Article Title：Unearthing the past: The archaeology of bog bodies in Glob, Atwood, Hebert and Drabble
Abstract：
Within the narrative poetics of the archaeological find, accounts of the discovery of beautifully preserved Iron Age bodies in the peatbogs of Northwestern Europe constitute a particularly complex, well-defined and resonant subgenre. A reading of the genre's founding text, P.V. Glob's The Bog People, reveals a repertoire of tropes and topoi that will inform subsequent fictional treatments of the bog body finds. Arguing that the poetic specificity of the bog body lies in its extraordinary capacity to abolish temporal distance and mediate between past and present, this article seeks to define the figure as a special kind of chronotopic motif, or mnemotope: a site of temporal compression, a space in which one time comes alive within another, manifesting the presence of the past. Fictional texts by Margaret Atwood, Anne Hebert and Margaret Drabble provide the focus for an analysis of the complex exchanges, both narrative and symbolic, mediated by the mnemotope in the memory work of cultures and individuals.
Keywords: archaeology; bog body; chronotope; memory; mnemotope; museum
DOI: 10.1080/09502360210163417
Source：TEXTUAL PRACTICE
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