They describe the Celts as an ancient pagan society, ruled by kings, queens and druid priests. They tell of struggles between rival warriors and gods and goddesses who could be fickle and unpredictable, prone to meddling in human affairs and requiring bloody rites to appease them. These ancient stories lead Ned to believe that the violent deaths of two of Ireland's most famous bog bodies, Old Croghan Man, who was stabbed in the heart, and Clonycavan Man, whose head was split open, were actually human sacrifices: victims that belong to a long, grim roll call of men, women, and children across northwest Europe.
Some may have been criminals or prisoners, most were brutally murdered, all buried in the bog. Radio-carbon-dating of most of the hundreds of previously discovered bodies places their dates of death between B. The team fully expects that Cashel Man, too, will prove to be an Iron Age body, from the same period.
So, when they receive the radio-carbon-dating report, they are stunned. This body is older, much older. Cashel Man died 4, years ago, more than 1, years before the other Irish bog bodies, during the pre-Celtic Bronze Age. It's a complete surprise.
It's much earlier than we anticipated. That's very, very exciting. It's probably the earliest fleshed bog body in Europe.
To Ned, it is tantalizing evidence that depositing victims of violence like this in bogs was a practice that began many centuries earlier than previously thought.
To try to understand what was behind these strange burials, the team turns its attention to Cashel Man's grave, to the bog itself. The bog is a complex ecosystem with a long history and the subject of extensive study by wetland archeologist Ben Geary.
They have enormously long history. They have been part of the landscape for millennia. Here, the ground is waterlogged and oxygen-poor. The conditions preserve dead plant matter, which accumulates to form a carbon-rich, spongy material, called "peat.
The same conditions that preserve the peat also preserve the corpses and even give them their strangely darkened color. BEN GEARY: When we see bog bodies, the skin is, often looks like it's been heavily tanned, like if somebody spent far too long in one of these tanning booths. And that's the result of the humic acid which we have in bog water. You can probably see that. If we squeeze it, you see the brown water coming out. And by cutting into the peat, Geary can expose preserved layers going back millennia.
This is sphagnum moss. And you can see that, for a deposit that is maybe a thousand, fifteen-hundred years old, the preservation is remarkable. A single meter of peat can act as a time capsule, preserving a thousand-year record of plant life, ancient artifacts and bodies.
BEN GEARY: Within bogs we have this record, this memory of the past—of past environments, of past people and of past landscapes—and we just don't have that in any other environment on the earth.
Archaeologist Ellen O'Carroll takes core samples that hold clues about the ancient landscape. Her sample includes the area where Cashel Man was discovered but also looks deeper, further back in time. So, this is a record of the years before Cashel Man was deposited in the bog.
NARRATOR: By examining the contents of the core, she begins to piece together a picture of the ancient landscape and how it developed over the centuries. You can see the wood remains in here, and you can see the reeds just poking out here. As you get up further, you can see your eriophorum, which is your bog cotton, which is the white kind of cotton you see growing on the bogs.
So, what you can't see, and what I analyze back in the lab, is your pollen. You could fit 30 pollen grains on the top of a pin. And they are so tiny, you need a microscope to identify them. Pollen from these two species dominate the samples, indicating both ash and birch were more prevalent than they would be in an undisturbed, wild forest.
Cashel Man died within the vicinity of a community that was quite vibrant. NARRATOR: Further analysis of the peat core reveals more evidence of human activity: microscopic traces of charcoal, indicating fires were burnt in the area, confirmation that Cashel Man was buried close to a human settlement. But what would this community have been like? Billy Mag Fhloinn studies Bronze Age archaeology by recreating the technology of that vanished world.
The idea is the metal will melt and turn to liquid. To achieve this temperature, much hotter than the temperature of an open flame, prehistoric bronze smiths probably used bellows to force air into an enclosed furnace. Once the bronze is molten, he pours it into a clay mold then cools it by quenching in water. Finally, he breaks it open to expose the solidified metal. And you'll be able to hammer a sharp edge onto it.
