OK, so I get the idea of freezing, mummifying, lithification, and the amber bit, but can someone explain the chemistry/mechanics of peat bog preservation?
OK, quick and dirty science experiment about bog bodies …
Take 5 or 6 generic tea bags and make about a pint of seriously undrinkably strong tea. Put it into a small tupperware-oid container, and drop a raw bone in skin on chicken thigh into it. Seal it tight. Leave it in the corner of the fridge for a week.
Take it out, and slice across the chicken thigh. See how the tea has soaked in and stained the meat and skin brown? Even under the skin?
WHat a bog is is a swampy area that has tannins and other chemicals leached out of fallen trees/shrubs into the water. If you take a human body and place it into the water, and stake it down with a stake to keep the body under water you are marinating a corpse in a solution of fairly nasty chemicals. In general the water of a bog is oxygen depleated and the combination of chemicals and lack of oxygen supresses the bacteria from decomposing the body while the tannins and other chemicals ‘tan’ the body like leather. Tannin is frequently used in tanning leather=)
Essentially the bodies are turned to leather, and bogs tend to silt up after hundreds and thousands of years of debris has fallen into the water and turned into sludge. Most bodies are found because the plant ‘peat’ which grows in boggy conditions is ‘mined’ or dug up for processing into ‘peat moss’ for gardening or for drying and burning [it was very common in areas where the trees had been depleated due to overforestation for the charcoal burners to make into fuel for industry]
Why yes, I do have a friend who is an archeologist=)
[who is a hoot to watch certain types of horror movies with=)]
What about plastination for preservation. It seems just as good as fossilizing (better actually) so that you will last on display.
There’s a bit more information on plastination here:
As near as I can tell, no one is doing whole body plastination without flaying the corpse into a more easily treated form. I don’t think you can plastinate a body without doing some serious knife work.