First-century Lindow Man goes back to his rootsMaev Kennedy The Guardian, Monday January 28 2008
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This article appeared in the Guardian on Monday January 28 2008 on p6 of the UK news section. It was last updated at 23:48 on January 27 2008. Lindow Man is to return to close to the spot where he met an appalling death almost 2,000 years ago, skull smashed in, strangled, stabbed, and finally dumped face down into the bog pool which preserved the evidence of his last terrible hours.
He has been one of the star exhibits at the British Museum since his discovery in 1984 by peat cutters at Lindow Moss in Cheshire, transfixing visitors who gaze into his leathery, contorted face and startlingly preserved hair and eyelashes. The museum is now sending him on a year-long loan to Manchester Museum.
"I am delighted people in the north-west will once again have the opportunity to meet this everyman of prehistoric Britain," said the London museum's director, Neil MacGregor.
Lindow Man, dated to the mid-first century AD, is the best-preserved ancient body found in Britain, and one of a haunting group of scores of bodies found in bogs across northern Europe which have provoked debate among archaeologists. Like many of the others found across Europe he was a healthy man in the prime of life, although he had the beginnings of osteoporosis in his spine, and intestinal parasites. The remains of his one surviving hand have neatly trimmed nails and fingertips with no sign of the wear of hard manual labour.
"The jury really is still out on these bodies," curator Jody Joy said, "whether they were aristocrats, priests, criminals, outsiders, whether they went willingly to their deaths or whether they were executed - but Lindow was a very remote place in those days, an unlikely place for an ambush or a murder.
"I think the fascination is that you can look into the face of a real man who may have used the implements and objects in the cases around him."
Lindow Man was exceptional among the bodies found in bogs for his "triple death", bludgeoned, stabbed, and garotted by the leather cord still around his neck. However, scientists now think the tightness of the leather may have been caused by swelling in the water.
"We may never know exactly how and why he died," Joy said, "but I believe science will have a great deal to tell us about how he lived."
Although the bodies are tanned to leather, they are fragile and in danger of decay and mould. Lindow Man will be on display in Manchester from April.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jan/28/archaeology.forensicscience