But what really comes across is how refined they had their technology. Sure their technology is at a more basic level than ours, and what they could do with more limited conditions than what we have now was astonishing. We know of hierarchies of people, political leaders, religious leaders and other people, so, in fact, a highly stratified society. But that is silent, which has no writing, so is very difficult to get at.
So ideas of foreign trade and international commerce and exchange were not foreign concepts. But the backbone of the economy was agricultural production. Among the hundreds of gods and goddesses mentioned by Roman authors and depicted in Celtic artwork, female deities play a leading role, bringing both fertility and abundance, but also threatening drought and destruction if displeased with humans.
Might these beliefs hold a clue to the motive behind the bog body murders? In the town of Derryville, just 30 miles from Cashel Bog, a large excavation is providing intriguing new clues to Iron Age weather patterns.
Scientists have long known that, in times of heavy rainfall, these bogs come to life and grow, but during times of drought, the mix of plants and other organisms changes. In preserving a record of life in the bog, the peat also preserves a record of environmental change. One of the clues to understanding what conditions were like thousands of years ago are these microscopic single-celled organisms known as testate amoebae. And we know from modern studies of testate amoebae what moisture preferences different species have.
So we can use knowledge of the present as key to the past. Ben Geary exploits this difference to describe thousands of years of climate history.
BEN GEARY: Now, as bogs grow and change over time, depending on how wet or dry they are, of course, this will be reflected by the composition of communities of testate that are living in the peat. It's called arcella discoides; this is an indicator of, generally, rather wet conditions.
This is Hyalosphenia subflava; this is an indicator of a comparatively dry sample. Now, by cataloguing the population density of each testate species in those samples, Geary creates a detailed record of the ancient Irish climate, as it changed over time.
BEN GEARY: There has been a huge amount of work done on different bogs, different sites, in Ireland, and indeed in northwest Europe, attempting to track changes in bog surface wetness, really, over the last 5, years or so, or maybe even longer.
BEN GEARY: We tend to see that there is increasing evidence for a climatic shift, probably to a wetter and colder environment, round about the Bronze Age to Iron Age transition, so, very broadly, around the time that we do get increasing evidence of bog bodies appearing in wetlands.
It was one of the most significant climatic events since the Ice Age, and it lasted hundreds of years. But how would ancient people who worshipped a goddess of fertility have dealt with what could have been long periods of failing crops and hard times? At the Derryville site, archaeologists have uncovered another ancient link to the bogs.
It's a network of finely crafted tracks, which once created a path across the spongy ground. Henry Chapman has been studying these hand-crafted walkways. It's a wickerwork hurdle, so you can see it extending quite some way along here. None of the trackways uncovered at Derryville traverse the entire bog.
Instead, each ends right where the marsh was at its wettest. To some, this suggests that the wet, marshy area was a destination rather than an obstacle, but for what purpose? One clue could be the wealth of valuable objects found buried in boglands and dating from all periods.
The scale and locations of these hoards lead historians to believe that they are offerings, placed in the bog to appease ancient deities. Archeologists call them "votive offerings.
It's an offering that's been made on behalf of the community. Ned Kelly believes it was an offering to the goddess of fertility. NED KELLY: We are clearly dealing with material that has been deposited for a reason, and that reason was, I believe, the protection of the cattle herds and to ensure the continued supply of milk by the herds and proper food resources.
And these are also thought to be offerings to the goddess of fertility. Sacrifices like these hint at the sacred nature of the boglands of Iron Age Europe. It's allowing them to ask for things, to ask for help, to ask for thanks. Those are events which happen at a time of conflict, or when they require a good harvest.
It's those sorts of events which are what these things are probably about. But why deposit a body in the bog? Archaeology in Ireland and in northwest Europe has shown that, typically, these people did not bury their dead. A new theory emerges that they are those of ritually cuddled kings, gruesomely slain to assure the fertility of land and people.
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Season 41 Episode 3 53m 7s Video has closed captioning. In the rolling hills of Ireland's County Tipperary, a laborer harvesting peat from a dried-up bog spots the remnants of a corpse and stops his machine just in time, revealing a headless torso almost perfectly preserved and stained dark brown by the bog. Archeologists recognize the corpse as one of Europe's rare bog bodies.
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