“Crumpled, folded, left lying for the peat
Flesh becomes water, became earth
Became stone in time.
No hope of that now, leather man, stone
Interrupted,
Your journeys unexpected direction?
To offer us questions
It’s always questions, that’s what we have of you.
Maybe questions are what we need
No certainties, no mysteries finally revealed”

“It’s spring outside now,
The frogs have broken the hibernation dream
And fill the world with bubbling, copulating life
I would bring you flowers and new shoots,
Pussy willow and hope.
But they cannot, could not, touch you in you
Sealed crystal coffin, defying even handsome princes
So I bring you the dream of spring and the wind
that blows over the hills, with the rain and
the sudden sleet, And I offer you, spring mornings
and the air full of promise, stones warming
slowly under a glowing sun.
I feed you dreams and a blanket of memories,
A thicket of hope to shelter you from the
Endless staring eyes in that cold, climate controlled
Bubble
We will hold a space for you in the dancing circles,
A place at the table, a welcome in the Feast for the Dead

With love, Gordon the Toad”

As part of the work on evaluating the Lindow Man exhibition I rang Carole Knight, Project Administration Assistant at the Manchester Museum, to ask how many people visited. 133,413 people came to see Lindow Man.

I spent this morning looking at the evaluation of the Comments Cards in the Lindow Man exhibition for October to December 2008 and there, as an example of a reflective comment from a visitor is this poem:-

It started out as a lovely day,

Birds were flittering amongst the hay,

For someone’s satisfaction I was slain,

My life was lost, they didn’t gain.

Distorted and squashed I’m here in the west,

It doesn’t stop the crowds,

I’m not at my best,

Cruel in life,

Crueller in death.

Washed down stream,

Flowing with river,

Caught in the floods,

Settled in moss,

Aged and weathered,

Man of the hills,

Mountains Loss,

The destruction of Cairns and Mounds

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.

A couple of days after our Lindow Man exhibition closed I had a meeting with Cat Lumb, Lead Educator Humanities (Secondary and Post-16) to talk about how we could continue to offer an education session based around the Lindow Man courtroom scenario without being able to use Lindow Man himself.

We spent an hour looking around the Mediterranean Gallery and the new Manchester Gallery and  identified a number of objects that she could use with students to talk about what Lindow Man means. We spoke about different value systems and binary opposites between Northern (European)  and Southern (Mediterranean), cold and heat, beer and wine, barley and grape, ‘barbarous’ and civilised, native British (Brigantian?) and foreign (Romanised), literate and illiterate and so on.

Which of these sets of opposites  is better is a value judgement of course but native people don’t have a choice. They could either go along with the occupation or if they resisted they were defeated militarily in swift order. If the Roman administration is stamping out human sacrifice, then perhaps one of the (extreme) ways for native people to create or maintain a sense of identity is to sacrifice someone – like suicide bombers in Iraq. 

The reconstructed head of Worsley Man on display in the Manchester Museum offers a way in to this debate and the original head is of early 2nd century AD date too. Other things that help the contrast between native and Roman include a Roman amphora in the Mediterrenean Gallery and the altar set up by Aelius Victor to the Mother Goddesses here in Manchester and now on display in the Manchester gallery. 

We looked at some coins in the Money Gallery and compared native British gold coins with the Roman currency systems and discussed the different significance of money in different cultures. The perfect illustration of this was Chinese hell money displayed in the same gallery that is intended for use in the hereafter. It makes no sense in a monetary economy like ours but in the realm of magic and the afterlife it has considerable meaning.

Perhaps the Romans experienced a similar sense of bafflement faced with native British ways of doing things and vice versa.

Lindow Man exhibition closed today but remember that the Lindow Moss photographic exhibition continues until July.

The following comment was written in the comments book in the photographic exhibition about Lindow Moss:-

“dear curator-type guy, although myself and my amazing girlfriend are aware that there is little chance of you actually reading this we feel the need to congratulate you on the wonderful experience we have had of your museum… as avid historians we feel a little more depths to the descriptions would be useful as many questions were left unanswered. However this is only a mild complaint lost in a sea of awe concerning the educational environment which you have constructed. Much love Sammy and Naomi xx (heart) xx’

I can’t claim any credit for the temporary exhibition about Lindow Moss but I love the salutation  “curator-type guy” and Sammy & Naomi criticize us so nicely it would be churlish not to share this with others.

Or what about:-

“I was born and brought up at Lindow and played on the moss as a kid. “The Bog” we called it. Back then in the 60s a lot of the cutting was still by hand with neat stacks of cut peat next to each trench. Everything was taken away on the narrow guage railway. We used to paly on the trucks. When I’ve been there recently I hardly recognize it. The industrial scale of the detruction is very upsetting. I wish more would be preserved. Sue S.”

I’ll bet Bruce Mould, who contributed to the Lindow Man exhibition, which closes on 19th April, cut the peat that Sue saw. The recent TV programme about peat also explored the subject of the conservation of bogs ‘v’ use of peat in gardens.

This is great stuff and thanks to all, too numerous to include every one, who have left comments.

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.

Last Saturday I came into the Museum to show the Stoke on Trent Museum Archaeological Society the Lindow Man exhibition. I also showed them  the recently discovered Roman altar from Manchester in our new Manchester Gallery. After lunch I took them to the partially reconstructed Roman fort at Castlefield.

The usual suspects: Stoke on Trent Museum Archaeological Society at Castlefield

Although this is quite old and some of the interpretation panels and mural are looking a bit worn, it is still  impressive. If the reassessment of Lindow Man’s radio-carbon dates is correct and he lived sometime in the later 1st century AD he would have been aware of the earth and timber  precursor of the stone fort. One of the Roman altars now displayed in the Mediterranean Gallery mentions a vexillation or detachment of Noricans and Raetians (from eastern central Europe) who garrisoned the fort at a later date. Aelius Victor, who set up the altar to the Mother Goddesses perhaps

Members of the Stoke on Trent Museum Archeological Society examine the Roman altar from Manchester in the newly-opened Manchester Gallery.

some time in the 2nd century AD, is likely to have been a German.  The influx of soldiers and their dependants, as well as camp followers and suppliers of services that traditionally ’soften the rigours of a harsh military life’, must have had a significant effect on native people.  Could the late 1st or early 2nd century bog bodies from Lindow Moss and Worsley Moss be part of the native people’s reaffirmation of their culture in the face of sudden change?  The key challenge is to reconcile human sacrifice (if that is what is happening) with the presence of the Roman administration, which is supposed to stamp it out.