Known for his curly red hair, day-old stubble, and
uncannily preserved two-thousand-year-old physique,
Grauballe Man - a mummified body discovered in 1950s
Denmark - was an instant archaeological sensation. But
he was not the first of his kind: recent history has
resurrected from northern Europe's bogs several men,
women, and children who were deposited there as
sacrifices in the early Iron Age and kept startlingly
intact by the chemical properties of peat. In this
remarkable account of their modern afterlives, Karin
Sanders argues that the discovery of bog bodies began an
extraordinary - and ongoing - cultural journey.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
Sanders shows, these eerily preserved remains came alive
in art and science as material metaphors for such
concepts as trauma, nostalgia, and identity. Sigmund
Freud, Joseph Beuys, Serge Vandercam, Seamus Heaney, and
other major figures have used them to reconsider
fundamental philosophical, literary, aesthetic, and
scientific concerns. Exploring this intellectual
spectrum, Sanders contends that the power of bog bodies
to provoke such a wide range of responses is rooted in
their unique status as both archaeological artifacts and
human beings. They emerge as corporeal time capsules
that transcend archaeology to challenge our assumptions
about what we can know about the past. By restoring them
to the roster of cultural phenomena that force us to
confront our ethical and aesthetic boundaries, "Bodies
in the Bog" excavates anew the question of what it means
to be human.
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