The Surprising and Iconic Bronze Age Egtved Girl: Teenage Remains Tell a Story of Trade and Travel

One of the best-known Danish Bronze Age burials, the well preserved Egtved Girl was found in a barrow in 1921. Her woolen clothing, hair, and nails were perfectly preserved, but all her bones were missing. Scientists studying the ancient teenager’s remains in 2015 made the surprising discovery that the Egtved Girl traveled great distances before her death, and wasn’t from Denmark at all.

A study published in the journal Nature details the results of modern tests done by scientists. Strontium isotope analysis on Egtved Girl’s molar, hair, and fingernails, combined with examination of her distinctive woolen clothing, have revealed she was born and raised hundreds of miles from her burial site in Egtved, in modern Denmark.

Findings show she likely came from The Black Forest of South West Germany, and she traveled between the two locations via ship frequently in the last two years of her life.

The Egtved Girl

According to LiveScience, the Egtved Girl’s oak coffin was uncovered in 1921 from a Bronze Age archaeological site near Egtved, Denmark. The grave was found within a burial mound of dense peat bog, and has been dated to 1370 BC. 

Inside the coffin, the 16 to 18-year-old girl was buried. She is believed to have been of high status. The teenager had been laid on an ox hide and covered by a rough woolen blanket. The contours of where her dead body had lain are still visible, pressed into the ox hide beneath her.

She was of slim build, with mid-length blonde hair, and her clothing—a short string skirt and small, midriff-baring, sleeved top—caused a sensation when revealed in the 20s. Around her waist she had worn a large, spiked bronze disc decorated with spirals. Even now people recreate the stylish Bronze Age fashion .

Other grave goods included bronze pins, a sewing awl, and a hair net. Local flowers decorated the top of the coffin (indicating a summertime burial), as did a small bucket of beer made of honey, wheat, and cowberries.

Another body was found with Egtved Girl in her coffin. Ashes and bones comprised the cremated remains of a small child recovered near Egtved Girl’s head. The identity of the child, who was about five or six years old when he or she died, is not known. No DNA could be recovered from either sets of remains, so their relationship is a mystery.

Well-Preserved Remains

Scientists found that the soil composition of the grave worked as a microclimate, preserving some items and destroying others. Rainwater seeped in to the hollowed-out, oak-trunk coffin, but it was starved of oxygen. These conditions decayed the bones completely away, but left behind excellently-preserved fingernails, hair, scalp, a small part of her brain, and clothing.

Senior researcher Karin Margarita Frei, from the National Museum of Denmark and Centre for Textile Research at the University of Copenhagen analyzed the Bronze Age girl’s remains, according to Science Daily .

Trade and Travel

Analysis of the high-status teenager’s remains, as well as the cremated bones of the young child, showed that the pair had spent much of their lives in a distant land, thought to be Schwarzwald (the Black Forest) in Germany.

“If we consider the last two years of the girl’s life, we can see that, 13 to 15 months before her death, she stayed in a place with a strontium isotope signature very similar to the one that characterizes the area where she was born.

Then she moved to an area that may well have been Jutland. After a period of c. 9 to 10 months there, she went back to the region she originally came from and stayed there for four to six months before she travelled to her final resting place, Egtved. Neither her hair nor her thumb nail contains a strontium isotopic signatures which indicates that she returned to Scandinavia until very shortly before she died.

As an area’s strontium isotopic signature is only detectable in human hair and nails after a month, she must have come to ‘Denmark’ and ‘Egtved’ about a month before she passed away,” Karin Margarita Frei told Science Daily.

This movement makes sense to researchers. Kristian Kristiansen of the University of Gothenburg told Science Daily, “In Bronze Age Western Europe, Southern Germany and Denmark were the two dominant centers of power, very similar to kingdoms.

We find many direct connections between the two in the archaeological evidence, and my guess is that the Egtved Girl was a Southern German girl who was given in marriage to a man in Jutland so as to forge an alliance between two powerful families.”

The bronze belt disc found on Egtved Girl may have come to the area via the busy trade routes of the day.  The spiral decorations are said to be related to a Nordic solar cult, and the bronze is thought to have originated somewhere in the Alps.

Further, the wool that made up her clothing came from sheep outside of Denmark. The ‘fashionable’ Egtved Girl and her mysterious tiny companion have captivated people since their discovery in 1921. Modern research brings the life and death of the prehistoric girl to light in amazing detail, and gives us a better understanding of early European people.

But she is not the only teenage girl found in Denmark that has created a stir in the last few years. In 2017, it was announced that another famous Bronze Age burial of a teenage girl, this time found in Jutland, Denmark was also a traveler from faraway lands. Strontium analysis of the 16- to 18-year-old Skrydstrup woman suggests she originally came from Germany, the Czech Republic, France, or Sweden.

