[APFel]

A 2,600-year-old corpse has been discovered in the moors of northern Germany. It's not the only one. Such finds are frequent, but have posed an increasingly large riddle: Why were so many of the bodies victims of violence and dismemberment?

Probably because they didn't bother with prisons. Chop up the criminal and chuck their parts in the bog. Simple solution.

Please send me a government grant. I am obviously smarter than any German anthropologist.

APf

[ApplegateRanch]

Why were so many of the bodies victims of violence and dismemberment?

A worker stacked the sections of turf sliced free by the guillotine-like blade. Suddenly he paused, something having caught his eye. "What's this? An old leather jacket?"

It wasn't. In fact, what the worker had dredged from the moor was a large piece of human skin. It was followed by long bones, a foot, fingernails, an open ribcage and more and more hair, everything colored rust-red by acids in the bog.

Maybe because they get run over by a peat cutting machine with a guillotine-like blade?

Can we make a joint application (no pun intended) to do a differential study? Might even turn out to be criminals run over by peat cutters.

[Salamander]

Sacred three [or occasionally four-fold] death sacrifices.

The victims were partially drowned, then nearly strangled and then finally beheaded.
The four-fold could also include stabbing or burning, depending.

The most famous bog man even had a book written about him;
http://www.parlorcity.net/reviews/drprince.htm
He very likely volunteered to be sacrificed for the good of his people.

More info here;

http://www.mesh5.com/tension/febmarch/bog.htm

Not coincidentally, William Wallace's death was symbolically a holdover of the practice.
Rather than having the desired submission effect that Longshanks intended, it awakened the collective subconscious of the Scots and they got -really- p*ssed.

They saw The Wallace then as their sacrificed "Sacred King" and rebelled.

Ain't archetypal/mythopaeic symbolism cool?....:)