"Draaisma describes the development of prosthetic memories over time from wax tablet via various pre-photographic machines—such as those known to produce “physionotraces”—to photography proper, and eventually to computer memory. This led me to think about how the bog offers its own kind of prosthesis that shares the metaphoric and alchemic associations we have with such memory tools. Because bog bodies are made in nature, it may seem counterintuitive to exercise the nomenclature of prosthetics—the artificial extension or replacement of something original and missing—about that which is very much natural and very much in existence. Draaisma’s book made me ponder the question of memory and artificiality in ways different than what I had originally imagined."

Recommended by Karin Sanders, Professor of Scandinavian and author of Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination.