Besides peat, which resources would iron age peoples have extracted from swamps, bogs, wetlands etc.?

by Beer_Gut_Bob

I'm doing some worldbuilding, and trying to figure out if/why anyone would have major settlements in such terrain besides for peat extraction. They seem pretty inhospitable otherwise. Are "swamp people" much of a thing, historically, or is it pure fantasy?

mikedash

You're talking here about a period that goes back well before the written record, with the exception of a very small number of mentions, at goodness knows what hand, by Roman writers. As such, the attitudes, aims and motivations of the "swamp people" you describe are very largely matters of conjecture. What can be said, I think, is this:

  1. I'm not aware of any evidence of "major settlements" located in bogs or close to bogs. On the whole, bogs were actually located a significant distance from Iron Age settlements. For example, Lindow Moss, near Manchester in northern England, from which several significant "bog bodies" have been recovered, was about 18 miles from the nearest known human habitations.
  2. We should be careful not to exaggerate this isolation; ancient wooden trackways thread their way through several otherwise impassable morasses, laid, perhaps, to permit the exploitation of bog iron – low-grade metal that was the only readily accessible source of iron in ancient times. Mires could also be sources of woods such as alder and hazel that were thought to have magical powers, as well as of birds and other foods; one bog body, a teenager dug out of a northern German marsh and known today as Uchter Moor girl, is thought to have slipped and died by accident while jumping from hummock to hummock in search of eggs or bilberries.
  3. Another category of find, wooden casks of butter, known as "bog butter", is also known. Hundreds of bog butter finds have been made; archaeologists differ as to whether Iron Age peoples used bogs as primitive refrigerators or whether the deposits of butter were intended as offerings.
  4. The use of bogs for religious and sacrificial purposes, and perhaps for executions, is implied by the discovery of a fairly large number of bog bodies bearing evidence that they had been hanged, had their throats cut, or otherwise done to death.

I covered the evidence from bogs, and the disputes that have raged around what it tells us, in a longer, fully referenced essay that might interest you, and which can be read here.