Bodies in the Bog: A Book Review

When I was at the Society for American Archaeology meetings in Sacramento last month, I kept hearing about this book, Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination. Bodies in the Bog was written by Karin Sanders, who is a professor of Scandinavian Studies at Berkeley, and not an archaeologist. The book wasn't a brand new book: in fact it was published by the University of Chicago in 2009. But archaeologists at the meeting kept bringing it up in paper sessions and in idle conversations. I was intrigued and I went and begged for a review copy at the University of Chicago Press book table.

Bodies in the Bog Cover Art. ©2009 University of Chicago Press

Bodies in the Bog turns out to be about the reactions that bog bodies have created in painters, poets, sculptors, novelists, movie directors, politicians and (gulp) psychoanalysts: all creative investigations into bog bodies beyond that of scientific archaeology. The book should sit very nicely alongside your copy of Peter Vilhelm Glob's 1965 The Bog People; it illustrates the richness of ideas and images created by a wide range of people of the unknown but startlingly close past.

• Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination, the full book review
• Bog Bodies, the glossary entry
• Bog Bodies, individual descriptions of a handful of the bodies

Sanders, Karin. 2009. Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.

Glob, Peter Vilhelm. 2004[1965]. The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved. New York Review of Books, New York.