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BODIES IN THE BOG and the Archaeological Imagination
By KARIN SANDERS
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2009 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-73404-0
Chapter One
Nature's Own Darkroom
On April 28, 1952, a peat digger in Eastern Denmark found the dead body of a man buried in the layer of peat known as "dog flesh." Even before he was fully released from the soil, this new archaeological sensation was given the name of Grauballe Man, so called after the nearest village. He was a full-grown man with long curly red hair, eyebrows, day-old beard stubble, and a wrinkled forehead. His body was unusually well preserved. The skeletal parts were gone, but the limbs were intact and the muscles were clearly defined. The body lay in a fetal position, with the torso raised from the rest of the body and the head bent slightly backwards. During the night after the discovery, one of the curious onlookers who had gathered at the location of the find stepped on Grauballe Man's head, partly squashing the face and thereby adding to his appearance as a "forceps baby," as Seamus Heaney would later call it.
Twice Photographed
In the first photographs of Grauballe Man in situ, his head is clearly visible, with his upper torso still struggling to emerge from the tight embrace of the peat-grave. He is caught between realms: lingering, resting, and hesitating before the final contraction releases him from the darkroom of the bog and into the light and availability of the camera. Spawned from and caught up in the paradoxes of bog and photography respectively, the bog man himself forms a third paradox in the odd shape of an "ancient man-baby." He is both newborn and prehistoric. The bog has "killed" him and now "gives birth" to him in front of our very eyes—for which the camera and photographer are proxy. He is, writes Glob, "naked as the day he was born."
But before the bog man is rescued and embalmed by the photographic lens, he has already been "shot" and mummified by the bog acids. In this sense, he has been "shot" twice. In the first "shot" the agency involved can only be called nature and time in a rather abstract way. In the second, the agent can be named, someone has literally snapped the shutter, and the photographs in question can be signed and dated. In the first, the body has in some sense become a representation of itself without losing its original material corporeality that is its core and trademark. In the second, this corporeality is flattened and displaced so that in spite of the old assumptions of a photograph's ability to reproduce, as German cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer put it, "nature with a fidelity 'equal to nature itself,'" its material corporeality is lost. Yet the structural similarities are hard to overlook.
In fact, it is tempting to see bogs as nature's own darkroom with powers similar to those of photography. If we think of the advancement in technology from the earliest daguerreotypes to the digital cameras of today's world, we could place the bog as a kind of ur-camera or as a pre-photographic natural darkroom that acted as "nature's own pencil" and a "mirror of memory" before man-made inventions lay claim to such magic capabilities. Taking their time, literally around two thousand years, the mnemonic properties in these bog-laboratories of northern Europe have produced nature's own equivalent of photo-sculpture. The inventions, advanced chemical processes, and technological capabilities of the nineteenth century and the artificial memories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have substituted the preserving acid of the bog with a more up-to-date magic. But both bog and photography can, each in their way, be seen as laboratories for prosthetic memories. A prosthesis is a material replacement of something missing, of something that has been but is now lost. Its function is to be an (artificial) extension and to mimic the functionality of that which has been amputated. If we take prosthetics metaphorically, as we must when we add memory to the term, cultural history offers a host of prosthetic memories, many of which resonate directly with the materiality and metaphoricity of the bog realm—photography being the most obvious example. Dutch historian of psychology Douwe Draaisma extends the term back in time to Plato's wax tablet, which is described in Theaetetus as a membrane finely tuned between surface and depth: the wax tablet must be neither too hard nor too soft or the imprint—the memory—will be lost. Correspondingly, the bog must consist of just the right properties to serve as a mnemonic, to hold the material traces. In the development of prosthetic memories over time from wax tablet via various pre-photographic machines—such as those known to produce "physionotraces"—to photography proper, and eventually to computer memory, the bog offers its own kind of prosthesis that shares the metaphoric and alchemic associations we have with such memory tools.
Because bog bodies are made in nature, it may seem counterintuitive to exercise the nomenclature of prosthetics—the artificial extension or replacement of something original and missing—about that which is very much natural and very much in existence. Yet as with other prosthetic devices, the extension and replacement that bog bodies offer is seemingly liberated from the circumstances of time and space—no matter how "natural" their temporal-spatial reality seems to be. The analogy to French film critic André Bazin's well-known thesis on the ontology of the photographic image is almost too obvious. He hypothesizes that "the photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model." As a natural geological laboratory a bog is similarly able to capture images of the objects and humans placed in it, and like photography, it stops and freezes and transports images through time, so that the end result, as with the birth photo of Grauballe Man, becomes an uncanny copy of reality—a "natural" artificiality connected to the earth, to use Roland Barthes's expression, by an "umbilical cord that the photographer gives life."
