Luttra Woman

The Luttra Woman is a skeletonised bog body from the Early Neolithic period (radiocarbon-dated 3928–3651 BC) that was discovered near Luttra, Sweden, on 20 May 1943. The skull had been preserved well, but some bones of the skeleton, in particular many of those between the skull and the pelvis, were missing. The skeleton was assessed as that of a young female. She was deemed short for a Neolithic woman of the region, with an estimated height of 145 cm. Because her stomach contents showed that raspberries had been her last meal and she was estimated to have been in her early to mid-twenties at her death, she was nicknamed Hallonflickan (lit. 'Raspberry Girl'). , she was the earliest-known Neolithic person from Western Sweden.

No trace of injuries or fatal diseases was found on her remains. She appeared to have been tied up and placed in shallow water at her death or soon afterwards. Axel Bagge, an archaeologist who assisted at the initial investigation of her remains, suspected that she had been deliberately drowned as either a human sacrifice or the victim of a witch execution. Her skeleton has been part of a permanent exhibition titled Forntid på Falbygden (Prehistory in Falbygden) at the Falbygden Museum in Falköping, Sweden, beginning in 1994. The exhibition was later supplemented by a bust of her reconstructed using forensic methods.

Discovery


Carl Wilhelmsson, a man from the neighbouring Kinneved parish, noticed one of the hands of the skeleton at a depth of 1.2 m below the surface whilst cutting peat in Rogestorp—a raised bog that was part of a bog complex known as Mönarpa mossar in Falbygden, near Luttra—on 20 May 1943. Wilhelmsson reported to the police, who dismissed any possibility of a prosecutable crime because they assumed that, since the body had been found at such a depth in a bog, it had to be very old. Falbygden, a rural area in southwestern Sweden with a mostly agrarian economy, was one of the places in the country where human and animal skeletal remains of prehistoric origin were often found, which were well-documented during the 1920s to the 1950s when peat cutting was frequent. The bones tended to be preserved in Falbygden owing to its bedrock of limestone.

Wilhelmsson informed the local representative of the Swedish National Heritage Board, teacher and archaeologist Hilding Svensson. Svensson inspected the find the next day and forwarded a discovery report to the Board, requesting an expert's assistance. The Board dispatched geologist and archaeologist Karl Esaias Sahlström and palynologist Carl Larsson, both of whom were from the Geological Survey of Sweden. Upon arrival, they found that the skeleton lay upright, with the skull detached and rolled over so that the chin and foramen magnum pointed straight up. A protruding segment of the skeleton had been cut through during Wilhelmsson's peat cutting; nevertheless the skull had remained in its discovery position. 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, placed on a Masonite board and sent—along with a few loose bones they had found in the bog—in a wooden box to the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm by train. After the museum received the box, osteologist and anthropologist Elias Dahr excavated the skeleton from the peat block it was buried in.

Three years prior to the discovery, an arrowhead made of flint had been found in the same bog, about 6 m north from where the skeleton was found, at the same depth; however researchers could not determine if the arrow and the skeleton had been simultaneously placed in there.

Studies
The initial examination of the skeleton was done by Dahr after his excavation. Axel Bagge, an archaeologist who assisted at Dahr's examination, was the first to report the discovery in 1947, in the Swedish academic journal Fornvännen. A more thorough physical anthropological investigation was conducted by Sahlström, osteologist Nils-Gustaf Gejvall and anatomist Carl-Herman Hjortsjö, the result of which, including a detailed description of the remains, was published in 1952. After their investigations the skeleton has undergone a few more by other researchers: among them archaeologist Sabine Sten and osteologist Torbjörn Ahlström in the 1990s and Ahlström again in the 2010s.

Only parts of the skeleton had been preserved; the soft tissues had completely disintegrated and some bones, in particular many of those between the skull and the pelvis, were missing. The skull had been preserved well, with only the inner nasal region partially gone. The conditions of the rest of the bones were not as good. A pollen analysis dating showed that the corpse was a bit more than 4,000 years old. , the radiocarbon dating method has been used on the skeleton three times: the first two agreed with the pollen analysis result but the third, done using accelerator mass spectrometry in 2015, yielded the range of 3928–3651 BC, which is the early or middle period of the Early Neolithic—making her the earliest-known Neolithic person from Western Sweden to that point.

