David Roberts on the discovey of Ice Man

Iceman from the Copper Age The unprecedented discovery of the preserved body of a Copper Age traveler in the Alps, described in this National Geographic article, gave archaeologists a glimpse into what life was like 5000 or more years ago. THE ICEMAN: LONE VOYAGER FROM THE COPPER AGE By David Roberts In a rocky hollow at the crest of a high mountain pass, the man stopped to rest. We may never know what drew him to these heights. Perhaps he was a shepherd, guiding his animals back to the southern lowlands for the winter. Perhaps he was an itinerant trader, a shaman, a prospector, an outcast. Buffeted by cold winds along the pass, he gazed out over the two valleys below. The one to the north looked formidable—a vista of glaciers that led to a harrowing chasm and a thundering river. To the south beckoned a valley of safety, its larch trees a blaze of orange needles in the waning autumn, its stream spilling softly from one green meadow to the next. It was also a valley of comfort. It may even have led to his home. He knelt in the hollow and unpacked a birch-bark container. Inside, carefully wrapped in green leaves, lay a few pieces of charcoal. Had he not climbed so high, he might have built a fire with them, but now he was thousands of feet above any shrubs whose branches he might have used for kindling. A piece of meat, from an ibex he had killed earlier, and a few berries were all the food he had. The man, in his late 20s or 30s, stood five feet two. His clothes of animal skins, cape of grass, and leather shoes stuffed with grass warded off the cold. Beneath his clothes his skin bore markings, perhaps tattoos—several sets of parallel blue lines on his lower back, a cross behind the left knee, and stripes on the right ankle. In his hand he clutched his ax, the most valuable thing a man could own. He looked up at the mountains we call the Alps. Something was wrong. This skilled, solitary traveler, who knew these ranges as well as any man, was in trouble. Perhaps a sudden blizzard had surged over the jagged ridges and was engulfing the pass; perhaps the man had gone too long with too little food; perhaps some illness sapped his strength. One item at a time, he laid down the belongings that defined his life, propping them here and there among the rocks around him. Then he stretched out across a broad stone in the center of the hollow, reclined on his left side, and laid his head down. Sleep overcame him. The man never awoke. Deep snows covered him. Through some 5,000 years, he lay in his tomb of ice, frozen in the posture of his last conscious moments. On September 19, 1991, a German couple, Helmut and Erika Simon, hiking near the border between Austria and Italy, wandered slightly off the trail. Suddenly Erika Simon caught sight of a small head and pair of shoulders emerging from the ice. The couple thought they had stumbled across a discarded doll. Instead, Frau Simon had found the solitary prehistoric traveler now known around the world as the Iceman. He was quickly nicknamed Ötzi, after the Ötztal, the valley north of his death site. Not since Howard Carter unlocked the tomb of King Tutankhamun in the early 1920s had an ancient human so seized the world's imagination. Within months, T-shirts, postcards, jewelry, and pop songs celebrated Ötzi. Austrian schoolchildren described him as well as anyone could: “the poor man who died alone in the snow.” Everyone had a fantasy about Ötzi. One journalist insisted that the Iceman was a hoax—an Egyptian mummy stolen from the British Museum and somehow planted in the ice. A German woman announced that she was writing a book about her nightly séances with Ötzi. Other women declared that they wanted to be impregnated with his presumably frozen sperm! Meanwhile, the Iceman had begun to excite archaeologists and anthropologists all over the world. Thought initially to be 4,000 years old, he ranked as one of the oldest and best preserved mummified humans ever found—King Tutankhamun, by comparison, lived nearly a millennium later. The Iceman's was by far the oldest body ever retrieved from an Alpine glacier; his nearest rival was a mere 400 years old. And at 10,530 feet, the death site represented the highest prehistoric human find ever made in Europe. Not even the remains of a campfire had been discovered so high before. The Iceman's body survived through topographic luck. Shortly after he died, the rocky hollow where he lay filled with snow, but it formed a stable pocket, detached from the glacier that flowed for five millennia a few yards above his head. Bodies caught in glaciers usually are crushed and torn by the movement of the ice, and tissues and organs are