Authenticity or Simulacrum
While the birth image of Grauballe Man as "forceps baby" helps illustrate the analogous ontology of photography and bog, Tollund Man allows us to consider questions of authenticity and inauthenticity, original and copy. He too is "twice photographed"; he too adds to the analogy between bog realm and photography, albeit with a different twist. In The Bog People, Glob gives us a detailed description of Tollund Man's remains in toto (with stomach content of the last meal and so forth), only to surprise the reader (and even most present-day museum visitors) when he concludes that in the end only Tollund Man's "splendid head" was selected for a year's treatment with formaldehyde, acetic acid, alcohol, paraffin, and heated wax, and was eventually displayed at Silkeborg Museum. The rest of the body was "left to dehydrate and offered to various scientific institutions for research." Glob goes on:
In the process of conservation, the proportions of the head and the features of the face were happily completely retained, but the head as a whole had shrunk by about 12 per cent. In spite of this it has emerged as the best preserved head of an early man to have come down to us so far. The majestic head astonishes the beholder and rivets his attention. Standing in front of the glass case in which it is displayed, he finds himself face to face with an Iron Age man. Dark in hue, the head is still full of life and more beautiful than the best portrait by the world's greatest artists, since it is the man himself we see.
Glob's claim is rather bold, but the elegant and evocative assertion that it is "the man himself we see" is easily disputed. To borrow a phrase from French writer André Malraux's study of "museums without walls" (The Voices of Silence), "each exhibit is a representation of something, differing from the thing itself, this specific difference being its raison d'être." What Glob wishes to do, however, is to deem the body authentic even if it has been reduced to a "splendid head," just as he has authenticated the entire body in his words and in the photographs. Nonetheless, authenticity seems to have been in some peril when only the head underwent the lengthy preservation process and was displayed in the first public exhibit. Glob tells us that the torso and limbs were disposed of, partly because it was thought inappropriate and too morbid to display a dead corpse, and partly due to lack of adequate preservation techniques.
Unlike the multitude of bog bodies, Tollund Man was not in need of a face reconstruction; he was in need of a body reconstruction. Yet not until the mid-1980s, with help from the preservative powers of photography, was the splendid head reunited with the body. The original remains of Tollund Man's body were poorly kept and scattered for years in various locations, which meant that the original photographs had to serve as prosthetic memory aids. In 1987 the complete bog man was finally exhibited.
Tollund Man's museum body in its present display is, in other words, a curious hybrid made by means of bog preservation, photography preservation, and museum technology. It consists of an amalgam of original and copy, in which the authenticity of the head has been fused with the photo/copy reconstruction of the body. The result teeters precariously close to becoming an example of unadulterated simulacrum in which the representation replaces the reality it represents—or, said differently, the copy takes on the reality of the original. If this causes the displayed bog body to become pure constructedness, Schein, or illusion, the display of Tollund Man and the synchronized artificiality and authenticity he embodies can also be seen as a fascinating and instructive instance of how "raw" authenticity (and with it the curiosity-effect) has been pried out of the "natural" and reinstated as hybrid. Ironically, as a consequence, the most "natural" and authentic access we have to Tollund Man today is through the original photographs. This brings questions about authenticity and inauthenticity to the fore. Lionel Trilling, for one, has asserted that the fact that "the word [authenticity] has become part of the moral slang of our day points to the peculiar nature of our fallen condition, our anxiety over the credibility of existence and of individual existences." Authenticity, then, is oft en seen as "merely not being inauthentic" or as something that "involves a degree of rough concreteness or of extremity." Bog bodies inevitably and continually renegotiate these questions as they travel back and forth or linger in a realm between authenticity (realness, humanness) and simulacrum (fakery, thingness). And Tollund Man's story, in particular, stresses the complicated interrelation of photography, authenticity, and simulacrum.
