For almost 2000 years, the man lay buried in a bog in the north of England preserved by the peaty liquor. Then in 1958, to the surprise of a gang of peat-cutters and the consternation of the local constabulary, her – or rather his head – emerged from its cold, soggy tomb into the warmth and light of a summer’s day. Unlike his near neighbour, Lindow Man, who became an istant celebrity when he was discovered in 1984, the headfrom the bog attracted little interest.
After a cursory prod and a somewhat belated post-mortem, the head was buried again, this time in a cupboard in Manchester Medical School. Later after Lindow Man had hit the headlines, the Manchester bog man was dug out and examined more closely. Now, 45 years after the peat-cutters stumbled across him, the mystery murder victim is no longer just a brown battered skull. Worsley Man has a face his family would almost certainly recogonise.
IT TOOK the police five days to search Worsley Moss, 100 hectares of peat bog a short hop from metropolitan Manchester. On 18 August 1958, workmen slicing through the peat had uncovered a severed head. Suspecting the worst, they called the police.
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The head didn’t seem to have been there long. There was still flesh clinging to one side of the face and a lock of hair above the right ear. Two experts who examined it agreed that it belonged to a man between 20 and 40 who had been in the bog less than a year. With so little to go on, the police tramped the bog, their heavy boot-prints filling with dark, dank water as they searched for more remains. They found nothing.
A few weeks later, the results of X-rays and chemical tests suggested that the head had been in the bog for at least a century and perhaps even 500 years. At the inquest into the man’s death, the coroner had little option but to return an open verdict. The case was closed and the head handed over to the Manchester Medical School, where it ended up in a cupboard in the pathology department’s museum.
Twenty-five years later, peat cutters unearthed another head – at Lindow Moss, south of Manchester. This time the police had a possible victim, a local woman whose husband was suspected of killing her and hiding her body in his garden – which backed onto the bog. Confronted with the discovery, the man confessed and was convicted of murder. Research later revealed that the body dated from the Iron Age and was male.
The next year, an almost complete Iron Age corpse emerged from Lindow Moss. The body was shrunken and twisted from its time in the peat but otherwise almost perfectly preserved. Fifty specialists went to work on him, piecing together a detailed picture of his life and death. The man had been subjected to no fewer than three sacrificial rituals intended to satisfy three Celtic gods. His executioners had struck him on the head, probably with an axe, cut his throat and strangled him with a garrotte made from animal sinew. Then they buried him under water – the gateway to the underworld of the Celtic gods.
While Lindow Man was big news, Worsley Man had been forgotten. But a couple of years later, in 1987, John Denton, chief technician in the university’s pathology department, rediscovered the head and Neil Garland, a postgraduate student in search of a project, jumped at the chance to examine a bog body.
Unlike Lindow Man with his creased and leathery face, the Worsley head was little more than a skull. The chemistry of the bog had preserved some soft tissue, but the rest was just bone – softened and deformed under the weight of the peat. The man had all his teeth when he died, but now there were only two. And the head had suffered during the original post-mortem, when the pathologist had hacked it about and then put it back together with crude wire staples.
Despite these difficulties, close inspection revealed a wound behind the right ear, fractures to the top of the skull and a sharp cut through the second cervical vertebra that would have decapitated him. Embedded in the soft tissue were the remains of a garrotte. Worsley Man had much in common with the man from Lindow Moss.
In fact, he and his neighbour were remarkably similar. The condition of the pulp in the two surviving teeth put Worsley Man’s age when he died at between 20 and 30. Lindow man was in his mid-20s. The two men lived around the same time: radiocarbon dating of a tiny piece of skin placed Worsley Man in the late Iron Age, around AD 120. Both were Celts living in the turbulent times when the Roman legions were expanding their occupation into northern Britain.
As a specimen, Worsley Man was too ancient for the medical school and was handed over to The Manchester Museum and into the care of archaeologist John Prag. “Whoever killed him did a more thorough job than on Lindow Man,” says Prag. “He was bashed on the head, garrotted, had his throat cut and his head chopped off.” That links his death directly to the Celtic cult of the head. Even the Celts must have thought it brutal. “In time, carved wood and stone heads came to replace real heads as symbols of the human spirit and as offerings to the gods,”Prag says.
Prag is a pioneer in the use of science-based facial reconstruction. Rebuilding faces not only puts flesh on old bones, turning dry archaeological remains into real people, but it can also help to solve archaeological and historical problems. Across the road from the museum is the university’s Unit of Art in Medicine, renowned for such reconstructions. And when the museum decided to create a new gallery to highlight this work, Prag decided it was time to put a face to Worsley Man.
In January, facial anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson started work on the head. The key to the reconstruction is the skull: its bones determine the shape and structure of the face, the proportions, the shape of the nose, the position of the eyes and so on. Wilkinson would normally start with a cast of the skull. But the bones were soft, shrunken and deformed in places. It was impossible to make a direct cast. Wilkinson sent the head to Manchester’s Christie Hospital for a CT scan. With this, she could digitally strip the soft tissue from the virtual skull to leave bare bone.
The next step was for a team at University College London to create a digital replica of the skull, expand it back to its original size, and make a copy. “There was some deformity from the blow to the head, and the nasal bones had been pushed in by the pressure in the peat bog,” says Wilkinson. “We had to correct these with wax and clay and then recast the skull in its pre-damaged shape.”
Now Wilkinson could begin to build up the man’s facial muscles in clay, following a strict set of anatomical rules. “The structure of the skeleton determines the shape of the muscles and that gives the shape of the face.” Other structures, such as the parotid glands in front of the ears, are also important. “This gland is bulky – it looks like solidified porridge – and its structure is important to the shape of the cheek,” says Wilkinson.
The nasal bones tell you almost everything you need to recreate the nose – its slope, projection and the height of the fleshy part of the nostrils. The only part left to guesswork is the tip. “We make one in sympathy with the rest of the nose,” says Wilkinson. Ears are trickier. The bones provide almost no clues. “Although we do know if they had lobes,” she says. If the mastoid processes, bony spurs at the base of the skull, project downwards, it means the lower part of the ears were attached to the head. If they point forwards, the ears had lobes. Worsley Man had ear lobes.
With the muscles in place and the nose and ears fixed, Wilkinson rolled out thin layers of clay skin to cover them. The final step was to cast the head in wax and send it to a make-up artist for the finishing touches, including the blue eyes and dark hair typical of a Celt. At the unveiling of the finished head, Wilkinson wasn’t sure what to expect. “You can’t visualise the person just by looking at the skull,” she says. “When you finish the face it’s always a surprise.”
This face belonged to a strong young man at the peak of his powers. That fits the emerging pattern of bog sacrifices, says Prag. “He was just the sort of man you would choose, the best you could offer the gods.”