New Egtved Girl Discoveries: A Foreign Birth

Major media outlets are reporting on recent discoveries about the origins of the iconic Egtved Girl, specifically that she was born elsewhere before moving to what is now Denmark later in life. For example:

Glimpse of a Bronze Age girl’s daily life from hair, clothes” at cbs.com
* Prehistoric Danish girl 'probably born in Germany' at bbc.com

Now housed in the National Museum of Denmark, the Egtved Girl (Danish Egtvedpigen) is the partially preserved corpse of a Nordic Bronze Age teenager who was buried in a hollow log in the summer of 1370 BCE (via dendrochronology) and discovered in 1921 in the small city of Egtved on the peninsula of Jutland in Denmark. The Egtved Girl caused something of a sensation when she was discovered particularly due to her surprisingly well preserved clothing. There are many fascinating things about the Egtved Girl, and I encourage you to read more about her on the National Museum of Denmark’s page about her, which you can find here.

New analysis has shown that the Egtved Girl was not born in Denmark, but rather emigrated to Denmark another location, perhaps from what is nowadays the Black Forest in Germany. You can read more about these fascinating discoveries here: “Tracing the Dynamic Life Story of a Bronze Age Female” on nature.com

Thousands of years after her death, the Egtved Girl has come to inspire everything from poetry to music, particularly in Denmark. An image of the Egtved Girl standing before her oak coffin appears widely in grocery  stores and liquor stores all over the U.S. by way of the mass availability of Dogfish Head’s Kvasir, a reconstructed Nordic Bronze Age grog (see detailed discussion at the Livescience report here).