Sometime around 1899, a cliff near Bagicz on Poland’s northwest coast gave up a secret it had been holding onto for a long time. Erosion undercut the ground, and a wooden coffin slid out of the earth and down the face of the bluff. Inside was an adult woman, placed on a cowhide and buried with a bronze pin, a necklace made from glass and amber beads, and a pair of bronze bracelets. The burial was unusual enough that archaeologists started calling her the “Princess of Bagicz,” a nickname that stuck even as the evidence pointed to a much simpler life.
The coffin did a lot of the heavy lifting here. It was a log coffin, with the box and lid carved from a single oak trunk, a kind of organic material that usually rots away before anyone gets a chance to study it. This one survived because it sat in a wet, humid environment that helped preserve the wood long past its expected expiration date. Researchers say it’s the only preserved wooden sarcophagus of its kind from the Roman Iron Age.
The bigger problem was the timing of it all. Over the years, scholars agreed she died sometime in the Roman period, but they couldn’t nail down a date. A study of the grave goods in the 1980s suggested a window around A.D. 110 to 160. Then a radiocarbon date taken from her tooth in 2018 suggested something far earlier, between 113 B.C. and A.D. 65. Seeing dates that far apart makes people re-check everything, twice.
Who Was the Princess of bagicz?
A newer study finally cleared the mess by dating the coffin itself with dendrochronology, meaning tree-ring dating. The researchers took a small core sample from the oak and compared the growth rings to established regional sequences from northwest Poland. “The estimated felling date of the oak used for the coffin was calculated as 120 AD,” the researchers wrote. “It is likely that the coffin was crafted immediately after felling.” That lines up neatly with the style and era of the objects buried with her, which makes the earlier tooth date the outlier.
So why would a tooth read older than the rest of the burial? One likely culprit is the marine reservoir effect, where carbon dating can skew earlier if someone ate a lot of seafood or consumed water sources that pull “older” carbon into the body. In layman’s terms, your diet can warp your lab results.
The identity mystery is still open, too. Marta Chmiel-Chrzanowska, an archaeologist at the University of Szczecin, told Live Science in an email that the woman showed no clear signs that point to a cause of death. She did have osteoarthritis, which might fit work-related strain, especially given her estimated age of 25 to 35. That detail also doesn’t exactly match the princess label and points toward a more ordinary life with a very uncommon burial.
Next up is DNA testing. Chmiel-Chrzanowska told Live Science she was traveling to Warsaw for another attempt, including plans to drill into the skull to reach the temporal bone while avoiding visible damage. So, although the date of her burial has been figured out, the mystery still remains—who is she and what made her so “special”?
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