reduced to an undifferentiated mass. The Iceman instead was naturally mummified. The body emerged in such good condition that the man's eyeballs remain intact, glaring eerily at the modern world, and scientists may be able to determine what he ate for his last meal. As a mountaineer who has spent many jubilant days in the Alps, I found myself engrossed the moment I heard about the Iceman. As a journalist who often writes about prehistory, I was doubly intrigued. And as the details of the chance discovery became clear, I realized that on a warm September afternoon in 1982—nine years almost to the day before Erika Simon stumbled upon the mummy—I myself had ventured within a mile and a half of where the Iceman lay. I flew to Innsbruck to report on the Iceman, hoping to see him with my own eyes. It was too late: Already the scientists in charge had closed the door tight on press and public alike. Their reaction made sense in light of the shocking tale of the botched recovery of the Iceman's remains that was beginning to unfold. During the four days after the September discovery, a small horde of well-meaning hikers and officials, including the famed mountaineer Reinhold Messner, had taken their turns trying to free the wanderer from the ice. With ice axes and ski poles, the “rescuers” had hacked and prodded. One of them had seized a nearby stick to dig with, breaking it in the process; the stick turned out to be part of the hazel-wood and larch-wood frame of the Iceman's backpack, an artifact the likes of which had never before been discovered. In their haste the workers also managed to snap off the Iceman's six-foot-long bow. (The bottom end of it, frozen in the ice, was recovered a year later.) Yanking and pulling on the Iceman's body, his saviors succeeded in destroying what was left of his clothing. Then, as they hauled their victim out of the ice, they realized that his genitals were missing. Once freed, the Iceman was slung in a body bag and airlifted to Vent, the nearest Austrian village. There, his salvagers forced the body into a coffin for the car ride to Innsbruck. Some witnesses heard a cracking sound. (X rays later revealed the left arm to be broken.) And on the mortuary slab in Innsbruck, as a mob of photographers flashed away, a contaminating fungus began growing on the Iceman's skin. Not until five days after his discovery did an archaeologist, Konrad Spindler of the University of Innsbruck's Institute for Prehistory and Early History, examine the Iceman. In all fairness, none of the salvagers had suspected the Iceman's antiquity. Even the knowledgeable Messner guessed the body might date, at the earliest, from the Middle Ages. “I needed only one second,” Spindler told me in October 1991, “to see that the body was 4,000 years old.” Actually, it was the style of the Iceman's ax that inspired the archaeologist's confidence. That ax indicated to him that the Iceman lived around 2000 B.C. plus or minus 200 years. At once a rigorous effort to stabilize his condition was launched. Under the supervision of Werner Platzer of the university's Anatomy Institute, the mummy was placed in a freezer, where the temperature was kept at a constant 21°F and the humidity 98 percent—the same conditions as the ice from which he had emerged. The Iceman could not be removed from the freezer, Platzer decreed, for more than 20 minutes at a time, and then only for the most compelling scientific inquiry. By then, the best press credentials in the world could not crack open that freezer door. During the next few months the Austrians began divulging some of the Iceman's secrets. They did so slowly and cautiously, still embarrassed by early mistakes. For instance, the mummy's most prominent injury was a gaping hole in the left hip. In October Spindler had assured me that the hole was caused by some wild animal shortly after the Iceman's death, before the snows covered him. But a policeman who had helicoptered to the death site in September came forward with a confession. It was he, wielding a pneumatic jackhammer, and not some predator, who had gouged the hip in his zeal to free the icebound body. In addition, radiocarbon analyses from two different laboratories dated the Iceman between 3500 and 3000 B.C.