Lindow Man: Manchester Museum gets bogged down

Jonathan Schofield gets very annoyed by an exhibition which says next to nothing about anything

Date Published: 21/04/2008

Lindow Man was sacrificed almost 2000 years ago. He’d been bludgeoned, garrotted and had his throat cut. Satisfied he was probably dead by then, his persecutors threw his body into a bog or pool which now forms part of the Lindow area of Wilmslow.

The result is that in one of the Britain’s major museums, in an exhibition dedicated to an Iron Age sacrifice, ten percent of the space is devoted to the 1980s. Work that one out.

Sacrifice such as this wasn’t altogether unusual. Water carried religious significance for the Iron Age peoples in Northern Europe and it was common practice to make offerings of weapons, clothes, food and even each other, to the deities they imagined lived in water.

Human sacrifice is the best you can get in archaeology to excite an audience, save for treasure. Lindow Man’s twisted body should therefore have provided a perfect centre piece to a tip-top exhibition in Manchester about the Iron Age in Britain.

Or so you’d have thought.

Surely Lindow Man (back up from the British Museum for a year) should be centre-stage, surrounded by artefacts from his time and culture, illustrations, dramatic models and reconstructions? Not at all. Instead visitors stumble across the poor fella in a cramped space, devoid of drama, bereft of a ‘ta-darrr’ moment.

The clue as to what’s gone wrong lies in the press information. This exhibition apparently looks ‘at what Lindow Man means to us today’. So forget the Iron Age, instead we get several of our contemporaries talking about him, half of them not even experts.

Susan Chadwick was a pupil at Lindow Primary School in 1984, when Lindow Man was discovered. Her thoughts are included because as the museum says, ‘For many people Lindow Man triggers feelings of nostalgia. He takes them back to the 1980s, a time of Bros and Care Bears.’ So, we get Sue’s Care Bears, Bros memorabilia and a Girl annual. There’s a line in the publicity which reads, ‘What is Lindow Man’s connection with a Care Bear?’ This is posed without irony. The result is that in one of the Britain’s major museums, in an exhibition dedicated to an Iron Age sacrifice, ten percent of the space is devoted to the 1980s. Work that one out.

An MDF Age shelving unit

Another one of our select group is a self-appointed ‘pagan’ Emma Restall Orr, a ‘Druid Priest’. She gets her say because first off, she represents a group of ‘pagans’ who think it’s disrespectful to display the ancient dead. The logic seems to be, let’s invite her, that should keep them happy. Or to be kinder, and more accurate, they think because she’s a ‘pagan’ she must have a special affinity with Lindow Man - even though she has no idea what he really believed, and 'paganism' if it refers to ancient times is all guesswork.

An Iron Age Care Bear

An Iron Age man

This seems a dangerous step. The museum appears to have given power of attorney to a person who has no right whatsoever to speak for the corpse. It also raises questions of how far should we allow spirituality into museums? Will it end with a priest, an imam and a ‘pagan’ in institutions supposedly dedicated to reason not superstition?

The other reason Orr is here seems to be that her beliefs put her in touch in a special way with the British landscape. Which is plain nonsense, many of us would claim a similar special relationship. It gets worse. Orr is quoted as saying: ‘Perhaps we need Lindow Man to teach us about the magic, the enchantment of the landscape, of ancestry, of our heritage and all the ways in which they connect so powerfully.’ How lovely. Sort of environmentally friendly isn’t it? Let’s go re-cycle some cans of coke.

But she might also have pointed out that Lindow Man also teaches us how lucky we are to live in a society which doesn’t think it’s acceptable to bludgeon and garrotte people and throw them in a bog. Maybe Lindow Man teaches us of the dangers of a society ruled by omens, signs and sudden changes of weather: a society which may have worked intimately with nature but was prey to it.

An Iron Age shield

But we don't get that because this exhibition is almost entirely devoid of information or balance. This is the danger of this vox pop approach to galleries. It’s like one of those history-lite Channel 5 documentaries were people keep talking about their reaction to what they’ve found, as though trying to coerce us into feeling the same. Just give us the facts please, and let the audience decide when to empathise.

The museum’s role here was to educate and excite people, immerse them in another time. We should have had Iron Age tools and weapons, a reconstructed chariot, a section through a hillfort ditch, examples of Iron Age food to taste and an Iron Age roundhouse in the museum forecourt. If that was way beyond budget, we could for God’s sake, have at least had some bloody good wall displays.

It’s not as though examples of good museum practice are too far away. The Egyptology gallery upstairs in this museum, in an even more cramped area, shows what can be done, as does the Fossils Gallery.

Manchester Museum is a fabulous museum but it’s let itself down badly with Lindow Man. The only reason the exhibition is worth visiting is to view the twisted corpse of the sacrificial victim himself. That is very moving: the rest is flim-flam: cramped, confused and shallow. It even fails in that most important of pursuits in modern museums: it's boring for families.

Lindow Man: a bog body mystery is at Manchester Museum until 19 April 2009.