Luttra Woman

Location of the discovery site in Sweden

Carl Wilhelmsson, a local farmer, noticed one of the hands of the skeletonised corpse at a depth of 1.2 m (4 ft) below the surface whilst digging peat in Rogestorp, a raised bog that was part of a relatively large bog complex called Mönarp's bogs (Swedish: Mönarpa mossar or Mönarps mossar) near the parish of Luttra, Falköping, Västra Götaland County, on 20 May 1943.[1][5]

Wilhelmsson reported to the police, who dismissed any possibility of a prosecutable crime because they thought, since the body had been found at such a depth in a bog, it had to be very old.[1] The police informed the local representative of the Swedish National Heritage Board, senior teacher Hilding Svensson. Svensson inspected the find the next day and forwarded a discovery report to the Board, requesting an expert's assistance.[1] The Board dispatched geologist and archaeologist Karl Esaias Sahlström and pollen analysis expert Carl Larsson, both of whom were from the Geological Survey of Sweden.[3] Upon arrival, they found that a protruding segment of the skeleton had been cut through during the excavation; nevertheless the well-preserved skull remained in its original position.[3] Sahlström decided that a thorough in situ investigation was not feasible, so he had the entire block of peat in which the skeleton was partially embedded cut out and sent in a wooden box to the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm by train.[3][8]

During and after Sahlström's initial investigation, the body has undergone several investigations by other archaeologists, anthropologists, and osteologists; among them Elias Dahr and Nils-Gustaf Gejvall in the 1940s, Sabine Sten and Torbjörn Ahlström in the 1990s, and Ahlström again in the 2010s.[9][10]

The Luttra Woman, displayed in the position in which she was discovered (Falbygdens Museum)

The body lay in a north-northwest–southeast orientation, with the head facing north.[10] Only parts of the skeleton had been preserved; the soft tissues had completely rotted away and some bones of the skeleton, especially those between the skull and the pelvis, were missing.[3] The skull was well-preserved, with only the inner nasal region partially gone; the conditions of the rest of the bones were not as good.[10] Dahr, an anthropologist and osteologist, assessed the skeleton as that of a young female.[9] Gejvall estimated the body as a woman of 20–25 years but later Karl-Göran Sjögren disagreed, suggesting that the more appropriate age category would be that of 15–20 years.[4] She was small in stature with a height of 145 cm (4 ft 9 in) – Neolithic women of the same age in that region averaged between 153 and 163 cm (5 ft 0 in and 5 ft 4 in) in height.[10]

Her legs were in a tight squatting position so that her calves rested against her thighs.[1] It was possible that her legs had been tied up and the straps or ropes used to bind her had not been preserved in the bog.[3] Sahlström noted that the skull's imprint on the peat block indicated that she had been placed with the forehead down; Dahr agreed that she had been lying on her stomach.[6] She seemed to have been placed in shallow water at her death or immediately afterward, and remained undisturbed in the restrained position until the discovery.[11][lower-alpha 1] The skull had a hole below the left eye socket, likely due to a long-term infection of the bone tissue, but otherwise no trace of injuries or diseases was found on her remains.[1] Axel Bagge, an archaeologist who assisted at Sahlström's investigation, suggested that she had been deliberately drowned, either as a human sacrifice or the victim of an execution.[6] Sten and Ahlström remarked that similar sacrifice methods had been found in Early Neolithic remains in Denmark.[6]

The Luttra Woman's stomach contents consisting of raspberry seeds

There was only a lump of small yellow-brown seeds where her stomach had been; the seeds turned out to be those of raspberries.[1] She had eaten a rather large serving of raspberries just before her death, which meant that she died in late summer, July to August.[3] Because of her last meal and her age, she was nicknamed Hallonflickan (lit. 'Raspberry Girl').[1]

A pollen analysis dating showed that the corpse was slightly more than 4,000 years old. As of 2017, the radiocarbon dating method has been used on it three times so far; the first two agreed with the pollen analysis result, but the third, done using accelerator mass spectrometry in Belfast, yielded the range of c. 3928–3651 BC, which is the early or middle period of the Early Neolithic.[2] She was the earliest-known Neolithic person from Western Sweden as of 2017.[2] The strontium signature of one of her teeth was analysed and the results indicated that she was probably born and grew up in Scania, the southernmost region of Sweden, and travelled to present-day Mönarp's bogs in a later period of her life.[lower-alpha 2][1] Researchers have tried to extract DNA from the skeleton but, as of January 2023, have not yet been successful.[1]

The Luttra Woman's bust reconstructed by Oscar Nilsson

As of January 2023, her body has been on a permanent exhibition titled Forntid på Falbygden (lit. 'Prehistory in Falbygden') at the Falbygdens Museum, Falköping, since 1994.[1] The exhibition has been supplemented by a reconstructed bust of her, created by Stockholm-based model-maker Oscar Nilsson.[1]

• List of bog bodies

• Media related to Hallonflickan at Wikimedia Commons