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The Flower That Dated a Bronze Age Burial

By Weird Burial Stories Editorial Desk · 2026-10-10

A yarrow flower laid on the edge of an oak coffin shows that the Egtved Girl was buried in summer, in 1370 BC, under the barrow Storehøj near Egtved in Denmark.

By C. V. Wooster

The Egtved Girl was buried in 1370 BC in an oak coffin under the barrow Storehøj, near Egtved, west of Vejle, and a yarrow flower laid on the edge of the coffin shows that the burial was in summer. Of her body, the National Museum of Denmark says, only hair, brain, teeth, nails, and a little skin remain, and the teeth show that she was 16 to 18.

The flower and the coffin

The museum's page on the grave is plain about the flower. "A yarrow flower was laid on the edge of the coffin before the lid was put on. The flower reveals that the Egtved Girl was laid in her grave in the summertime." The coffin was a hollowed oak trunk, stripped, one half the box and the other the lid. The mound that covered it is Storehøj, at Egtved in south Jutland, not far from Vejle. The same museum's introduction says it in one line: "One summer's day in 1370 BC she was buried in an oak coffin that was covered by the barrow Storehøj near Egtved, west of Vejle." The grave was excavated in 1921. The barrow was by then only a shadow of itself. Earth and material had been taken from it. A well-preserved grave remained in the eastern part of the mound.

Before she was laid in, the coffin was lined with a cow skin. She was placed on it with her grave goods. A woollen blanket covered her, and the lid was closed. The flower went on the rim before that lid. When the coffin was opened almost 3,500 years later, the cow skin had rotted. The hair of the hide remained, and in those hairs the museum says the contour of her body can still be read, pressed down by the weight of the girl. The flower is the clock. Oak coffins and tree rings date the burial to the Bronze Age. The yarrow dates it to a season.

A 2015 paper in Scientific Reports, by Karin Margarita Frei and colleagues, cites dendrochronology for the same coffin: she "was buried in an oak coffin approximately 3,400 years ago." The excavation year in that paper is also 1921. The museum's 1370 BC and the paper's "approximately 3,400 years" are the same dating spoken two ways. Ötzi has a radiocarbon range and no coffin. Nobody closed a lid on him. The Egtved flower is evidence of a moment in a burial, which his glacier is not.

What was left of her

The museum is equally plain about the body. "Of the girl herself only hair, brain, teeth, nails and a little skin remain. Her teeth reveal that she was 16-18 years old when she died." The Scientific Reports paper agrees on the age, "approximately 16 to 18," and on what survived: hair, tooth enamel, nails, and parts of the brain and skin. It adds a reason the bones did not: they dissolved in the acidic water that stood in the oak coffin. There is no skeleton to display. The person is the hair, the teeth, the nails, and the clothes.

She wore a short tunic and a knee-length skirt made of cords. A belt plate of bronze, decorated with spirals, lay on her stomach. The museum says the plate may have been a symbol of the sun, which was the most important element in Bronze Age religion. That "may" is the museum's. A comb of horn was attached to her belt. A bronze ring was around each arm, and a slender ring was in her ear. By her face was a small box of bark, holding a bronze awl and the remains of a hair net. At her feet was a small bark bucket that once held a type of beer. The Death Glossary files objects buried with the dead as grave goods. The tunic, the cord skirt, the plate, the comb, the rings, the box, and the bucket are that list, as the museum gives it.

The child

At her feet the museum also records a small bundle of clothing containing the cremated bones of a child five or six years old. A few bones from the same child were in the bark box. The Scientific Reports paper describes "a small container with some cremated skeletal remains of a 5 to 6-year-old child" and places that container by her head. The museum, which holds the grave, separates the finds: the bundle of clothing with the cremated bones at the feet, and a few of the child's bones in the box by the face. This article follows the museum for the positions. Both sources agree that a child of five or six was in the coffin, cremated, and that the girl herself was not cremated. She was inhumed in the oak. The child was bone already burned, wrapped and placed with her.

The coffin was brought to the National Museum, the grave page says, and excavated and conserved there. The girl "saw the light of day again" in 1921, almost 3,500 years after the lid. Visitors are told they can meet her in the exhibition on Danish prehistory. What they meet is the costume and the remains the acid left. The flower is not a costume. It was a plant on the rim, and it is why the museum can say the burial was a summer day, and why it can name the year 1370 BC as that summer.

The cord skirt and the short tunic are the clothes the museum reconstructs for display. The belt plate is the object it singles out, spirals on bronze, perhaps a sun. None of that dates the season. The yarrow does. It was laid on the edge before the lid, and it bloomed when the mourners were there.

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