EAP - Trames Publications

PUBLISHED
SINCE 1997

TRAMES. A Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences

ISSN 1736-7514 (Electronic)
ISSN 1406-0922 (Print)

Open Access Journal

CiteScore: 0.8

Impact Factor (2022): 0.2

BODIES FROM THE BOG: METAMORPHOSIS, NON-HUMAN AGENCY AND THE MAKING OF ‘COLLECTIVE’ MEMORY; pp. 299–308

PDF | doi: 10.3176/tr.2008.3.05

Author

Stuart McLean

Abstract

This essay is about bog bodies – the preserved remains of prehistoric humans, often interpreted as ritual killings, found in peat bogs across northwest Europe. It considers the production of knowledge about the human past as a complex, relational process implicating multiple actors and traversing the terms of any straightforward nature-culture binary. It argues that theorizations of collective memory – and in particular of its ‘collective’ aspect - need to pay closer attention, both to the role of non-human agencies in the shaping of humanly intelligible artefacts and histories and to the relationship between preservation and transformation as a constitutive feature of collective memory. By way of illustration, it traces in some detail the story of one particular bog body, from death and deposition in the ground through rediscovery, excavation, archaeological analysis and subsequent public display.

References

Asingh, Pauline (2001) “The Grauballe Man. A well preserved Iron Age bog body. Old and new examinations”. In Mummies in a New Millenium: Proceedings of the 4th World Congress on Mummy Studies. Nuuk, Greenland, September 4th to 10th, 2001, 50–55. Niels Lynnerup, Claus Andreasen, and Joel Berglund eds. (Danish Polar Centre. Publication, 11.) Copenhagen: Danish Polar Centre.

Beuker, J. R. (2002) “The girl and the devil”. In The mysterious bog people (exhibition catalogue), 107–109. C. Bergen, M. J. L. Th. Niekus, and T. van Vilsteren, eds. Zwolle, Netherlands: Waanders Publishers.

Briggs, C. S. (1995) “Did they fall or were they pushed? Some unresolved questions about bog bodies”. In Bog bodies: new discoveries and perspectives, 168–182. R. C. Turner and
R. G. Scaife, eds. London: British Museum Press.

Buck-Morss, Susan (1997) “Aesthetics and anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s artwork essay reconsidered”. In October: the second decade, 375–413. Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Hal Foster, Denis Hollier, and Silvia Kolbowski ,eds. Cambridge, MS: MIT Press.

Callon, Michel and John Law (1995) “Agency and the hybrid collective”. South Atlantic Quarterly 94, 2, 481–507.

Davidson, Hilda Roderick Ellis (1988) Myths and symbols in pagan Europe: early Scandinavian and Celtic traditions. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Feehan, John (1996) The bogs of Ireland: an introduction to the natural, cultural and industrial heritage of Irish peatlands. Dublin: Environmental Institute, University College Dublin.

Feldman, Allen (1994) “From Desert Storm to Rodney King via ex-Yugoslavia: on cultural anaesthesia”. In The senses still: perception and memory as material culture in modernity, 87–108. C. Nadia Seremetakis, ed. Chicago: University pf Chicago Press.

Gill-Richardson, Heather (2004) “Bog bodies on display”. Journal of Wetland Archaeology 4, 111–116.

Glob, P. V. (1969) The bog people: Iron Age man preserved. London: Faber and Faber.

Halbwachs, Maurice (1992) On collective memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Heaney, Seamus (1975) North. London: Faber and Faber.

Kehne, P. (2002) “Tacitus and the bog bodies”. In The mysterious bog people (exhibition catalogue), 94–96. C. Bergen, M. J. L. Th. Niekus, and . T. van Vilsteren, eds. Zwolle, Netherlands: Waanders Publishers.

Latour, Bruno (1993) We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Latour, Bruno (2005) Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stead, I. M., J. B. Bourke and Don Brothwell, eds. (1986) Lindow man: the body in the bog. London: British Museum Publications.

Tacitus (1970) The Agricola and the Germania. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Van der Sanden, Wijnand. (1996) Through nature to eternity: the bog bodies of northwest Europe. Amsterdam: Batavian Lion International.

Back to Issue