The Jührdenerfeld Man is a bog body found in Jührdenerfeld, a village in the district of Bockhorn, Lower Saxony in Germany. Today it rests at the State Museum for Nature and Man in Oldenburg as Inventory No. OL 5933.

Discovery

The individual now known as the Jührdenerfeld Man was discovered on 19 November 1934 in a raised bog, a type of bog fed mainly by rainwater, near Jührdenerfeld in the municipality of Bockhorn, Lower Saxony, northwestern Germany. His remains were uncovered by peat cutter Heinrich Stöfer while he was digging a drainage ditch.

He lay in a natural hollow in the peat beneath three pointed wooden stakes. Each was about long and approximately as thick as a person's arm. One lay lengthwise over him. The other two lay across him, one at the level of his arms and the other at his pelvis, with their ends wedged into the sides of the hollow. The stakes were made from alder and rowan.

During his recovery, boards were carefully pushed beneath his remains so that he could be lifted from the peat in one piece. He was then carried to the nearby school in Jührdenerfeld, where he was kept until he could be transported to the museum in Oldenburg. He was taken to what is now the State Museum for Nature and Man the day after his discovery.

Clothing and associated objects

Jührdenerfeld Man was found naked, but two pieces of clothing or textile had been placed with his body. A sack-like woollen textile lay loosely bunched over his torso, while a roughly stitched fur garment was found between his shoulder and head. The surviving early account does not identify the animal used for the fur or establish that either item had been worn by the man before his death.

Three sharpened wooden stakes lay across the body. Each measured approximately 1.4 to 1.6 m (4 ft 7 in to 5 ft 3 in) long and was described as about as thick as a person's arm. One end of each stake had been sharpened to a point, while the other had been cut straight across. The stakes were arranged lengthwise and diagonally over the body, with their pointed ends driven into the surrounding peat. Their position provides a physical marker for the force applied to the remains: the man's chest was deeply compressed, and investigators reported that the depression corresponded to the positions of the stakes.

Condition The man was found lying in a curled-up position on his right side with his left leg bent. Both the arms and the right leg were missing, probably due to animal scavenging. Small pieces of the arm were found next to the body. The about 15 cm long hair and moustache that were originally blonde were well preserved and stained red from the bog. On the back and the chest, most of the skin is still preserved in a leather-like state. In other parts of the body it has shrunk due to the intestines, muscles, and fatty tissue had been lost to the bog.

Body and health

Jührdenerfeld Man was an adult male, estimated to have been about 35 years old at the time of his death. An osteological examination estimated his living stature at approximately . The researchers cautioned that the estimate was based on the limited number of surviving long bones.

Dating

Early attempts to date Jührdenerfeld Man relied on the peat surrounding his body rather than the remains themselves. In 1942, botanist Kurt Pfaffenberg estimated that the peat in which the man lay dated to about 340–310 BCE, based on the body's position within the bog and changes in the surrounding pollen record.

Direct radiocarbon dating later produced a younger age. Using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS), researchers dated a sample of the man's skin to 170–45 BCE and a sample of his hair to 40 BCE–75 CE.

Archaeobotanists Arie Kalis and Jutta Meurers-Balke later investigated the difference between the radiocarbon dates and the earlier peat chronology. Their reanalysis confirmed that the peat immediately surrounding the body dated to the fourth century BCE, but found that about of peat above it had been disturbed. They concluded that a pit had been cut through younger layers into older peat and then refilled with mixed material. The earlier analysis had therefore dated the older peat into which Jührdenerfeld Man was placed, while radiocarbon dating measured the age of the man himself. See also

List of bog bodies from Germany

References

Further reading