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In a morbidly fascinating new documentary, NOVA gains exclusive access to
forensic scientists and local police authorities investigating two mysterious
murder cases. As police unearth stunning evidence of brutal, ritualistic
killings, they quickly realize they are the wrong people to solve these crimes.
Archeologists step in and soon find evidence pointing to violent deaths in the
prehistoric Iron Age, over 2,000 years ago. In this program, NOVA probes how
these people lived and why they died.
This will be no ordinary investigation, because this is no ordinary ground.
Found by accident in waterlogged Irish peat bogs, the corpses are almost
perfectly preserved. Although the ancient perpetrators are now well beyond the
reach of law, the bog bodies will yield fascinating secrets if modern science
asks the right questions.
"The Perfect Corpse" enters the lab with experts pushing archeological
forensics to its limits in an 18-month investigation. The Conservation
Department of the National Museum of Ireland coordinates the project, and NOVA
goes behind the scenes with key players, including archeologist Isabella
Mulhall, pathologist Marie Cassidy, and conservator Patrick Doyle. Both of
these bizarre cases will test every team member's experience and expertise, and
there is not a lot to go on: the last body to emerge from the Irish bogs was in
1978.
Now, the team is confronted with two murdered men and an assortment of
perplexing clues. The injuries to the bodies are devastating: stab wounds,
broken bones, skull-crushing blows, and dismembered appendages. One of the
victims has an elaborate hairstyle. On the other, a simple leather band with
metal clasps adorns the upper left arm. No small detail is overlooked as NOVA
examines the corpses up close in the laboratory.
Make no mistake, these are not skeletons or mummies but the intact soft tissue
of people trapped in time. The fine details of fingerprints and individual skin
pores show up perfectly under magnification. The team uses high-tech CAT scans
to deliver 3-D body images and even probes nasal passages to search for pollen
inhaled during one of the victim's last breaths. They use hair analysis to
figure out diet and even magnify the edges of fingernails to assess if the
victims were engaged in hard manual labor or a life of privilege. (To examine
perhaps the most famous bog body of all, see Tollund Man.)
One of the two bog bodies is named Oldcroghan Man after the locale in which it
was found, at the foot of a rolling hill with ritual monuments and burials
dating back for millennia. Irish archeologist Ned Kelly discovers that many bog
bodies are found buried along ancient Irish tribal boundaries first recorded by
medieval monks. If these were not simple acts of execution, perhaps the killing
sites were carefully chosen for their sacred significance and the victims
offered up as sacrifices to appease the gods of antiquity.
From radiocarbon dating to paleodietary analysis, every advance in
archeological forensic science is applied to the case. "The Perfect Corpse"
assembles the puzzle of how two men's lives came to such violent ends, and the
experts agree it is an astonishing glimpse into a vanished prehistoric era. (To
learn about a famous bog-body site in the United States, see America's Bog
People.)
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Peat bogs can preserve a lot more than just soft
tissue, including clues to everything from the person's final meal to his or
her manner of death.
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