Wooden figures were sacrificed as were people; human victims suffered a sudden and violent death from what the archaeological finds throughout bogs—in what was once Germania—indicate. In many cases, various measures were employed to ensure that the body was held down in the bog, either using branches or stones. Danish historian, Allan A. Lund, posits that the victims had been killed because they were considered witches who brought misfortune to society. He explains this by the fact that the victims had been placed in a peat bog, where they would not dissolve and thereby be transferred to the other world, but were instead, preserved forever in a border state between this and the other world.