Egtved Girl: A Bronze Age Oak-Coffin Burial in Denmark

The Egtved Girl was a young woman buried in an oak coffin in a burial mound near Egtved, in southern Jutland, Denmark, in the summer of 1370 BC. Found in 1921, her grave preserved a complete set of Bronze Age clothing, a bronze belt disc and the cremated remains of a child. Since 2015 she has also become famous for a scientific study suggesting she travelled hundreds of kilometres during her short life.

The discovery

In 1921 a farmer digging into a large burial mound called Storhøj, near the village of Egtved, struck a big oak coffin. Archaeologists from the National Museum of Denmark took over the excavation and moved the coffin to Copenhagen, where it was opened under controlled conditions.

The coffin was a hollowed-out oak trunk with a lid. Oak-coffin burials of this kind were used by the elite of the Nordic Bronze Age in Denmark, northern Germany and southern Sweden. When a mound was built over the coffin, the core often became waterlogged and sealed, creating conditions in which wool, hair and wood survive for over three millennia.

Who she was

The woman was about 16 to 18 years old and about 1.6 metres tall. Her bones had dissolved in the acidic water, but her hair, teeth, nails, parts of her skin and her brain tissue survived. Her blonde hair was shoulder-length. The cause of her death is unknown.

Tree-ring dating of the coffin shows the oak was cut in 1370 BC. A flowering yarrow plant had been placed in the grave, indicating a summer funeral.

Clothing and grave goods

She wore a short-sleeved woollen blouse and a short skirt made of corded wool strings, hanging from a waistband to just above the knee. Before the find, scholars had not known that women in Bronze Age Scandinavia wore such garments. She lay on a cowhide and was covered with a blanket.

At her waist was a round bronze belt plate decorated with spirals, a sign of high status. She also wore bronze bracelets and an earring, and a horn comb was found in the coffin.

Inside the coffin was a small bundle of burnt bones from a child aged about five or six. Also in the grave was a birch-bark bucket that had held a fermented drink made from wheat, honey and berries such as cranberry or lingonberry, flavoured with bog myrtle. The relationship between the woman and the child is unknown.

The strontium study and its critics

In 2015 a team led by Karin Margarita Frei of the National Museum of Denmark published an analysis of strontium isotopes in the woman’s tooth enamel, hair and nails. Strontium in the body reflects the local geology where food and water were consumed, so different layers can record where a person lived at different times.

The team concluded that she was probably born outside Denmark, possibly in the Black Forest region of south-west Germany, and that in her last two years she travelled between that region and Jutland. The study suggested that Bronze Age elites formed alliances through marriage across long distances.

Other researchers questioned the result. They argued that modern agricultural lime and other inputs have changed strontium values in Danish soils and water, so the comparison data used may be misleading. On this view, a local Danish origin cannot be excluded. The debate remains open and has made the Egtved Girl a test case for isotope methods.

Oak-coffin burials of the Nordic Bronze Age

The Egtved Girl belongs to a small group of well-preserved oak-coffin graves from Jutland, most of them dated to the 14th century BC. Other famous examples include the burials at Borum Eshøj near Aarhus, which held an older woman, a man and a young man, and the grave of the Skrydstrup Woman in southern Jutland, whose elaborate hairstyle and hairnet survived. Together these finds provide most of what is known about Bronze Age dress in northern Europe.

Such burials were costly. Raising a mound required many hours of labour, and the bronze objects inside were made from metal imported from central Europe or further afield. The people buried this way were members of a wealthy elite whose status rested on control of trade, land and cattle.

Myths and facts

Myth: the child in the grave was her own. The cremated child is often assumed to be her son or daughter, but nothing proves a family link. At 16 to 18 she would have been very young to have a child of five or six, and the child may have been a relative, a companion or someone buried with her for other reasons.

Myth: she is a bog body. She was not found in a bog. Her soft tissues survived because of the sealed, waterlogged oak coffin inside a burial mound, not peat.

Timeline

• c. 1700 BC: The Nordic Bronze Age begins in southern Scandinavia.
• 1370 BC, summer: The Egtved Girl is buried in an oak coffin under a mound.
• 1921: The coffin is found in the Storhøj mound near Egtved and taken to Copenhagen.
• 2015: A strontium isotope study proposes that she was born outside Denmark.
• 2019: Other scholars challenge the isotope reference data, keeping her origin under debate.

Why it matters

The Egtved Girl gives a rare, intimate view of an individual from Bronze Age Europe: what she wore, what was given to her at death and when she was buried, down to the season. Like the Trundholm Sun Chariot and the Nebra Sky Disc, her grave shows the wealth and wide connections of Bronze Age elites. Her disputed travels also show how new science can reopen old finds.