‘Earth Pantry, Bone Vault’: A Critical Analysis of the Peat Bog as an Archaeological Archive

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The decay-halting effects of the Sphagnum moss that accumulates in the peat bogs of Northern Europe have preserved some of the most striking and provocative organic archaeological material from the ancient past, inspiring authors from a wide variety of disciplines. The botanist Harry Godwin envisaged the bog as an archive that removes its botanical and archaeological contents from the usual processes of time, delivering them to us as precious and unique repositories of information about the past. This paper reconsiders this archival metaphor from an archaeological perspective, with a particular focus on human remains. With the British Museum’s Lindow Man archive as a case study, it will explore some of the archivization processes that bog bodies go through and reflect on their epistemic significance for archaeology.