Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination

Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination
Author: Karin Sanders
Publsiher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2009-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226734040

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Over the past few centuries, northern Europe’s bogs have yielded mummified 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, 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 archeological 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.

Digging the Dirt

Digging the Dirt
Author: Jennifer Wallace
Publsiher: Bristol Classical Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2004-06-25
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: UVA:X004771300

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When Jennifer Wallace travelled round Greece as a student, hiking through olive groves to hunt out the stones of old temples and lost cities, she became fascinated by archaeology. It was magical. It was absurd. Give an archaeologist a few rocks and, like a master storyteller, he could bring another world to life. Give him a vague hunch about the past, and he was prepared to spend hours raking through the soil in search of proof. From the plain of Troy to the Titanic, and from Britain's Stonehenge to Ground Zero in New York, Digging the Dirt explores the excavation sites that have exerted the strongest pull on the public imagination. Some sites, in which bones are indistinguishable from dust, have driven archaeologists to despair. Other sites haunt poets with memories of loss and romance. All reveal the relevance of archaeology to our deepest cultural anxieties. Passionate and intelligent, Digging the Dirt engages with the work of philosophers and writers who have been stirred by the life below the ground, while never losing sight of the pressing demands of archaeologists today.

Bog Bodies

Bog Bodies
Author: Melanie Giles
Publsiher: Unknown
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2021-02-16
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1526150182

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Bog Bodies Uncovered Solving Europe s Ancient Mystery

Bog Bodies Uncovered  Solving Europe s Ancient Mystery
Author: Miranda Aldhouse-Green
Publsiher: Thames & Hudson
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2015-09-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780500772980

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The grisly story of the bog bodies, updated via details of archaeological discovery and crime-scene techniques Some 2,000 years ago, certain unfortunate individuals were violently killed and buried not in graves but in bogs. What was a tragedy for the victims has proved an archaeologist’s dream, for the peculiar and acidic properties of the bog have preserved the bodies so that their skin, hair, soft tissue, and internal organs—even their brains—survive. Most of these ancient swamp victims have been discovered in regions with large areas of raised bog: Ireland, northwest England, Denmark, the Netherlands, and northern Germany. They were almost certainly murder victims and, as such, their bodies and their burial places can be treated as crime scenes. The cases are cold, but this book explores the extraordinary information they reveal about our prehistoric past. Bog Bodies Uncovered updates Professor P. V. Glob’s seminal publication The Bog People, published in 1969, in the light of vastly improved scientific techniques and newly found bodies. Approached in a radically different style akin to a criminal investigation, here the bog victims appear, uncannily well-preserved, in full-page images that let the reader get up close and personal with the ancient past.

Archaeologists and the Dead

Archaeologists and the Dead
Author: Howard Williams,Melanie Giles
Publsiher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 486
Release: 2016
Genre: HISTORY
ISBN: 9780198753537

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Papers from two conference sessions: the first took place at Easter 2010 as part of the Southport IfA annual conference, the second in December 2010 at the Bristol TAG conference.

Secret Britain

Secret Britain
Author: Mary-Ann Ochota
Publsiher: Frances Lincoln Children's Books
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2024-03-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780711288850

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In Secret Britain, join anthropologist and broadcaster Mary-Ann Ochota for a tour of more than 70 of Britain's most intriguing archaeological sites and artefacts.

The Bog People

The Bog People
Author: Peter Vilhelm Glob
Publsiher: Unknown
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2010-05
Genre: Bog bodies
ISBN: 0571270905

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This classic book about the remains of iron-age people preserved in peat-bogs throws fascinating light on ancient ways of life, religion and rituals. During the last two centuries, workers in bogs throughout Europe have often accidentally exposed sunken human bodies that looked to them like incarnate devils. Actually, they were being confronted with their own ancestors of two thousand and more years ago. The bog waters have kept the bodies from decay, sometimes even preserving the facial expression at the moment of death. Most of these bog people bear signs of violent ends. Are they murder victims, sacrificial victims, or executed criminals? Acting as a consultant after the discovery of one such body, Professor Glob noted that the anguished face seemed peaceful when viewed apart from the means of death: the rope still tight around the neck. Later he perceived a connection between these bodies and a fertility goddess often portrayed with neck chains. In The Bog People, Glob unravels the dark, forbidding background of their story.

How Do We Imagine the Past On Metaphorical Thought Experientiality and Imagination in Archaeology

How Do We Imagine the Past  On Metaphorical Thought  Experientiality and Imagination in Archaeology
Author: Paul Bouissac,Dragoş Gheorghiu
Publsiher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2015-02-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781443875738

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Recent years have witnessed a search for new sources for archaeological inspiration within areas which until recently have not been imagined as a source for science. Archaeology has become more “anthropologized”, and, as such, is becoming increasingly influenced by the Zeitgeist, although some European schools are yet to recognize this. The process of scientific research that archaeologists have always considered to be an objective approach has been revealed to be the result of different subjective cognitive processes, forming part of the contemporary humanistic paradigm, a fact confirmed by new tendencies in contemporary archaeology. Consequently, this book considers the question: how does the archaeologist think today? Beginning with simple analogies issued from archaeological experiments or from ethnography, the structure of the contemporary archaeological thought is increasingly complex, working today with concepts that only yesterday were a subject of study. This book considers these new types of approaches, through a series of personal narratives provided by archaeologists, describing their working methods in the process of imagining the past.