FARGO N.D.
A North Dakota State University professor is studying mummies that were preserved in peat bogs.
Anthropology professor Heather Gill-Robinson will be spending the summer studying six mummies and one skeleton in conjunction with Archaeologiesches Landesmuseum Schloss Gottorf, a museum in northern Germany.
Researchers are trying to determine why the conditions in marshy peat bogs preserves the bodies, Gill-Robinson said.
“We think there’s some sort of a process that’s happening when the body meets the bog, but we don’t know what it is,” she said.
Researchers also are not sure how the bodies ended up in the peat. Some likely were intentionally hidden.
At least one of the bodies Gill-Robinson is studying was the victim of a violent death. The man was decapitated, stabbed in the heart and mutilated.
