- Judging by the terrified look on his face, the German
horseman who has come to be known as "Red Franz" harboured few
hopes of 21st-century fame in the moments before he was murdered and deposited
in a bog 1,800 years ago. But after a world tour which has already introduced
him to half a million people, he arrived in Manchester yesterday in an
exhibition which sheds light on the fate which befell him and many others.
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- Red Franz - who takes his name from the colour his hair
turned to after thousands of years in bog water - was joined by other "Bog
People", including the Dutch "Girl from Yde" and a pair
whose dying embrace earned them the name "the married couple".
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- Undiscovered until peat-cutters chanced upon them 100
or so years ago, each has been well preserved by the acidity and absence
of oxygen afforded by the bogs of northern Europe.
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- The first international exhibition to bring them together
- The Mysterious Bog People - reveals that they shared much more than a
resting place. Recent scientific analysis of their bodies suggests that
all were subjected to violent deaths and may have been consigned to the
bog as sacrificesor as punishment killings. Red Franz, whose long hair
was blond when he perished, was stabbed through the shoulder and had his
throat cut at the age of 25 - somewhere between AD200 and AD400.
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- Manchester is used to such artefacts, since the discovery
at nearby Wilmslow of Britain's most famous bog body, "Lindow Man",
21 years ago. He was a young adult who had fallen victim to a brutal act
of violence in the first century AD. For years, many thought the body (still
known locally as "Lindow Pete") was a recent murder victim. This
seemed to be a common assumption when a bog person surfaced. The exhibition
reveals how many bodies were so well preserved that peat-cutters took them
to local police, who could not identify them and arranged for them to be
reburied. Red Franz was interred in a cemetery at Hanover, Germany, in
1900 before a local museum realised his value and dug him up again five
months later.
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- The exhibition, which introduces visitors to the bog
people via a virtual walk through high-banked peat-cutters' channels, draws
on 400 exhibits to support the view that the bogs were carefully selected
as places for spiritual sacrifices by people who associated its water with
the next world.
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- From the Mesolithic period (10,000-50,000BC) up to Roman
times, people often placed their most precious posessions in the bogs -
from amber necklaces to leather-sheathed daggers, elk bones, harpoons and
even an entire wooden temple.
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- ©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=606543
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- Violence in the Bogs
- http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/bog/violence3.html
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