Mysteries of the dead

SOMETIME around the birth of Christ, while the Romans ruled the Mediterranean, the Han dynasty controlled most of East Asia and the ancient Bantu were spreading through the heart of Africa, a 16-year-old girl was led to a peat bog in northern Europe, stabbed, strangled and then dumped sacrificially into the tannic waters.

About 2,000 years later, in the soft light of an Ottawa museum room, Canadian writer Heather Pringle stared at the girl’s desiccated remains and felt tugged by the strings of time. It was the feet that did it, small and vulnerable as they poked out from beneath ancient fabric. And the face too, after a computer expert used the skin-covered skull and a tuft of hair to create an image of a girl with blond ringlets framing a high forehead and strikingly blue eyes.

“I find her really astonishing and very poignant,” said Pringle, author of “The Mummy Congress,” a 2001 book about the small world of international mummification experts. “The lock of hair and so on -- that particular bog body seems very vulnerable, because it’s a child as well.”

This is the peculiar appeal of “The Mysterious Bog People” exhibition, the same traveling show that Pringle saw in Ottawa and which is on display at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County through Sept. 10. Where most anthropological exhibitions are built around objects, this show is built around flesh -- Yde, named for the village (in what is now the Netherlands) near where she was found, and five other human remains.

And in the odd and occasionally unfathomable way that modern society works, the collection of corpses has drawn large crowds in Europe, Canada and most recently at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History, where more than 60,000 people peered at the wrinkled remains before the exhibition closed in January.

“It was extremely popular and drew a lot of people who normally don’t visit the museum -- the 21- to- 30-year-olds without kids,” said Carnegie Museum spokesman Dan Lagiovane.

At the Los Angeles museum, about 67,000 people had taken in the show through Monday.

But imagine the reaction had the bodies under glass been dug up from 50-year-old graves instead of ancient bogs.

“People from the 1950s fall within our modern human family, and we’re very protective of our kin,” Pringle said by telephone from her home in Vancouver. “We don’t want to see our mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters on display like that when they are dead. That’s a cultural taboo.”

Stripped of the trappings of modernity, the bodies in the exhibition invite flights of fantasy about what our own lives might have been like had we lived then. Spurred by the physical traces of the ancient dead, we contemplate a society in which a girl like Yde could be killed, the trajectory of human evolution since then, and the tenuousness of existence itself.

We might live in a different era with different values, but we face the same eventuality. The phrase “the way of all flesh” echoes in the head.

And the recent successes of TV shows like the “CSI” franchise, which include occasional images of decomposing bodies, have helped inure the public to the more squeamish elements.

“They helped us market it a great deal,” said Sandra Olsen, the Carnegie’s curator of anthropology. “People are already accustomed to seeing these things on television, and they also have a feel for the kind of information you can get out of a corpse. They’ve been educated, Hollywood style, in forensics.”

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Accidental discoveries

THE exhibition consists of accidental discoveries. For several hundred years, peat cutters in northern Europe have stumbled across ancient remains buried deep in the bogs, as well as ax heads, ornate pottery and gold and silver coins.

About 400 such relics round out “The Mysterious Bog People,” most of them laid out in glass cases under subdued lighting that lends an ethereal quality to the show. They are accompanied by information boards detailing the history of the bogs and their secrets. Some have short video presentations as well.

One of the more intriguing items is the lur, a serpentine brass instrument that looks like something from a Dr. Seuss book and usually has been found buried in pairs. Modern lungs can propel sounds from the pipes, but no one can tell what sounds the ancients played -- or even whether the music was melodic, monotone or sets of aggressive single-note blasts. It’s as though time has left them mute.

Experts believe the bodies and items were placed in the bogs as religious sacrifices.

“You don’t accidentally lose an ax that keeps you alive,” said Jaap Brakke of the Netherlands’ Drents Museum, chief curator of the exhibition, who was in Los Angeles for the show’s March opening. “They did it for religious reasons -- they are offerings.”

The bogs themselves are mysterious places. Formed over vast sweeps of time, they grow upward from water-holding depressions in the ground. Rains keep the environment wet, which helps slow decomposition of the dying plants while leaching out acids, eventually creating something like a sponge made of sticks and leaves.

Sphagnum moss and other plants that derive little nutrition from soil predominate, creating an environment in which the ground gurgles and shifts underfoot and emits noxious odors and thick fogs -- an easily imagined portal to the afterlife.

“The only purpose for going into a hostile bog,” Brakke said, “is to search for your superior being.”

The bogs are also highly acidic, which does unusual things to a human body, simultaneously dissolving some of the bone while curing the flesh into a human leather. Over a thousand or more years, as the acids turn hair to a reddish color, the bodies become grotesquely flattened yet remain clearly recognizable as human.

In some cases, the skulls are preserved and facial features are clear. One, the head of “Red Franz” -- not part of this exhibition -- has been so well preserved he looks asleep, the stubble of his beard sprouting from smooth skin.

There is, of course, no way to know for sure how all those bodies wound up out in the peat bogs of northern Europe, like some ancient mob dumping ground. But hundreds have been found, some still with the ropes and scarves wrapped around their throats. One man -- part of the current display -- had a clear knife wound in his emaciated belly, his apparent murderer lying dead too at his side.

Yet the span of time invites other overlapping explanations as well. The oldest body found dates about 10,000 years, around the time that anthropologists believe ancient nomadic hunter-gatherers took to farming and began settling into small villages. The youngest bodies date to early medieval times, indicating that as Christianity spread over northern Europe the sacrifices stopped.

What were once sacrifices could, by the time the practice had stopped, have become capital punishments. Tacitus, the ancient Roman historian, wrote based on soldiers’ observations that while remote Germanic tribes punished traitors and deserters by hanging them from trees, people “stained with abominable vices” were “plunged into the mire of the morass.”

Sylvia Morel is director general of exhibitions and programs for the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa, one of the four museums that organized the traveling exhibition. In Los Angeles for the opening, she said the inability to say for certain what happened lends mystery to the bog people and propels modern interest.

Although anthropologists can infer certainties from tangible objects -- from seed-holding pots to the weave of ancient clothes -- the most elusive element is the “why?” And exhibiting the bodies along with the artifacts adds a dimension not found in more conventional displays.

“It wouldn’t be as interesting,” Morel said. “The bog bodies are the witnesses to the story.”

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‘The Mysterious Bog People’

Where: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 900 Exposition Blvd., Los Angeles

When: 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays

Ends: Sept. 10

Price: $2 to $9

Contact: (213) 763-DIN0; www.nhm.org/bogpeople and www.bogpeople.org