—1,000 to 1,500 years older than Spindler's confident initial assertion. How had he made such a mistake? Spindler had based his date on the shape of the Iceman's ax blade. It looked like a relic from the Early Bronze Age, which began around 2200 B.C. The blade, however, turned out not to be bronze at all. Chemical analysis showed it to be nearly pure copper. (The two metals look quite similar.) Thus the Iceman was far rarer than a voyager from the Bronze Age. He was, in fact, unique: a mummy from the Copper Age, which lasted in central Europe roughly from 4000 to 2200 B.C. Meanwhile, the Iceman became the focus of an intense political dispute. Although Austrian police had retrieved the body, surveyors determined that the Iceman had actually died 303 feet inside the Italian border—in the autonomous district of Alto Adige, or South Tirol. Italy demanded that the Austrians turn over the Iceman. And South Tirol made its own claim. After lengthy negotiations the Austrians agreed—on paper at least—to return the Iceman to South Tirol by September 1994. Since then the South Tirol government has agreed that the body may remain in Austria until research is completed. The Austrians' preservation efforts were fraught with problems. “To freeze the Iceman again is bad,” explained an outspoken young archaeologist named Markus Egg. “It dries him out. Also the ice expands and breaks down the walls of the cells. Every time they take him out to check on him, he starts to melt again.” I met Egg, whom the Austrians had put in charge of restoring the Iceman's tools and belongings, at the Roman-Germanic Central Museum in Mainz. Unable to see the Iceman, I had determined to learn about his world. His possessions, many archaeologists believe, will eventually tell us more about that world than the body itself will. Geographically, the Iceman's domain was the Alps, stretching from the massifs of southeast France to the Swiss-German border, from the ranges of the Austrian Tirol to the lakes of northern Italy. Five thousand years ago these mountains that command the heart of Europe were a vast, fearsome wilderness. Yet in the Copper Age, or, as archaeologists call it, the Chalcolithic, hardy voyagers trekked through these ranges, and the goods they traded traveled even farther. Whatever else he was, the Iceman was a mountaineer: His very clothing and his tools proclaim as much. The Iceman's most provocative possession was his copper ax. With reverence, I watched Markus Egg pick it up and offer it to me. I grasped its yew-wood handle and swung the tool gently through the air. The handle ended in a gnarled joint where it bent to hold the blade. Perhaps the Iceman himself had seen the shape of the ax handle lurking inside a tree and had cut it free. I traced the haft with my fingers to where it ended in a notch that held the blade. Dark birch gum held the blade firmly in position beneath a tightly wrapped thong of rawhide. I weighed the wedge-shaped blade in my palm and ran a finger over a pair of small nicks in the cutting edge. What swings had the Iceman made to dent that blade? The ax blade that fooled Spindler continues to confound the experts. Surprisingly, it is a flanged ax rather than a more primitive flat ax. The flanges, or ridges, along its four edges hold the blade more stably in its haft. Most Copper Age specialists in Europe now agree that the Iceman's blade is a classic example of what they call the Remedello style. Remedello Sotto was a cemetery just south of the Italian Alps, where 124 tombs were excavated in the 19th century. However, Remedello artifacts are thought to date back no earlier than 2700 B.C. Given the Iceman's radiocarbon age, how could he have owned a Remedello ax hundreds of years earlier? It was as if the tomb of a medieval warrior had yielded a modern rifle. Egg walked me to a table where his assistant, Roswitha Goedecker-Ciolek, was trying to put the hundred-odd scraps of the Iceman's clothing back together. It looked like a hopeless jigsaw puzzle of pieces with stretched, soggy edges. Yet already the two researchers had made important observations. The patchwork garment had originally been finely stitched together with sinew by a skilled hand. Far cruder repairs had been made, probably by the Iceman himself, sewing with grass. Thus they believe he must have had ties to a community, although he was used to fending for himself. Also, as they sorted through the tatters of his clothes, Egg and Goedecker-Ciolek found two tiny spikelets of a primitive wheat. Later another researcher, Willy Groenman-van Waateringe of the University of Amsterdam, found pollen of the same wheat as she searched among the hairs fallen away from his fur clothes. This wheat grew only at low altitudes. Meanwhile, University of Innsbruck botanist Sigmar Bortenschlager and his team analyzed the pieces of charcoal the Iceman carried. They came from a variety of trees found throughout the Alps. But one tantalizing piece of evidence allows us to speculate about the Iceman's homeland: One of the families of trees can be found a mere five or six hours south of the death site but at least two days to the north. This