As archaeologist Karin Frei of the National Museum of Denmark told ScienceNordic, “We can’t say with 100 per cent certainty where she [the Skrydstrup woman] came from, and we may never be able to, but she definitely wasn’t Danish.

It gives us so many new perspectives. Now we know that Egtved Girl was not an isolated case.” These studies show that early European mobility was more dynamic that previously believed; Bronze Age people were trading and traveling long distances, quicky.

Tollund Man – the preserved face from Prehistoric Denmark and the tale of ritual sacrifice

Tollund Man is the naturally mummified body of a man who lived during the 4th century BC, during the period characterised in Scandinavia as the Pre-Roman Iron Age. He was hanged as a sacrifice to the gods and placed in a peat bog where he remained preserved for more than two millennia.

The face of the Tollund Man is as preserved as the day he died. The look upon his face is calm and peaceful, as though looking upon a sleeping man.

It was 6 th May, 1950, when two brothers cutting peat in the Bjaeldskov bog, an area about 10 kilometres west of the Danish town of Silkeborg, came upon the lifeless body of a man. The man’s physical features were so well-preserved that he was mistaken at the time of discovery for a recent murder victim and the police were called.

Puzzled by the appearance of the remains and recalling the discovery of two other ‘bog bodies’ in the same bog in 1927 and 1938, the police asked an archaeologist named P. V.

Glob to come and view the discovery. Recognizing that this was an ancient burial, Glob began efforts to remove the body for further study.

The examination of the Tollund Man at the National Museum of Denmark in 1950 revealed an unusually well-preserved body of an adult male who was slightly over five feet tall and approximately 40 years old when he died.

The stubble on his chain, eyelashes, and the wrinkles in his skin can still be observed in minute detail. His last meal was porridge made from 40 different kinds of seeds and grains.

Tollund Man was naked apart from a leather cap and a wide belt around his waist. Around his neck was a braided leather rope tightened in a noose.  

It was clear that he had been hanged – but why? Was he a criminal, a victim of crime, or part of a ritual sacrifice? Archaeologists embarked on an investigation to find out.

Like all the other ‘bog bodies’ that have been found, Tollund Man showed no signs of injury or trauma, apart from that caused by the hanging. It was clear that he had also been buried carefully in the bog – his eyes and mouth had been closed and his body placed in a sleeping position – something that wouldn’t have happened if he were a common criminal.

When somebody died in the Iron Age, the body was cremated in a funeral pyre and the ashes placed in an urn, but Tolland Man was buried in a watery place where the early people of Europe believed they could communicate with their many gods and goddesses.  He was also killed in the winter or early spring, a time that human sacrifices were made to the goddess of spring.

Taking into account all of these factors, archaeologists believe that Tollund Man was ritually sacrificed. He may have been an offering to the gods in return for peat that was taken from the bog.

The incredible discovery of Tollund Man has brought to life in vivid detail the lives and deaths of the people of prehistoric Denmark. He now resides in a special room of the Silkeborg Museum.

The Huldremose Woman: One of the best preserved and best dressed bog bodies

More than 500 bodies and skeletons were buried in the peat bogs in Denmark between 800 B.C. and A.D. 200.

In 1879, Niels Hanson, a school teacher in Ramten, was digging peat turfs from a peat bog near Ramten, Jutland, Denmark. While doing this, he recovered a bog body of an elderly Iron Age woman. The body became known as “Huldremose Woman” or “Huldre Fen Woman”.

Supposedly, the woman had passed away sometime between 160 B.C. and 340 A.D. It is believed that she lived at least 40 years, which to the standards of the time was a very long life. Like most of the bog bodies found in Denmark, the woman from Huldremose was fully clothed.

More than 130 years after its discovery, it remains one of the best preserved and best-dressed bog bodies. This discovery offered a rare opportunity to understand the clothing of the Iron Age in Northern Europe and Scandinavia.

She was dressed in a costume consisting of a woollen skirt (tied at the waist with a thin leather strap inserted into a woven waistband), a woollen scarf (139-144 cm in length and 49 cm in width, wrapped around the woman’s neck and fastened under her left arm with a pin made from a bird bone) and two skin capes.

The fur coats she was wrapped in were made from the skin of 14 sheep. The sewn-in objects have probably functioned as amulets. Not only was her costume of high quality; it was also colored in a multitude of colors. olor analysis has shown that originally the skirt was blue and the scarf was in red color.

The finding of the woman has encouraged many different debates and interpretations over the years. Medical analysis revealed that she had received a cut to her upper arm, removing her arm from the rest of her body before she was deposited in the peat.

It was previously believed that the cut to the arm was the cause of death and the woman died as a result of a subsequent loss of blood.

