Fissured Fred
When the prehistoric site at Fiskerton in Lindisfarne was first excavated in 1981, archaeologists found part of a human skull lying among the swords, spears, tools and other items that had been placed along the causeway. It represented the back of a man's head and was badly damaged.
Fissured Fred, as the skeleton became known by the excavators, had been hit by a sword, which had taken out a chip of his skull. Other than a couple of bones, the rest of Fissured Fred was never found, so there is no further evidence of how he met his death. The sword blow by itself would not have killed him, but it was inflicted around the time of his death 2,500 years ago.
'Was Fissured Fred a human sacrifice? We shall probably never know for certain...'
Was Fissured Fred a human sacrifice? We shall probably never know for certain but there is circumstantial evidence to suggest he was. His remains were mixed up with weapons and equipment, which had themselves been sacrificed and thrown into the water.
The evidence for human sacrifice in this period of the Iron Age is most prolific in Denmark, Germany and Holland, where many bodies have been found completely preserved in peat bogs. Some were hanged or strangled, the noose still around their neck, and others were bludgeoned on the head or had their throat slit.
They too, like Fissured Fred, were found in special places, where people had made offerings to an afterworld. It seems clear that these were not murders, but deliberate, socially sanctioned, killings.
Writing much later, in the first century AD, the Roman historian Tacitus tells us that these Germanic peoples executed their social outcasts - cowards, shirkers and those of disrepute - by pressing them down into bogs. So were these bog victims in fact executions and not sacrifices? If such a distinction could be drawn between the two, it does seem most likely that they were sacrifices, because bogs were places where other, inanimate offerings were made.
Published: 2002-08-19
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