botanical evidence indicates that the Iceman may have come from the Val Senales in the South Tirol. Egg showed me the rest of the Iceman's tools. A small pencil-shaped stick of linden wood with a tip of antler was first thought to be a fire starter; now Egg believes that it was a tool used for sharpening flint blades. The beautiful deerskin quiver that held the Iceman's 14 arrows astonished the scientists, for no quiver from either the Copper or the Bronze Age had ever before been found. Some tools looked as if the Iceman had laid them down just yesterday. The bow, taller than the man himself, was unfinished, and scallops where he had shaped the wood with his ax looked freshly cut. A flint blade in his carrying bag still bore a burnish called sickle shine—left by the grasses he cut with the blade. Inside his quiver I saw scratch marks made by the flint tips of his arrows. Some relics, such as a small flint dagger with an ash-wood handle, were similar to those found at other Copper Age sites. However, no one had ever seen the kind of delicately woven grass sheath that held the dagger. These tools could not tell me who the Iceman was or what he was doing on a treacherous 10,530-foot-high pass. They did, however, evoke vivid images of a distant time. The first half of the Copper Age was an era of climatic warming, when humans penetrated higher than ever into the Alps. The tree line climbed during the warming, and game followed the forests. Hunters followed the game. Other motives drew daring adventurers to high altitudes. Because dense forests covered much of Europe, the meadows above the tree line offered the best pastures for sheep, goats, and cattle. There was also this newly valued metal we call copper—great green veins of it bare to the sky, ready for the finding among the rocky crags. Copper was changing the Alpine world forever, stimulating the development of major trade routes between many isolated valleys. “Before this moment,” explained Markus Egg, “there were only two ways for a man to be rich. He could have a great mass of cattle or a great mass of wheat. But these are not good treasures—you cannot carry them around.” Egg took the Iceman's copper ax blade in his hand. “This is a good treasure!” he said. “Moreover, you now need men to be miners, smelters, axmakers, maybe even salesmen. Now people have a real profession, a specialty. Before copper, everybody did everything.” To turn raw chunks of copper-bearing stone into an axhead like the Iceman's is no easy feat. The ore must first be heated in a clay crucible buried in the ground to remove impurities, or slag. Blowing through pipes, several workers simultaneously direct intense streams of air into the fire, fanning it until it reaches 1981°F, copper's melting point. After the molten copper has separated from the slag, the entire mass is allowed to cool and the slag is carefully chipped away, leaving blocks of relatively pure copper. These blocks, or ingots, are later reheated, and the liquid metal poured into a cast. The world's earliest known man-made copper objects—beads, pins, and awls—were fabricated about 8000 B.C. in Turkey and Iran. There is evidence of copper mining in the Balkans by around 5000 B.C. From there the technology probably spread west, reaching the Alps about a thousand years later. Our fullest picture of life in the Copper Age comes from scores of villages painstakingly excavated over the past century on the shores of lakes in northern Switzerland, as well as lakes just across the border in Germany and France. As I traveled among these scattered sites and the museums that held their artifacts, I imagined the Iceman, perhaps as a trader, paying a visit to such a village in the late fourth millennium B.C. The long approach through the dark forest had taken its toll on his spirit. He had sensed bears and wolves lurking unseen in the woods; because of the tangle of brush and trees, he had found his bow and arrows all but useless for hunting. Several times he had lost his way, finding it again only by carefully retracing his steps. At last he came to a wooden palisade fence encircling a village. The strangers guarding the gate demanded to know who he was, but their language was alien to his ear. They stared at him hard, disdainful of his patchwork animal-hide clothing but impressed by his wonderful ax. Finally they let him pass inside. The village was a pandemonium of domestic animals and people. The Iceman climbed a ladder to the floor of a terrace. It sat on great wooden stilts above the mucky shoreline of the lake. The rough-hewn houses of the villagers were crowded behind him. Gradually the Iceman's welcome grew warmer. His hosts lent him a linen tunic, embroidered