Illustration by Radio 29Tip By Malia WollanThe bodies have also been transformed
by their time in the bogs. Their hair, where
it remains, is a deep and inhuman red.
Their bones have often been cracked after
hundreds of years of the peat pancaking
their bodies. Even their exhumation can
become a kind of violent metamorpho-
sis, as the open air accelerates the long-
postponed decomposition.
Many of the people found in the bogs
had been executed. The Tollund Man
was almost certainly hanged, while oth-
ers appear to have been disemboweled,
decapitated or bled from the throat. One
young boy, unearthed in Northern Ger-
many, appeared to be blindfolded. The
intention with which the bodies were
interred — as with a woman, also dis-
covered on the Jutland Peninsula, whose
body was pinned down with stakes — sug-
gested a ritualistic aim. In his book ‘‘The
Bog People,’’ P. V. Glob, a former director
general of museums and antiquities for
Denmark, argued that the unearthed were
either criminals or sacrifi cial victims,
killed to appease ancient gods.
In analyzing its own holdings, the
National Museum of Ireland emerged
with a diff erent interpretation, empha-
sizing the inherently political nature of
the deaths. Found near ancient seats of
power, the bodies display characteristics
of the Iron Age upper class, from fi ne
clothes to hair gel. Trimmed nails, in this
view, point more toward a violent transfer
of power than a primitive blood rite.
Eamonn P. Kelly, the museum’s former
keeper of Irish antiquities, has posited
that kings may have been executed for
failing to ensure adequate food for their
people, a problem that worsened in the
sixth century, when Europe’s climate
began to change. How fi tting that their
bodies, usually discovered during the cut-
ting of peat, which is burned for energy,
have become unexpected climate reve-
nants, like the ice mummies disgorged by
retreating glaciers or the diseases thought
dead forever beneath melting permafrost.
When I fi rst came upon the Dublin
bodies, I was barely out of college, liv-
ing thinly on a temporary work visa. At
that point in my life, I spent my months
thrilled by the ready access to deep time:
ogham stones, passage tombs, Bronze
Age barrows, ring forts, all marked in
red on my collection of survey maps. I
was sure that I could construct a narra-
tive of the past large enough to contain
me, a certain thing on which I could
steady myself.
Bog bodies can be exasperating because
their shocking and impossible survival
does not yield as much information as you
might wish for. Criminals, fallen kings, sac-
rifi cial victims, they are almost perversely
unrepresentative of the everyday life of
their lost societies. The indisputable phys-
ical fact of the body turns out to be a blind
alley, a mask that obscures as much as it
reveals about its identity: names, memo-
ries, experiences, epiphanies.
Everything that matters, the bog bodies
tell us, is one day lost. In the museum, I
press my face up to their glass cases, and
I’m reminded of how limited our knowl-
edge of their world is. Of course, the past
does not exist to be explained. It is sover-
eign, peculiar and particular. To accept thisis to accept the freedom of our own place in
our own time, unique and peculiar in itself.
But that’s not to say our worlds are
entirely disconnected. In their introduc-
tion to a reissue of Glob’s book, the schol-
ars Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T.
Barber note that the people who deposited
the bodies found in this era had likely come
across other burials in the bogs, whether
sacrifi cial victims or criminals or deposed
kings, from earlier eras than their own.
The Tollund Man was himself laid in a pre-
existing cutting. The past has its own past.
When our Anthropocene remains are
unearthed in 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 years, what
will be understood of our own inexplica-
ble, sacrifi cial rituals? Face to face with the
bodies, you would see skin and bones, hair
and clothes, and what else? Suggesting
everything, they explain nothing.How to Harvest Caviar
‘‘You need a female fish,’’ says Josh
Lang, site manager at Sterling Caviar’s
white-sturgeon farm in Elverta, Calif.
It’s nearly impossible to ascertain a stur-
geon’s sex from the outside; Lang and his
team use ultrasound on 3-year-old fi sh to
spot testes and ovaries. (Male fi sh and
females with small ovaries are killed for
meat.) When the fi sh are 6, start yearly
biopsies by inserting a thin fl exible sam-
pling straw into the abdomen and pulling
out a few eggs. ‘‘To determine whether
it’s ready, you need to see, touch and
taste it,’’ Lang says.
It is still legal in some places to catch
sturgeon in the wild and harvest their
eggs, but it is strongly discouraged,
because most sturgeon species arecritically endangered. Take caviar from a
farmed fi sh. Squeeze the little glop of eggs
from your sampling straw between your
fi ngers. You’re looking for fi rm, equal-size
eggs about three millimeters in diameter.
If you see smaller, white eggs, they aren’t
mature. Squishy roe indicate that the fi sh
has begun to reabsorb her eggs, in order
to recoup energy if stressed or if spawn-
ing conditions aren’t right. ‘‘You’ll need
to wait about two years before that fi sh is
ripe again,’’ Lang says.
Once identifi ed, a ripe fi sh needs to
be purged for the best-quality caviar.
That means extra cold, clean water and
no food for weeks. ‘‘Unfortunately,’’ Lang
says, ‘‘the fi sh does not survive’’ what
comes next. Position belly up and slice
down the abdomen’s center, being care-
ful not to let your knife slip to either side.
Gently pull out the ovaries, which can
have as many as a million eggs. Rub them
over a screen to detach the roe from the
ovary membrane. Egg color will vary by
fi sh and might include golds, browns
and blacks. The most expensive caviar
Sterling sells contains two colors; one
kilogram goes for $4,793. (Caviar from
beluga sturgeon can sell for as much as
$10,000 per kilogram.)
Caviar can occasion fancy feelings,
but it’s good to situate those momentary
sensations in geologic time: Sturgeon
evolved more than 100 million years
ago; they were swimming in murky riv-
ers when dinosaurs roamed.In the museum,
I press my face
up to their glass
cases, and I’m
reminded of
how limited our
knowledge of
their world is.Robert Rubsam
is a writer, translator
and M.F.A. candidate
in creative writing at
Columbia University.
Th is is his fi rst article
for the magazine.