We have mentioned the bodies that are found in bogs, in the past. It is amazing how well the bogs preserve some of the bodies and actually mummify them. It is a very rare thing to find a bog body and only a couple may be found in a century. What kind of people were these that lived near the bogs? How advanced were they? They certainly seemed advanced enough to commit murder, since many of the bodies bore the wounds of an assassin who casually dumped them into the bog and that person was never seen again until they surfaced thousands of years later, too late to punish their killers I might add.

The main areas where bog bodies have been found are Ireland, Great Britain, the Netherlands, northern Germany, and Denmark. How well preserved are these bodies? The bodies themselves can be skeletal remains or range all the way up to completely preserved bodies. Sometimes only pieces of bodies are found, like an arm here or a foot there. Bog bodies can range from all the way back to 8000 B.C. to early medieval times. It seems that people have been living near bogs for quite a long time. There is a strange thing that has happened to some of the bog bodies, they have completely disappeared after they were found. There is no way of obtaining an exact count of the bodies that have been found because of this.

Most people probably think that bodies found in the bog are the result of people falling in and not being able to get out, but archeologists tell us a different story. They say that many of the bodies are of people that met violent deaths. One theory states that the bog served as the ultimate punishment for committing crimes. We have the electric chair, gas chamber or lethal injection, they had the bog. But it is also thought that human sacrifice took place and the unlucky sacrificed people were killed and tossed into the bog or just tossed. It is believed that sacrifices were made to celebrate military victories, or cure illness. It seems the Iron Age people that lived near the bogs believed in human sacrifice.

Let's take a closer look at some of the bodies that have been found in the bogs. Grauballe Man was discovered in 1852. He died when someone cut his throat. It is believed he died about 2000 years ago, give or take 50 years. In 1897 a woman's body was found. The poor woman had been hacked so badly that her one arm was detached from her body. She died about 1700 to 2000 years ago. That same year the body of a teenage girl was found, she had been strangled and stabbed and died about the same time, 1700 to 2000 years ago. There were a couple of bodies of men that were found around 1904. One was murdered, a stab wound was clearly visible in his chest, the other was too decomposed to tell. In 1938 the body of another woman was found, she had been hanged with a leather thong. The archeologists knew this because the "V" shaped mark was still on her neck. She died somewhere between 2000 to 2300 years ago. Pormose man was found in 1946, he died around 3500 B.C. by being shot with an arrow. In 1949 two skeletons were found and at least one person had been hanged. In 1950 the body of a man from about 200 B.C. was found. He also was hanged with a leather belt.

The bodies listed above are certainly not all of the ones that were found and don't include the many body parts that have been uncovered but they do give us a picture of a very violent history. Peat harvesting only began a few hundred years ago and before that people didn't go into the bogs very much because it was too dangerous. It was like trying to walk through quick sand. It seems that the bog people didn't only throw people into the bogs, they also threw in items that were precious to them. This may have been some sort of offering to the gods. Some of the items that have been found in the bogs are:
jewelry, pottery, leather shoes, bronze axes, musical instruments, flints and even some gold coins.

One of the oldest objects ever found in a bog is the Pesse dugout canoe. It was found in 1955 and could date back to 8040 B.C. The bogs were often foggy and they must have seemed very mysterious to the people that lived near them. They may have even thought that they held some sort of magical powers. In 1898 a bog body was photographed at the site it was found. This was the first body to be photographed in such a manor.

It is hard to classify the bog people as one people since there is such a huge time differential involved. As you can see, the time differential between the first discovery the canoe and the middle ages, when it is believed that the bog people ceased to exist as such is on the order of 9200 years. One thing we know for sure, that for at least the last 3000 to 4000 years of their existence, the bog people were a very violent race. Comparing them by today's standards may be unfair however. Maybe we should be comparing them to the people of their own time, this may show them in a much more favorable light.