However, later forensic analysis found evidence of strangulation, her hair was tied with a long woolen rope, which was also wrapped around her neck several times.

5,000-year-old ‘bog body’ found in Denmark may be a human sacrifice victim

The bones of a possible ancient human sacrifice victim have been found in a bog in Denmark.

Archaeologists have discovered the ancient skeletal remains of a so-called bog body in Denmark near the remnants of a flint ax and animal bones, clues that suggest this person was ritually sacrificed more than 5,000 years ago. 

Little is known so far about the supposed victim, including the person’s sex and age at the time of death. But the researchers think the body was deliberately placed in the bog during the Neolithic, or New Stone Age.

“That’s the early phase of the Danish Neolithic,” said excavation leader Emil Struve(opens in new tab), an archaeologist and curator at the ROMU museums in Roskilde. “We know that traditions of human sacrifices date back that far — we have other examples of it.”

Dozens of so-called bog bodies have been found throughout northwestern Europe — particularly in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain, where human sacrifices in bogs seem to have persisted for several thousand years.

“In our area here, we have several different bog bodies,” Struve told Live Science. “It’s an ongoing tradition that goes back all the way to the Neolithic.”

Ancient bones

The ROMU archaeological team found the latest set of bones in October ahead of the construction of a housing development. The site, which has now been drained, had been a bog near the town of Stenløse, on the large island of Zealand and just northwest of the Danish capital Copenhagen.

Danish law requires archaeologists to examine all land that’s to be built on, and the first bones of the Stenløse bog body were found during a test excavation at the site, Struve said. 

The archaeologists will now fully excavate the site in the spring, when the ground has thawed after winter. But the initial excavations have revealed leg bones, a pelvis and part of a lower jaw with some teeth still attached. The other parts of the body lay outside a protective layer of peat in the bog and were not preserved, he noted.

Struve hopes that the sex of the body can be determined based on the pelvis and that wear on the teeth may indicate the individual’s age. In addition, the teeth could be sources of ancient DNA, which might reveal even more about the person’s identity, he said.

Bog bodies

Struve said the flint ax-head found near the body was not polished after it was made and may have never been used, and so it seems likely that this, too, was a deliberate offering.

The oldest bog body in the world, known as Koelbjerg Man, was found in Denmark in the 1940s and may date to 10,000 years ago, while others date to the Iron Age in the region from about 2,500 years ago.

One of the most famous and best preserved bog bodies is Tollund Man, who was found on Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula in 1950 and is thought to have been sacrificed in about 400 B.C.

A few of the bog bodies seem to have been accident victims who drowned after they fell in the water, but archaeologists think most were killed deliberately, perhaps as human sacrifices at times of famines or other disasters.

Miranda Aldhouse-Green(opens in new tab), a professor emeritus of history, archaeology and religion at Cardiff University in the U.K. and the author of the book “Bog Bodies Uncovered: Solving Europe’s Ancient Mystery”(opens in new tab) (Thames & Hudson, 2015), said ancient people were likely well aware that bogs could preserve bodies.

“If you put a body in the bog, it would not decay — it would stay between the worlds of the living and the dead.”

Archaeologists discover giant defensive minefield from the roman iron age

Archaeologists have unearthed a massive structure in Lolland that is believed to have been used to ward off an attacking army back in the Roman Iron Age.  So far, 770 meters of the structure have been detected.

In 2022 a team of archaeologists from the Museum Lolland-Falster in Denmark discovered a vast ancient “hole belt”: a defense land work featuring over 1000 long lines and rows of small holes dug into the ground.

According to archaeologist and Museum Inspector, Bjørnar Mage, talking to TV2 EAST , this hole belt was designed to slow down hostile advancing armies from the south coast of Lolland and it was built during the reign of the Roman Empire in Europe, and while 770 meters of the belt have been measured, museum staff estimate it may be up to twice as big.

The hole belt is thought to have been located about a kilometer from the coast between two impassable wetlands meaning attacking enemies advancing into Lolland, would have been seriously hampered, says Bjørnar Måge.

Since 2022, two smaller excavations have studied the hole belt but this recent excavation was the first to illustrate how large this ancient military feature actually was, and revealed that it had built at one time in a major constriction project.

Tomb of the Pagan Prince

The hole belt might have been built in the days leading up to a major battle , but maybe it was a reaction to a concrete threat where you “wanted to make sure you had time to defend yourself against an advancing enemy,” says Bjørnar Mage in a Nyheder article. And this apparent immediacy in the building of the structure is supported in the fact no evidence has been discovered that the belt was ever maintained after its construction and it appears that it had been left to lapse.

So far, three-hole belts have been found to the east of the main belt, but a number have been found in Jutland. However, this belt is much wider than any of the Jutland examples.

