can feel justly proud of the award. What a wonderful way to come back to work. I’ll see if I can post a photograph of the award on the Blog shortly.
More quotes and details on www.how-do.co.uk and www.citylife.co.uk/days out/news
