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Scientists Reconstruct the Life of a Bronze Age Sun-Worshipping Priestess

The iconic remains of the Egtved Girl take a ride in a spectrometer.
The remains of the Egtved Girl. Image: National Museum of Denmark

During the summer of 1370 BCE, a young woman died in Egtved, Denmark. She was between 16 and 18 years old, and her immaculate burial suggests she was from a high status family. Slim, blonde, and 5'3" tall, the girl has become known to history as the Egtved Girl—one of the most well-preserved human specimens from Bronze Age Europe.

Except, as it turns out, the Egtved Girl was not from Egtved at all. According to a fascinating new study published this week in Scientific Reports, this teenager traveled widely during her short life, and she likely grew up near the Black Forest in Germany, some 500 miles away from where she was buried, as the crow flies.

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"I have analysed the strontium isotopic signatures of the enamel from one of the Egtved Girl's first molars, which was fully formed when she was three or four years old," said lead author and archeologist Karin Margarita Frei in a statement. "[T]he analysis tells us that she was born and lived her first years in a region that is geologically older than and different from the peninsula of Jutland in Denmark."

If you have been following the ongoing saga surrounding the analysis of Richard III's body, which was recovered from under a parking lot in 2012, you may recognize the strontium analysis technique. In a study published last summer, strontium levels were used to map out Richard III's movements during his lifetime, as well as to determine what kind of diet he maintained in each location.

"[S]trontium gets incorporated into your teeth through the food you eat," Angela Lamb, the lead author of the Richard III study, told me last August. "[Strontium] varies depending on the soil type and geology of where the food was grown [and] grazed."

The fact that strontium levels vary so much regionally has proven to be a veritable Rosetta Stone for archeologists hoping to reconstruct the lives of these long-dead people. It is impressive enough that Lamb and her colleagues intuited Richard III's travels from five centuries ago, but deciphering the 3,400-year-old remains of the Egtved Girl is a whole other level.

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The authors were able to pin down the girl's movements in incredible detail, discovering that the girl was on the move for most of the tail end of her life. "[W]e can see that, 13 to 15 months before her death, she stayed in a place with a strontium isotope signature very similar to the one that characterizes the area where she was born," Frei said.

"Then she moved to an area that may well have been Jutland," she continued. "After a period of [about] nine to ten months there, she went back to the region she originally came from and stayed there for four to six months before she travelled to her final resting place, Egtved. Neither her hair nor her thumb nail contains a strontium isotopic signatures which indicates that she returned to Scandinavia until very shortly before she died."

"As an area's strontium isotopic signature is only detectable in human hair and nails after a month, she must have come to 'Denmark' and 'Egtved' about a month before she passed away," Frei concluded (using quotation marks to denote that these were not the names of those regions in the Bronze Age).

Study co-author and fellow archeologist Kristian Kristiansen speculates that the girl was probably sent to Denmark to cement a marriage alliance with a prominent ally.

"In Bronze Age Western Europe, Southern Germany and Denmark were the two dominant centres of power, very similar to kingdoms," he said in a statement. "We find many direct connections between the two in the archaeological evidence, and my guess is that the Egtved Girl was a Southern German girl who was given in marriage to a man in Jutland so as to forge an alliance between two powerful families."

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It's extraordinary how much of this Bronze Age teenager's life can be revealed through isotope analysis. Moreover, the careful manner in which her coffin was buried in bogland soil left her clothing and ritual essentials intact, which sheds even more light on her biography—including her religious persuasion.

"Her extremely well preserved costume consists of several textiles including a short corded skirt, a short blouse and a disc-shaped bronze belt plate symbolizing the Sun, which has been interpreted as belonging to a priestess of the Nordic Sun worshipping cult," Frei and her colleagues noted in their paper. In essence: She dressed like Daenerys Targaryen during her Dothraki phase.

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Clearly, researchers are finding many effective ways to bridge the massive historical gap between ancient peoples like Egtved Girl, and our 21st century world. But that doesn't mean that this body has divulged all its secrets. Plenty of mystery surrounds the girl's burial, especially the identity of the partially cremated child placed at the girl's feet. The child would have been about five to six years old, and his or her relation to the Egtved Girl is unknown.

Fortunately, the girl's body represents only one of many Bronze Age burials that have been found exquisitely preserved in Denmark over the last century. Frei and Kristiansen intend to perform isotope analysis on other bodies recovered from these bogs, which should breathe new life into this murky period of European history.

It is astonishing to ruminate over the life of this Sun-worshipping priestess, who lived and died millennia ago, and was then reborn again as a valuable archaeological resource. The myth structure of many solar deities is intricately woven into the rising and setting of our star from Earth's perspective, which is often interpreted as a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. It's hard not to wonder whether she would have appreciated that her own life would end up paralleling the mythological rhythm of the Sun she praised.

Alas, that's just one more secret that was buried with the Egtved Girl.