The Egtved Girl was unearthed in 1921. All that remained of her was her hair, fingernails, teeth and clothing. However, by analyzing the isotope strontium in the remains researchers know a great deal about her life.
Strontium exists in the Earth’s crust but it is not distributed evenly. Different geological regions contain different levels of stronium and those levels are reflected by humans, plants and animals who ingest it through food and water.
By measuring the strontium isotopic signatures, researchers can tell where a person, plant or animal came from and were it might have visited. It is described as a “kind of GPS for scientists”.
The analysis, published in Scientific Reports shows that the girl was not a local. She was born and lived most of her life, outside the current borders of Denmark. Analysis of her hair and a thumbnail shows that she did a great deal of traveling during her last two years.
“I have analysed the strontium isotopic signatures of the enamel from one of the Egtved Girl’s first molars, which was fully formed/crystallized when she was three or four years old, and the 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,” said senior researcher Karin Margarita Frei, of the National Museum of Denmark and Centre for Textile Research at the University of Copenhagen in a statement.
Additionally, an analysis fabrics and hides found with her in the oak coffin all come from a distant location. According to the researchers, that Egtved Girl and the cremated remains of a six-year-old buried with her, likely came from Schwarzwalk also known as the Black Forest in South West Germany. The girl’s coffin shows that she was buried in the summer of 1370.
By analyzing the girls 9 inch long hair, they also know that she had travelled shortly before she died.
“If we consider the last two years of the girl’s life, we 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. Then she moved to an area that may well have been Jutland. After a period of c. 9 to 10 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,” said Karin Margarita Frei.
The scientists believe that the girl was probably married from one powerful family into another, to cement a relationship and strengthen trading relationships.
“In Bronze Age Western Europe, Southern Germany and Denmark were the two dominant centres of power, very similar to kingdoms. 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,” said Kristian Kristiansen of the University of Gothnburg.
A large number of graves containing human remains from Bronze Age Denmark have been found. The team behind this analysis plans to continue to examine remains in the hope of painting a more complete picture of the region’s history.
