Filed under: Lindow Man Exhibition
Going through the contents of the Lindow Man Offerings box. In addition to over £300 in loose change there are lots of personal accessories such as badges and prepared pieces such as a female fertility figure with an open belly containing moss. There are poems and individual messages to Lindow Man as well as the usual bus tickets, sweet wrappers and shop receipts. Surprisingly one credit card transaction receipt gives the 16 figure account number for a purchase in Kuala Lumpur! Some colleagues from the Data Group came to see the stuff this morning prepare a presentation to the Manchester Museum staff in the summer. A post doctoral student is also interested in looking at the material for a paper about offerings in museums.
I will give a variant of my talk about Lindow Man and sacrificial theory. In the presentation I ask how, if Lindow Man dates from the early Roman period, we can reconcile human sacrifice with the Roman occupation.
What being occupied by the Romans means in practice is a moot point and there must have been considerable continuity in the early years, especially in northern Britain. Did the killings continue because no-one had banned them or was it because the Roman army was here and this was how local people held on to a sense of identity under foreign occupation? Rene Girard goes so far as to claim that the whole of human cultural and social order spring from “acts of unanimous sacrificial violence against innocent victims or scapegoats.” Girard helps to reconcile the practice of human sacrifice with Roman occupation by showing how scapegoats are charged with the worst crimes imaginable in order to justify killing them very violently (Girard uses emotive words like ‘lynching’ and ‘immolation’).
For example, in the ancient Greek myth of Oedipus, Oedipus is scapegoated and driven from Thebes because he killed his father and married his mother. Girard says that this is the wrong way round and that he was accused of those crimes after the fact in order to justify his banishment. Girard notes that following his banishment Oedipus acquired sanctified status and Greek cities vied with one another for possession of his remains.
Depiction of the Alderley Edge Wizard
This set me thinking about the local legend of the Alderley Edge wizard. In the story the sleeping king and his knights (King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table?) will awaken and save Britain in her hour of need. Working backwards along the Girardian scapegoat trajectory, the sleeping saviours must have been scapegoated before they could be sanctified. Typically this would involve killing them violently and afterwards writing a more palatable account of their death for posterity (Girard calls this ‘mythic crystallization’) .
Is the Alderley Edge wizard story a re-written account of the killing of scapegoats at the site or nearby (Lindow Moss isn’t very far away). Could it be a folk memory, committed to writing in the mid 18th century, of the killing of innocent people, whose remains have survived in the archaeological record as bog bodies?
One of the benefits of this approach is to reconcile human sacrifice with the presence of a Roman administration dedicated to stamping it out because scapegoat victims are accused of terrible crimes to justify killing them. It also leaves us free to disconnect the killing of Lindow Man and the Roman occupation of northern Britain. Sacrificial crises occur for any one of a number of reasons (plague, famine, flood, drought) or none at all. It was possibly in response to the Roman invasion but it doesn’t have to have been.
Newsletter about Lindow Man by Kashif Subhani, Breeze Hill School
No-one seems to have picked up the reference to the “mirror looking down the well” episode in Cold Mountain but I’ve came across another interesting human remains anecdote in Robert Hicks’ American Civil War novel The Widow of the South.
Based on fact, the novel describes the actions taken by a woman, Carrie McGovack (the eponymous Widow of the South), in the aftermath of the battle of Franklin (1864) in which some 10,000 men died. Some years later, learning that the land where they were buried is about to be turned over to plough, she arranges for the remains to be recovered and reburied on her own family plot.
An archaeologist who is excavating a native American Indian burial ground provides Carrie with a method for recovering and labelling the remains to ensure that the transfer is carried out without losing the dead soldiers’ identities. In a conversation towards the end of the book , the hero, Zachery Cashwell, asks why the Indian bones are being taken out of the ground. “To be preserved. For posterity” replies the archaeologist, who confirms they’ve been in the mound for a thousand years. Cashwell says “Sounds preserved to me”. Later he thinks to himself that it was funny the archaeologists had to dig into the mound to save the remains and that “the dead would end up scattered across the country, anywhere but where they’d started.”
The reason this springs to mind is because a few weeks ago I attended a public debate at the Manchester Museum at which Prof Piotr Bienkowski talked about the link between people and the land. He made the point that ours is the first society in which individuals do not know where they will be buried. He made a telling case for the remains of the dead to be returned where they were found, except in exceptional cicumstances.
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.
