The study of human remains, regardless of the context in which they’re being studied, is inevitably viewed as morbid by some of those working outside the relevant fields. Whenever I’m asked about my research interests, one of the most frequent follow-up questions is “why?” While bog bodies have received some attention in recent years thanks to increased accessibility of information via the internet, it is still something of a niche interest, even among museologists. Part of this is due, no doubt, to the seeming lack of practical application: thanks to a decline in the reliance on peat as a fuel source, new discoveries of bog-preserved remains are increasingly rare, and only a handful of museums throughout northern Europe have bog bodies on permanent display.

On a personal level, my interest in bog bodies grew out of undergrad research on the cultural history of pre-Christian Germanic Europe. I happened across a mention of the Osterby Head and went down a research rabbit hole, though there was no way to tie it into the capstone project I was working on at the time. That interest wasn’t cemented until a year and a half after graduation, when a friend invited me to London. While there, I made it a priority to visit the Sutton Hoo helmet at the British Museum. The Lindow Man—a bog body on display in the Iron Age room—was something of a peripheral interest, but I was so struck by the display that I ended up writing an article about the visit over on my personal blog.

Which leads me to the professional relevance of this project: I felt the display was poorly designed, though I didn’t have the knowledge to support this belief at the time; it was more like a gut feeling. The body was tucked into a dimly-lit corner in a very large room, quite easily overlooked, his case indistinguishable from the surrounding cases housing Iron-Age tools, clothes, and jewelry. There was no prominent signage to direct visitors to the body and it plainly did not draw the same attention as other remains housed in the museum (e.g., the multiple rooms displaying Egyptian mummies). On a busy Sunday, I was alone in that particular corner of the British Museum—the Lindow Man’s only visitor.

The visit raised a number of ethical and logistical questions for me. What all had to be taken into consideration when designing this sort of display? How was the body preserved once it had been exhumed from the bog, and did that limit the way curators could design an appropriate space? Was anyone opposed to these displays on a moral basis? Perhaps there was some context I was missing in judging the Lindow Man’s display so harshly.

There are believed to be around 45 bog bodies that remain in-tact today, many of which are displayed in museums [Gill-Robinson 2005]. This blog will look at current and past scholarship on the preservation of said bodies; provide an overview of the numerous challenges and considerations that go into preserving an exhumed bog body and placing it on display; and attempt to determine how successful many of the present displays are in addressing the aforementioned concerns.