Why Did Ancient People Bury Butter in Bogs?

Peat bogs are favorite hunting grounds of archeologists because of the many odd surprises these marshy wetlands have revealed from time to time. These wetlands of decaying plant matter have remarkable preservation properties. Low in oxygen and high in tannic acid, bogs are perfect place to fall into and have your bodies stay intact for millenniums to come. Ritual sacrifices by drowning in peat bogs were common in northwestern Europe. We know this from the thousands of “ bog bodies ” that have been pulled out from bogs across Europe. A variety of Bronze-age artifacts and mediaeval manuscripts have also been recovered by peat-cutters—people who harvest the peat and use it as fuel for cooking, throughout the centuries. Another ubiquitous find are stashes of butter, carefully wrapped in wooden buckets and barrels and buried in peats for reasons that are not entirely clear. Illustrations of a barrel used to store bog butter and a churn. A study conducted in the 1990s to test the preservation qualities of peat bogs found that the combination of cold water temperature and increased acidity produces a kind of bacteria that can survive without oxygen. This bacteria in the samples of meat the researchers buried in peat bogs made the meat unpalatable to other bacteria that normally decompose dead tissue. Laboratory analyses of the meat retrieved after two years in the bogs were found to have roughly the same levels of bacteria and pathogens as meat stored in a modern freezer. The meat-preserving ability of bogs were known to Ice Age hunters ten thousand years ago. When small groups of hunters killed a mastodon they preserved the meat underwater in ponds and bogs for the lean winter period. Researchers have discovered large cache of mastodon meat at various sites in North America.