with colorful designs, to wear while his fur clothing dried out. As he relaxed, the Iceman saw how superbly placed the village was. For days he had traveled under the dense canopy of pines, oaks, and elms, with only the occasional clearing to give him a glimpse of the landscape. Now, as he rested on the terrace, he could look southeast across a huge sheet of water to the spectacular mountains. His new friends fed him well. One night he ate beef, great bloody joints singed on the fire; another night, fish from the lake; yet another, steaks from a dog they had slaughtered that afternoon. Their berries and nuts he knew almost too well, but the food he craved was the soft, greasy stuff farmers had recently learned to make from milk. At last the Iceman pulled out of his backpack the goods he had come to trade: pieces of unshaped flint, ruddy, cream-colored, gray, and dark brown. They were from a famous quarry far to the south, he bragged. They were the finest flints anyone had ever seen, so much better for making knives and daggers than the pitiful stuff found north of the mountains. His lakeside friends turned the flints over and over in their hands. But it was his ax they kept staring at, and when the Iceman slept at night, he held its smooth handle in his hand and tucked the blade close to his chest. One day it was their turn to dazzle him. They took him to a field outside the palisade, where he saw two extraordinary objects. He had heard stories about both but had never been able to picture either. On the edge of the field a cow had been attached to a great open box loaded with firewood. The Iceman had seen such sledges laboriously dragged by cattle across the earth, but this box, two feet off the ground, glided through the air. As the Iceman stared, he saw that a pair of solid, round slabs of wood rotated beneath the sledge. He had seen his first wheels. And there, in the middle of the field, two cattle were yoked to a strange, forked wooden device; a man walked behind the device, guiding it. As the cattle moved, the device dug into the soil, cutting it loose and spilling it to the side—the kind of work that had always taken men infinitely longer to perform with wooden hoes. The Iceman had seen a plow. My vision of the Iceman's visit to a northern lakeside village is based on the work of many researchers over the past 30 years. For instance, excavated bones tell us that by around 5000 B.C. Alpine man had domesticated five animals: dogs, which were originally more important for food than companionship, cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. Horses were still unknown in the Alps. Chickens were not introduced here until the Iron Age, around 600 B.C., cats not until Roman times. In the Copper Age, villagers grew wheat and barley and made linen clothes from flax. They had only recently discovered how to milk a cow and how to make cheese and butter. Their sheep may have been used for meat but not yet for wool. Many staple foods of today were still unknown, including potatoes, onions, and oats. At the Swiss National Museum in Zürich, I saw probably the oldest wheel ever found in central Europe—and maybe in the world. It was discovered in downtown Zürich in 1979 by a Swiss team led by archaeologist Ulrich Ruoff. Made from a single piece of maple, it may date back as far as 3200 B.C. Central Europe's oldest known plow is more than a thousand years younger than the Iceman. Yet Copper Age artists cut images of plows on rock surfaces. Italian archaeologist Franco Mezzena has found many rows of furrows preserved at a major Copper Age religious complex excavated in the town of Aosta in northwest Italy. He believes the plowing was ritualistic rather than agricultural. What language did the Iceman speak? We don't know: Words cannot be dug out of the soil. Almost all modern European languages belong to the same family, which is called Indo-European after a hypothetical common parent language. Until recently, most experts thought that Indo-European tongues arrived in Europe around 2500 B.C. However, British archaeologist Colin Renfrew has recently argued that the Indo-European languages reached Europe much earlier. If the Iceman indeed spoke an Indo-European tongue, linguists believe he would have used a word like kwekwlos for wheel, dhwer for door, deiwos for god, and sneigwh, meaning to snow. While words cannot be excavated, pottery can. And different styles may point to different cultures—and presumably to different languages. In Switzerland sharply contrasting pottery styles seem to define a dramatic barrier between two cultures during the Iceman's era. Some specialists think this barrier, which bisects present-day Switzerland, marked