Becoming Bog Bodies Sacrifice and Politics of Exclusion, as Evidenced in the Deposition of Skeletal Remains in Wetlands Near Uppåkra

ABSTRACT

This paper is inspired by new materialist gender theory and the way it reconfigures the analysis of bodies and the environment. Here the relationships entangled in wetlands and bogs through depositions are in focus. More specifically, it deals with the placing of bodily remains and artefacts in wet contexts around the political and religious centre of Uppåkra in Scania, South Sweden. The aim of this paper is to map some of the processes that led to those people ‘becoming bog bodies’ and investigates their role in a situated political ecology. By examining who these people were and became during the life course and in death, it will open up a discussion on precariousness, vulnerability and masculinity, where victims of sacrifice were perhaps not only selected, but also possibly made. The paper brings a neglected dataset of skeletal remains from bogs to the attention of research and present new radiocarbon dates as well as osteological analysis of these remains. It engages with concepts such as slow violence and necropolitics derived from discussions within the environmental humanities.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-humanism
• gender theory
• bog bodies
• sacrifice
• intragenerational justice
• slow violence
• becoming
• Uppåkra

Acknowledgements

I thank Lunds Historiska Museum, Jenny Bergman, Lars Larsson and Anna Kjellström who have contributed kindly with their knowledge. I am also enormously grateful to my referees for sharing their benevolent advice on the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Christina Fredengren is an Associate Professor, works at the Department of Archaeology and Classical studies at Stockholm University and is affiliated to the Posthumanities Hub at Linköping University.

ORCID

Christina Fredengren http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6431-754X

Notes

1. Karen Barad (2003, 822) proposes a ‘process ontology’ where relations between mattering and meaning creates a congealing of agency where both contribute to what exists in the world. In this agential realism, not only bodies, but also the world consists of ontologically inseparable intra-acting agencies, that precede their semiotic definition. They cannot be seen as separate actors (as in actor-network theory), but their classifications by, for example, scientific or humanist communities, make agential ‘cuts’ into an otherwise interconnected world, and separate out such actors in order to come into being as phenomena. As Barad writes, such cuts work in one move, as a cutting together-apart. These cuts (into for example male:female or nature:culture) have both material and immaterial consequences and bring together ontology, epistemology and ethics and works to present material possibilities. To carry out an agential-cut is to bring in issues of ethics and responsibility towards ‘mutually constituted excluded others’ (Barad 2010, 253). In other words, both intra-activity and agential-cuts have real material effects, with ethical consequences.

2. There is a reference in Engström (1927, 55) to how a Bronze Age period VI, twisted neckring (LUHM 2987; see Badou 1960, 252. No. 63, type XVI D3) was found on a skeleton in a bog-trench at Hyby. Engström questions if this really was a human skeleton with an argument that the burial custom of this time was cremation. While the skeleton may well have been of a human being, as burials of uncremated bodies in bogs during this period are an exception to the cremation norm, it is still unclear if the neck-ring should be connected to the PRIA skeleton from Hyby mosse or if there is yet another skeleton from here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Swedish Research Council and Gad Rausings fund.