Bjørnar Måge believes the building of the hole belt required “considerable strength and hinterland” and that it was beyond the abilities of the average local farmer, leading him to suspect that “a local warlord or prince” was behind the construction.” He said it takes “time and a lot of manpower” to build such a large defense force and this is only something that would make sense if there was a “major man behind it.”

Perhaps lending weight to this line of thinking, not far from the hole belt in the town of Hoby near Dannemare, archaeologists discovered a stone built tomb dating from the Roman Iron Age but the researchers have not yet been able to associate the two sites yet.

Imagine For A Second, The Horror Of Being Trapped In A Hole Belt

The coasts of Denmark during the late Iron Age were invaded by armies from Norway and Eastern Europe but no historical records exist pertaining to military activities in the north of the country, but the belt indicates a major battle was prepared for.

Putting ancient hole belts in context, Bjørnar Måge compares them with “modern minefields” designed specifically to delay advancing enemy forces. According to writers J.E. and H.W. Kaufmann’s 2018 Classical to Medieval Fortifications in the Lands of the Western Roman Empire, “Caesar’s Lilies”, were Roman-built ditches about 1 meter (3.3ft) deep containing sharpened wooden spikes and Bjørnar Måge, said Viet Cong soldiers used “ Caesar’s lilies” against American soldiers as recently as the Vietnam War.

The archaeologists in Denmark believe the hole belt was designed to delay advancing armies so that the native army could get into the most tactically suitable positions, from where they could “shoot the attackers with arrows from towers” arranged behind the hollow belt.

But at this time no archaeological remains of such towers have been found, says Bjørnar Mage, however, towers were not needed to seriously hamper an advancing Roman army, for example:

Imagine you are on the front line of a Roman army. You’ve just spent eight months advancing into Denmark, sleepless and weary having defended your camp from native guerrilla attacks every night. Your sword is blunted chopping the skeletons of Denmark’s indigenous peoples and you are standing amidst your 6000 brothers in arms when you are deafened with the war cry “We Are Legion” as your field commander signals you to advance into the hole belt.

Tip-toeing around thousands of wooden spikes and deep pits your advance is slow, but you are almost at the other side and stop to take a breath, and to prepare your psychology for another mass-slaughter.

But then, your accumulated worst fears arrive in one nightmarish moment as the Danish infantry begin to thin, making way for their special forces who ride forward through the morning mist: 200 mounted cavalries armed with bows who fringe the hole belt.

Realizing their destiny, panic spreads among your men and most are reduced to whimpering as the sky quickly darkens with thousands of heavy oak, iron-tipped arrows, and for the last time your thoughts turn to your family and the swaying wheat fields from whence you came, and to where you will now return, courtesy of the hole belt.

Unfortunately, due to its environmental circumstances, the Lolland hole belt is rapidly disappearing and Bjørnar Mage said that if the site had been left for as little as five more years “there would probably be nothing left” and he says only the bottom five centimeters of the belt have been preserved in many areas of the structure.

Huge Medieval Coin Hoard Found In Southeastern Denmark

A treasure of 1,000 silver coins from the Middle Ages has been found in Vejle close to a forest. The coins, which are made of 80 percent silver and 20 percent copper, weigh approximately one gram apiece.

Some 803 of them are loose, while the rest, up to 1,000, are attached to the remains of the pot in which they were buried.

The story behind the find is more or less a treasure hunt in itself! It all started back in 2022 when an elderly couple walking in the woods by Uhrhøj found four coins lying on the path between some twigs and leaves. The couple later handed in the coins to VejleMuseerne.

In August 2022, another coin found in the same area was handed in to the museum, and then another one last month.

This prompted Kasper Terp Høgsberg, an archaeologist at VejleMuseerne, to visit the area with a metal detector on September 30, and it did not take him long to find the whole treasure.

The treasure is the first of its kind from the period found in the area, and the museum believes it might bring more nuance to the local history.

“It felt completely unreal. It is a once-in-a-lifetime thing to find such a treasure. It will never happen again in my career as an archaeologist!” said Høgsberg.

“I thought I was going to find a lost purse with 20 coins along a road, but it just kept going until I eventually had hundreds of coins.”

The coins are a mix between Danish coins and coins minted in German Hanseatic cities in the early 1400s. One of the Danish coins was minted in 1424, and experts believe the treasure was buried within the following two to three decades.

During those years, there were many conflicts between Denmark and the northern German Hanseatic cities.

However, the Hanseatic League, despite the conflict, was Denmark’s main trading partner, which explains the mix of coins.

Archaeologists estimate that the value of the coins at the time would be the equivalent of buying 10 cows – or enough to feed a farmer’s family for more than a year.

The museum believes in the possibility there are more coins out there, and it has launched a call for people to hand over any coins found in the area to the museum.