Posted on 03/20/2004 5:26:34 PM PST by blam
Mysteries of bog butter uncovered
Wax found in Celtic bogs is the remains of ancient meat and milk.
17 March 2004
PHILIP BALL
Peat cutters often stumble on chunks of butter in the bogs. © Stockbyte
Chemical detectives have traced deposits of fat in Scottish peat bogs to foodstuffs buried by people hundreds of years ago. The 'bog butter' is the remains of both dairy products and meat encased in the peat, say Richard Evershed of the University of Bristol and colleagues.
Those who live in the countryside of Ireland and Scotland and dig up chunks of peat for fuel have long been familiar with bog butter. While gathering the compressed plant matter, which can be burned in fires, diggers occasionally slice into a white substance with the appearance and texture of paraffin wax.
This is thought to be the remains of food once buried in the bog to preserve it. Waterlogged peat is cool and contains very little oxygen, so it can be used as a primitive kind of fridge.
The question is what type of food was buried in the peat. Local lore sometimes says that the waxy stuff is literally the remains of butter. For example, the seventeenth-century English writer Samuel Butler remarked in one of his famous poems that butter in Ireland "was seven years buried in a bog".
Grave wax
But there could be an alternative source for the waxy material: dead animals. In the eighteenth century, French chemists discovered that human corpses often contain adipocere, a substance also known as 'grave-wax'. So bog butter could be the remains of carcasses rather than dairy products.
To find out, Evershed and his colleagues took a close look at the fatty acids in bog butter. The chains of hydrocarbons in these molecules differ between those derived from dairy and those from meat. The chains in dairy products tend to be shorter than those in animal fat. And there are also differences in the relative amounts of normal and 'heavy' carbon they contain. Most of the carbon in organic material is carbon-12, but about one percent consists of the heavier isotope carbon-13. The exact amount of carbon-13 depends in part on whether the fat came from meat or dairy products.
The team verified some of these differences by analysing artificial bog butters, which were made in the 1970s from mutton fat and butter mixed with soil and water. They then looked at nine samples of bog butter provided by the National Museum of Scotland, some of which are 2000 years old. Six of the bog butter samples come from dairy products, and three are from animal fat, they report in The Analyst1. So ancient Scots clearly used the peat to store both types of food, they say.
But there remains some mystery: researchers still do not know for sure if the food was buried solely to preserve it. Perhaps chemical reactions in the soil helped to transform the foods to more palatable products in a kind of primitive food processing, says Evershed. He plans to bury some modern fatty foods in peat to find out if anything interesting happens to them.
Tollund Man (A bog person)
Because they will eat anything while the prissy people starve? :)
Windeby Girl looks like Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Yes to both. But in the interests of forensic science, the question arises, why was he murdered, and how did he come to be buried in the bog?
The corpse is perhaps from some period that predates the Christian era, well over two thousand years ago. The perpetrator of this act is long gone and disappeared into prehistory. This would have occurred about the time the Druids were a major religion of northern Europe and the British Isles, and the death could have been part of a purification ritual, or a summary execution. Burial in the bog could have been intentional in the interest of concealing the grave from marauders, or to hide it from relatives if this were an execution.
The body is in an extraordinary state of preservation, although there are no longer any skeletal bones left. The calcium and phosphate dissolved long ago, leaving only the preserved cartilaginous protein in the bone. The skin and internal organs would have been preserved in the organic acids (largely tannic acid) that filled the bog, and protected the remaining elements from oxidation. So long as the bog remained moist, the undisturbed site was anaerobic, and the highly acidic conditions prevent the growth of any bacteria that may have otherwise consumed the body.
A most excellent specimen for a forensic pathologist to work with. You should SEE what shows up in a morgue.
Actually, I'd rather not.
Makes the "bog person" look like a department store mannequin, I imagine.
This is a significant difference, unless you want to deny the society of the time the right to a death penalty while preserving our society's right to the same.
Koelbjerg Woman, whose skull is shown here, is the oldest bog body known. We do not know how she met her end, as her bones show no sign of violence. She was, at most, 25 when she died around 8000 B.C. Her body ended up in open water, and the bones were not incorporated in peat until later. She may have simply drowned. (Fyns Stifsmuseum of Denmark, Odense)
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