So is he (it!) the real thing? Walter Benjamin has taught us that the "presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity," and Roland Barthes has argued that in photography "the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation." But as we have seen, such authentication—so closely sutured to bog body photography (and with it a sense of certainty about represented "pasts")—has been uncannily tested in Tollund Man's remains. If time is already stopped in bog bodies and stopped again in the photographic process, then photographed bog bodies have undergone a kind of double-fossilization that in turn mythologizes both them and their past. Furthermore, if death and photography are somehow enmeshed as the shutter holds life captive, it would seem that bog bodies when photographed undergo not only a kind of enlivenment, but one that is fraught with the propriety (or lack thereof) in aestheticizing dead bodies.
Postcard Aesthetics
Let me offer an example of this. Two photo postcards of Grauballe Man purchased in a museum shop have decorated my office during the years it has taken to complete this book. One shows his hand, the other shows his feet. Each postcard is deliberately and cunningly cropped from what seems to have been much larger black and white photographs. In the postcard of the hand, the wrist is turned upward so that the clearly ascertainable veins face the viewer. The hands have long, fine fingers with manicured but dirty fingernails. Even the crescents (lunules) at the bases of the nails are plainly visible. The lens has captured the wrinkled skin as a microscopically detailed surface. The feet are sturdier, but they too are uncannily "real" with slightly swollen ankles and finely chiseled veins. In Glob's words: "Like his fingerprints, the lines on the soles of the Grauballe man's feet were as sharp as when they were formed in the embryo, more than one and a half thousand years ago." The intense sharpness of the postcard photographs and the focused light also reveals what looks to be imprints into the skin made from the fabric of peat in which the man rested for centuries. The cropping of the photographs makes them "easy on the eye" and highlights an effect of seeing which seems intended to solicit emotive responses. Adjectives like fragile, delicate, exposed, and vulnerable spring to mind, and it is easy to imagine, for example, that if one came into near contact with the bog-hand, one would want to enfold it in a protective handshake.
Similarly, museum postcards with photographs of Tollund Man's face, as Anthony Purdy has pointed out, are fraught with Walter Benjamin's notion that "the human countenance was the last site of resistance in early photography for cult value against the encroachment of exhibition value." Purdy reminds us of Benjamin's comment that "The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge of the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of the human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty." And he concludes that although Tollund Man has become a tourist attraction, he "retains his extraordinary capacity to move." My museum postcards' power to move (in this case the power of Grauballe Man's hands and feet) resembles, I would argue, that of Tollund Man's face. We are implicitly stirred by the individuality of the lines and patterns. We may not see the hands and feet as individual characters or personalities, such as we do faces—but as the photo postcards suggest, when the photos are deliberately and strategically cropped to underscore their humanness and individuality, they take on "face" nonetheless. Indeed, when medical students are asked to perform their first autopsies, they are oft en protected from the discomfort of cutting into a dead human being by having not only the cadaver's face but also its hands and feet covered over.
Yet what is at issue here is not the bog bodies' actual faces, hands, or feet, but rather the particularly rich relation that photography as a medium has with them. Given that death has been a key player in the practice and theory of the photographic medium since its inauguration, bog bodies are well suited to keep company with photography in more ways than one. Almost immediately after its invention photography was theorized as a kind of open casket, a memorial apparatus in which we can see, chemically preserved, that which is no longer in existence yet mystically guarded against time's "relentless melt." It is worth repeating here what has become a well-known refrain in photography theory: namely, that the duplicity of photographs, the simultaneous act of making the dead alive and the living dead, has a particular and paradoxical poignancy when the object photographed is in fact already a dead body. The "funereal immobility," as Barthes has it, paradoxically makes "the corpse [...] alive, as corpse." Barthes, in his early analysis in "The Photographic Message," also points out how the "utopian character of denotation" makes photography appear as naïve and innocent, "a kind of Edenic state of the image." This resonates with the bog's equally naïve archaeological photo album. And Barthes's later phenomenological reading in Camera Lucida, in which he favors the uncoded, mnemonic aspects of photography (punctum) over the "rational intermediary of an ethical and political culture" (studium) also seems to cast light on the astonishment and wonder that the nameless bog people evoke when we look at them in photographs. Thus both the ontology of photography and the emotiveness of its effects (its affects) have a bearing on bogs and on the bodies preserved in them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from BODIES IN THE BOG and the Archaeological Imagination by KARIN SANDERS Copyright © 2009 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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