Why was the Lindow Man naked and what is “woad”?
Discovered in Cheshire in 1984, Lindow Man was discovered by a commercial peat harvester who at first mistook Lindow Man’s foot for a piece of wood. Through radiocarbon dating, scientists determined that the peat which surrounded Lindow Man formed around 300 BC, and the general consensus is that the body was placed in the bog between 1 BCE and 119 CE.
He was found naked except for an armband of fox-fur and a thong around his neck - slightly odd as many bog bodies discovered so far were clothed, and the naked ones are totes naked. So what’s with a fox-fur arm band? Anne Ross and Don Robins speculated in their book The Life and Death of a Druid Prince that the armband signified Lindow Man’s connection to a wealthy and aristocratic family of “Lovernios” which Ross and Robins tell us means “fox or “son of fox” but they are a bit weird and largely dismissed by every bog body person because they wrote an entire book (which is quite ambitious) that reads a lot like they made it up and then forced everything about Lindow Man to fit into their already constructed narrative but anyway, this is the most interesting theory since everyone else’s theory is more like “we don’t know why he has a fox-fur armband around his left arm”.
Don Brothwell (the biological advisor in the investigation of the Lindow Man so I guess pretty credible) considers the meaning of Lindow Man’s naked state in his book The Bog Man and the Archaeology of People:
“Was this an ancient mugging where even his clotes were of value and thus stolen? Taking into account all the other pre-Saxon bog bodies from Europe, this simple mugging analogy with out own times does not seem satisfactory.
To begin with, was there in fact any evidence of clothing? There were certainly no skin or textiles near the body, at least not in the remaining area of peat which could excavated carefully. Woollens would have preserved well and could not have been missed, and even fabrics made of plant fibres should have been stained but recognizable/ Might Lindow Man have been ‘wearing’ the thinnest of all body coverings, woad?”
What the hell is woad? Wikipedia helps us out. A little.
Woad is a flowering plant that looks a lot like one of the few wildflowers we get in Arizona. I guess you mill it (there’s a picture of guys milling woad) and then, you get a really pretty indigo dye that was widely used until the early 20th century.
Ok cool so Brothwell suggests that maybe Lindow Man was just painted blue?
Bog Bodies are so weird.













