Peat Bogs and Iron Age Humans

One of my most treasured books from my college days was The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved by Danish scholar P.V. Glob (a real name), chronicling the custom of people burying dead bodies in boggy ground. Such burials are found throughout Northern Europe. It is believed the practice began around 5000 BCE and diminished around 700 CE.  Bogs are made of damp peaty soil, high in tannic acid and largely anaerobic, which had the affect of preserving the flesh, hair, clothing, fingernails, and even personal effects on the bodies. I had a mass-market Ballantine paperback published in 1973 (left with a cover photo of what became known as Tollund Man). I lost track of that copy some years ago, and have replaced it with a newer edition of the book, published by the NY Review of Books imprint (right).The new edition has prefatory material by the scholars Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul Barber, author of Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality.

On January 30th, the NY Times published a fascinating update about the burial practice, reporting on a database maintained by scholars with more than 1000 known bog burials in such countries as Ireland, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Archaeologists who’ve studied the sites and the bodies say some of them show evidence of violent treatment or even execution, perhaps incurred in the course of ritual or even sacrificial practice.

Despite what scholars in the Times article are describing, I don’t accept that all bog burials would’ve followed executions; it strikes me that at times a burial in a bog would have solved a challenge confronting mourners: how to inter or process the dead. Consider that if these 1000 burials have been found, these fifty centuries later, imagine how many multiples of that number there might have been bog burials down through the ages?

The images of the remains shown here cast my mind back uncounted generations when grieving families would’ve pondered how to inter their dead:

  • How do we dig several feet into hard-packed earth?
  • Who has a shovel, especially one that’s made from stout enough lumber and iron-forged steel so it won’t just snap in two?
  • Best not leave the grave too shallow, lest the remains be found and torn by animals, as was invoked in the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers.

In some instances, placing the dead in swampy ground would have been the simplest option, one that offered mourners the greater likelihood that the body of their loved one would be undisturbed.
In addition, survivors feared the violation of a grave. Corpse robbery—theft of keepsakes like jewelry, or the skeleton itself in the case of a body snatcher (see Robert Louis Stevenson’s story The Body Snatcher) is something that occurred. I know some people must find the study of funerary practice lugubrious, but I never have.

Inuit Elders Warning NASA: “The Earth has shifted, the sky has changed.” 

Please click headline for post.

Tracking Malaria, its Calamitous History and Worrying Future

Fascinating Q&A on C-Span BookTV w/narrative science writer Karen Masterson, author of The Malaria Project: The US Government’s Secret Mission to Find a Miracle Cure, which chronicles the efforts of the US military which had for long been worried about the disease’s potential to infect American troops serving in far-flung locales. There was a move to find a cure for the mosquito-borne disease. Interesting to me, the book, which looks to be fairly serious science, is published by NAL. They brought out it in 2014, apparently first in hardcover. By my reckoning, NAL is a house long known more for mass-market paperback fiction than narrative nonfiction in hardcover. [It looks like they’ve now brought it out now in trade paperback.] Good for NAL, a nice piece of publishing. More on Masterson and her book via this link. You can view the video via this link on BookTV’s website.

One thing Masterson said amazed me. The effectiveness of bed nets—which have been a useful tool in combating malaria, preventing mosquitoes from biting people while they sleep—is being eroded because mosquitoes, hungry for what scientists call their “blood meal,” are adapting their behavior and learning to bite people earlier in the day when they are still out and about. In watching her talk about this global affliction that still sickens and weakens millions worldwide every year—and kills a considerable percentage of those stricken—I was reminded of a book that I began discussing in 2006 with Paul R. Epstein—a doctor and scientist, and at the time, associate director of Harvard’s Center for Health and the Global Environment. Epstein was a trailblazer in studying the effects of climate change on human health. I first heard his distinctive New York accent when he was a guest that year on an episode of “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross. You can still hear it, via this link. Listening to their conversation in a rental car, in a classic ‘driveway moment,’ I learned that due to the planet’s warming temperatures, mosquitoes that transmit malaria have over the past several decades begun doing so at more northern latitudes and higher elevations than they have ever been known to do before. Epstein also discussed the finding that the tick-borne illness dengue fever is also occurring at latitudes and elevations where it was before not seen. Epstein discussed how these diseases are infecting a much greater number of people worldwide due to the warming of our planet.

These are only a couple of the scientific discoveries chronicled in Epstein’s book, Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do about It, co-written with Dan Ferber, which ultimately came out in 2011. I actually commissioned it in 2007, shortly after I became Editorial Director of Union Square Press at Sterling Publishing, a job that ended two years later when Sterling, a division of Barnes & Noble, shuttered the imprint, a milestone I’ve also written about on this blog. When I left the company, my old bosses quickly canceled Dr. Epstein’s book, although I had nearly completed editing the manuscript. Fortunately, that decision, though very shortsighted, while preventing the book from being published as soon as it might have, it was later picked up by the University of California Press, to be published alongside other important environmental titles. This is a link to the book on U Cal’s website. Sadly, Dr. Epstein, died in November 2011, at age 67, of cancer. Here’s a Washington Post obit on him. Though we fell out of touch after Union Square Press closed, I recall we did speak a couple more times, and he sent me a finished copy of the book, which he inscribed to me with a very generous message, “April 25, 2011 To Phil Turner—The motivating force for this book. Warm wishes, Paul,” pictured below. I didn’t know he was ill, and was stunned by news of his death.

Before Dr. Epstein became a teacher and researcher at Harvard, he had worked as a doctor in places like Mozambique and Angola, devoting himself to the study of tropical diseases and improving public health in developing countries. It was a privilege to meet and work with him. I was really sorry he wasn’t able to make personal appearances in front of audiences, on TV, and on radio, like I first heard him. As I listened to Karen Masterson on C-Span tonight, I found myself wondering if she knows about Paul’s research on the growing incidence of malaria and other illnesses worldwide due to climate change, and if she has perhaps read Dr. Epstein’s book. I see she teaches science writing at Johns Hopkins, so perhaps I’ll have a chance to send her this post and find out. [I did correspond with Ms Masterson and she was interested to learn about Dr Epstein and his book.]