The Bad Dürrenberg burial was opened in 1934 by Nazi Archeologist, revealing a story of a powerful and revered disabled woman. Surviving the regime propaganda and the War, her story was recomposed piece by piece by modern science and it is now ours to read. The Shaman was a legend, for her present and for generations to come, but we have lost this tale to the inevitable march of time.
Most of our understanding of the past is based on written sources. This is precisely why scholars use the invention of writing to define when history begins, marking what came before as “pre-history”. Recordkeeping, by whatever means it was performed throughout the world, helped humans preserve knowledge for years, decades, and even centuries: before the use of symbols on papyrus or tablets, transmitting information and stories across generations was much harder, almost impossible. And yet, some did: more than 600 years after the death of the protagonist of this story, her burial was venerated by her people. They brought gifts and probably prayed to her, remembering who she was for countless generations. This is the story of a lost legend from before history even begun, of a disabled woman so important for her tribe to be buried in the richest tomb that archaeologist have ever found in Central Europe, of a human being whose story has been remembered for centuries and then forgotten, only to be rediscovered by her descendants more than 9000 years later. This is the story of the Bad Dürrenberg Shaman.
The tomb of the Shaman was discovered in the Saxony-Anhalt state of East Germany in 1934 by some construction workers. The rushed recovery of the content was performed in only one afternoon, destroying valuable contextual evidence and contributing to the mystery surrounding the artifacts and the occupants of the burial. The woman and the infant child had rested together for millennia, surrounded by a complex collection of goods, from polished stones to deer antlers. The initial analysis of the body of what would eventually be identified as the Shaman was conducted by the German Anthropologist Heberer. His conclusion, based on some tools found and on the many animals’ remains, was that the tomb contained an ancient hunter-warrior of the Aryan race, perfectly fitting in the cultural and political context of 1930s Germany. By analyzing the burial through the lenses of their present, Nazi propagandists manipulated this discovery into a legend of their own and proclaimed it to be further confirmation of the grandiose past of the German people. Fortunately for the Shaman real story, the Halle State Museum of Prehistory survived the Second World War, and the burial content was reexamined by less biased scientists in the decades after.
The modern analysis of the tomb couldn’t give results further from the propaganda that the Nazi had built around it. First and foremost, the supposedly male hunter-warrior of the Aryan race was confirmed to be a woman around 30 years old, whose DNA even suggested that her skin could have been of a dark tone. The child she was buried with was not her own, but the two were distant relatives, as was probably common in the small tribes of the Mesolithic era. Further analysis on the skeleton of the woman revealed some unique and fascinating features: her frontal teeth were badly worn down, suggesting that she used her mouth to perform some activity which eventually damaged them, and the base of the skull was malformed. Comparing this last feature with modern patients, scientists have concluded that a blood vessel passed through a small hole in her bones, critically endangering the supply of blood to her brain. This physical disability was certainly very painful and made her life difficult, but it could have also been the reason for her importance. People suffering from similar conditions in the modern day present symptoms such as rapid eye movement, strong headaches, and even visions. If this was the life she lived, it is possible that her society saw these traits as supernatural abilities, granting the Shaman her important role in the tribe and explaining the richness of the tomb and the veneration she received.
Archeologists and anthropologists have spent hundreds of hours examining all the artifacts and the bones found in the Bad Dürrenberg burial, and yet we know so little about her story. We can infer her importance and her physical conditions, we can speculate on the animal garments she wore, we can even imagine what people felt like when she died. They had lost the bridge between this world and the next, someone so powerful, thanks to her disability, to be revered and prayed. But we will never know her name, her pains and joys, her hopes and fears, why she did what she did and how she felt throughout her life. We will never know what the people around her saw in her twitching eyes and in her feverish dreams. We will never know what her story really was, and how her people kept it alive for more than 600 years after her death. She was a legend, for her present and for generations to come, but we have lost this tale to the inevitable march of time.
The Roman philosopher and writer Boethius wrote in a book about ancient orators and politicians that every human faces death twice: the first death is the natural one, when the body ceases to live, while the second death is when the “breath of mortal fame” vanishes. According to this principle, the Shaman was kept alive far longer than most humans were at the time, and her second death was only temporary, as we have discovered her remains once more. Archeological research deals mostly in dead humans, in one way or another, and yet this one felt much more personal and alive than any other story I read about the past. The Shaman and the baby she has been holding for thousands of years are a relic of an ancient and lost spirit in mankind’s past. Whoever she was, whatever her fate was, she will forever remind us that stories have always been a precious thing for humans. So precious and valuable to make someone twenty generations after her death visit her tomb and remember her tale, in a token of respect that transcends time and even death. Metaphorically, I would like to bring the same respect to her tomb with this article, so that her story, at least what remains of it, shall survive a little longer.
