The Perfect Corpse
WGBH/Boston
2006
The soft tissues of the human body decay soon after burial, leaving only bones and teeth behind. Exceptions to this pattern—ancient bodies with well-preserved soft tissues—are a treasure beyond price for archaeologists. They form under conditions that simultaneously preserve the tissue and inhibit the growth of the microorganisms that would normally consume it: extreme cold, extreme dryness, and especially extreme acidity. The peat bogs of Northwest Europe, where sphagnum moss and water form an acidic bath that preserves human flesh in a process similar to the tanning of leather, are a particularly rich source of preserved bodies. Roughly two thousand “bog bodies” have been uncovered in Britain, Ireland, Denmark, and northern Germany. The Perfect Corpse, an episode of the PBS science documentary series Nova, tells the story of two of the most recent: “Old Croghan Man” and “Clonycavan Man,” named for the sites, only twenty-five miles apart, where they were unearthed in 2003.
The film follows a team of archaeologists, forensic anthropologists, pathologists, and museum conservators as they systematically investigate the two bodies. The analysis begins with anatomical observations that will be obvious even to viewers—the lower halves of both bodies are missing, as is Old Croghan Man’s head and one of Clonycavan Man’s arms—and moves on to increasingly specific, increasingly esoteric conclusions. Both bodies, the team concludes, belonged to Celts in their early-to-mid twenties who died somewhere in the 2nd century BC, Clonycavan Man stood a modest five-foot-two, Old Croghan Man was tall even by modern standards at six-foot-six. Both men were deliberately killed: Old Croghan Man tortured with a knife and then stabbed multiple times, and Clonycavan Man struck three times in the face and head with a heavy, edged tool. Both, based on the appearance of their hands and fingernails, enjoyed lives relatively free from heavy manual labor. Both, according to the contents of their stomachs and the nitrogen levels in their fingernails, ate relatively well. Old Croghan man’s pre-mortem diet was rich in grains and vegetables, suggesting that he was killed in the summer when such foods were plentiful. Clonycavan Man’s meat-rich diet, on the other hand, suggests that he may have died during the winter. Clonycavan Man’s hair yields further clues to the world he inhabited. It is dressed with a preparation made from the sap of a pine tree found only in the south of France. The fact that he had access to it suggests an active trade, in luxury items at least, between Ireland and the Continent. Radiocarbon dating shows that both men lived in the
The film intersperses scenes of the investigators at work in the laboratory with reenacted snippets that illustrate the theories they are developing. The reenactments are brief and highly stylized, with self-consciously “artsy” lighting, tight close-ups, and rapid-fire editing that distinguish them visually from the staid “documentary” style of the laboratory scenes. The overall effect is similar to an episode of the television series CSI, a sensible and probably deliberate decision on the part of the filmmakers. Fans of CSI and similar programs are unlikely to be startled by anything shown or described in The Perfect Corpse, but younger and more sensitive viewers may find it disturbing. The laboratory scenes include detailed close-ups of the bodies and the autopsies, and investigators discuss the wounds inflicted on them in explicit (though clinical) detail. The reenactments of torture, ritual murder, and bog burial are, like the shower scene in Psycho, horrific without being especially graphic.
The greatest strength of The Perfect Corpse is the filmmakers’ belief that their subject matter—the two bog bodies and the investigators’ examination of them—is inherently dramatic and needs little or no narrative embellishment. The film is consistently, scrupulously careful about distinguishing between the observable data (the condition of the corpses), straightforward inferences from the data (cause of death, pre-mortem diet), and more speculative inferences shaped by our knowledge of other bog burials and Celtic culture (possible motives for what appears to be premeditated, socially sanctioned murder). It deals at length with topics like human sacrifice and ritual torture, but never slips into the breathless sensationalism that hangs over many similar documentaries like smog. The commentators who discuss Celtic culture note the Celts’ reputation as a bloodthirsty people, but are careful to point out that all written accounts of them come from individuals (Roman conquerors and early Christian missionaries) whose interests would be served by exaggeration.
Documentaries about the past are legion, but documentaries about how the past is reconstructed are scarce as bog bodies. The Perfect Corpse is a worthy entry in that scandalously small field.
A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Southern PolytechnicStateUniversity