Dahr assessed the skeleton as that of a young female. Gejvall estimated the body as a woman of 20–25 years but later Sjögren et al. disagreed, proposing in 2017 that the more appropriate age category would be that of 15–20 years. There was only a lump of small yellow-brown seeds where her stomach had been; which were identified as those of European red raspberries (Rubus idaeus). She had eaten a large serving of raspberries just before her death, which meant that she died in late summer, July or August. Because of her last meal and estimated age, she was nicknamed Hallonflickan (Swedish for 'Raspberry Girl').

She was small in stature with an estimated height of 145 cm; Gejvall stated in a 1960 monograph that it was the shortest for a woman of her age group among Sweden's Neolithic remains he could recall. In Dahr's study of the remains from a Stone Age settlement on Gotland, the largest of Sweden's islands, the average height of the women of the same age category was 153 cm. The isotopes of strontium and oxygen ratios of tooth enamel from one of her molars was analysed and the results indicated that she was probably born and grew up in present-day Scania, the southernmost region of Sweden, and travelled to present-day Falbygden in a later period of her life. Researchers have tried to extract DNA from the skeleton; they have not yet been successful because the bones had been too affected by the bog environment for DNA profiling.

Cause of death


Her skull had a hole below the left eye socket, likely due to a long-term infection of the bone tissue; otherwise no trace of injuries or diseases was found on her remains. Her legs were in a tight squatting position so that her calves rested against her thighs. It was probable that her legs had been tied up and the materials used to bind her had not been preserved in the bog. 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. She seemed to have been placed in shallow water at her death or soon afterwards, and remained undisturbed in the restrained position until the discovery in 1943. Bagge suspected that she had been deliberately drowned, proposing the hypothesis that she was the victim of either a human sacrifice ritual or a witch execution. According to Ahlström and Sten, some of the Early Neolithic remains in Denmark bore indications that similar sacrifice rituals had been practiced there. An alternative explanation was that the bindings had been for a water burial of the Luttra Woman's corpse, after her death by another cause.

Exhibition and reconstruction
The 1945 text Tio tusen år i Sverige (Ten thousand years in Sweden), a guidebook to the Swedish History Museum's exhibition of prehistoric and other archaeological finds, did not mention the Luttra Woman although her remains were included in the exhibition at the time. In the early 1970s, the skeleton was removed from the display and placed in the museum's storage facility under the inventory number SHM 23163. The skeleton was loaned to the Falbygden Museum, Falköping, and available for public viewing again in 1994; since then it has been part of the museum's permanent exhibition titled Forntid på Falbygden (Prehistory in Falbygden). The exhibition was later supplemented by a reconstructed bust of her, created by Oscar Nilsson, an archaeologist and model-maker trained in sculpture. He had worked on commissions from museums to reconstruct Swedish remains from various periods—such as the Barum Woman (c. 7th millennium BC), the Granhammar Man (9th century BC), Estrid (11th century) and Birger Jarl (13th century)—through forensic methods that were used to identify crime victims from their remains.

To create the bust of the Luttra Woman, Nilsson had her skull CT scanned at the Karolinska Institute, a research-led medical university in Stockholm. Based on the scanned data, he had an exact replica of the skull 3D printed in polyvinyl chloride, on which he manually attached dozens of sticks to indicate her estimated facial soft tissue thickness. He moulded facial muscles and a thin layer of skin in clay, adding them to the replicated skull and sculpted more detailed facial features on the clay skin. Nilsson told an interviewer that the skeleton seemed "very feminine" to him; he shaped her face accordingly and gave her a narrow nasal bridge, resulting in a distinctly modern appearance rather than that of a stereotypical Stone Age woman. Since her DNA had not been extracted, Nilsson had to assume her hair and eye colour.