The Bronze Age Egtved Girl Wasn't Actually from Denmark

One of the best-known Bronze Age finds in Denmark wasn't actually from Denmark. Researchers have discovered the Egtved Girl, the remains of a young girl from the Bronze Age, actually was raised outside Denmark's current borders and travelled great distances during the last two years of her life.

The researchers have analyzed the Egtved Girl more thoroughly. The wool from her clothing, the blanket she was covered with and the oxhide she was laid to rest on in her oak coffin all originate from a location outside present-day Denmark. The combination of the different provenance analyses indicate that she actually came from Schwarzwald, also known as "the Black Forest," in Southwest Germany.

 "I have analyzed the strontium isotopic signatures of the enamel from one of the Egtved Girl's first molars, which was fully formed/crystallized when she was three or four years old, and the analysis tells us that she was born and lived her first years in a region that is geologically older than and different from the peninsula of Jutland in Denmark," said Karin Margarita Frei, one of the researchers, in a news release.

The scientists also traced the last two years of the Egtved Girl's life by examining the strontium isotopic signatures in the girl's hair. This revealed that she had been on a long journey shortly before she died.

"If we consider the last two years of the girl's life, we can see that, 13 to 15 months before her death, she stayed in a place with a strontium isotope signature very similar to the one that characterizes the area where she was born," said Frei. "Then she moved to an area that may well have been Jutland. After a period of about 9 to 10 months there, she went back to the region she originally came from and stayed there for four to six months before she travelled to her final resting place, Egtved."

It's like that the Egtved Girl was a Southern German girl who was given in marriage to a man in Jutland to forge an alliance between two powerful families.

The findings are published in the journal Scientific Reports.

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