the collision of two currents of thought and art—Mediterranean ideas sweeping up from the south and eastern European notions moving in from the north and east. Trade and perhaps warfare ultimately broke down the barrier. Toward the end of the Copper Age, around 2200 B.C., a single culture—called the Bell Beaker people, after the shape of its pottery—had unified the Alps and most of Europe. Last September, just before the first anniversary of the Iceman's discovery, I flew back to Innsbruck, still hoping somehow to see the man. His scientific guardians, Werner Platzer and Konrad Spindler, told me that a special viewing remained out of the question. However, Spindler flew with me by helicopter to the site where the Iceman was found. After we reached the hollow, Spindler stooped, then ran a finger across the snow. “Do you see this?” he said, showing me a fine dirt now coating his fingertip. “Dust! This is why we found him.” In March 1991 a huge Saharan dust storm blew tons of fine particles all the way to the Alps. Over the warm summer of 1991 the dark grit absorbed the sun's rays, spurring an unprecedented melting of the glaciers. “We think he was found only three days after he had melted out,” said Spindler. “And three days later, the snow fell again—enough to have buried him. He was out of the ice, then, only six days, at maximum. So we are very lucky. I think it is easier to break the bank at a casino.” I looked at the rocky slab where the man had lain and wondered again what he had been doing up here. I asked Spindler. “I think he was a shepherd,” he replied. I heard that belief echoed the next day. Rather than take the helicopter back with Spindler, I hiked down to the Ötztal Valley. The next morning I met a group of modern shepherds tending a flock of 1,600 sheep. Struggling in German, I questioned the three sturdy young men and a woman about the Iceman. At nine in the morning they were drinking wine straight from the bottle. Of course he was a shepherd, they assured me. Like them, he had been on his way from the north, across the glaciered Ötztal Alps to the Val Senales, the safe valley on the south. “To his house,” one nodded. As I sprawled in the grass, envying the shepherds their tipsy camaraderie, I realized I might be witnessing a trek that sprang from an unbroken tradition stretching back 5,000 years to the Iceman himself. Through these blithe shepherds I seemed to glimpse not only the Iceman but also inklings of his elusive soul. The Iceman's tattoo-like markings might imply something about his spiritual life. They intrigued scientists, who had no evidence that tattooing was practiced until about a thousand years later. The Iceman's markings are not like those of a modern sailor or biker. Located in normally hidden places—his lower back, behind his knee, and on his ankle—they were not done for show. They may have been designed to give him some sort of supernatural power or protection. So might the pair of fungi he carried, each pierced by a leather thong. Archaeologists have never seen anything like this arrangement from this period. The fungi contain chemical substances now known to be antibiotic. If the Iceman used them to counteract illnesses, perhaps they seemed magical to him. In the weeks ahead I tried to learn what else had animated the man. What were the gods he worshiped? What were the beliefs that held the cosmos of his people together? I found windows to his soul in a series of recent Copper Age excavations across northern Italy. The evidence is recorded on three types of artifacts. One type is engraved stone slabs, called stelae, which were erected at sacred sites. An astonishing set of six stelae was accidentally discovered only a few years ago at Arco, near the city of Trento, as bulldozers were clearing land for a new hospital. Earthmoving for new construction is, in fact, what has brought many Copper Age sites to light. These stelae, known as Arco I through VI, are kept in a warehouse in Trento. I was taken there by two energetic young archaeologists, Franco Marzatico and Annaluisa Pedrotti. Arco I, a sandstone slab standing seven feet tall and weighing seven tons, is shaped like a human torso. The chest is crowded with carvings: seven copper daggers, halberds, a necklace, a richly detailed belt, and an object Pedrotti called a scepter. Three copper axes are identical to the Iceman's. Axes are found on other Copper Age stelae. What do they mean? Scientists believe that stelae represent gods, venerated ancestors, or cultural heroes. Perhaps the Iceman, when he saw a stela such as Arco I, knew exactly which warrior or deity the stone proclaimed, as a Roman Catholic might recognize the saint in a medieval fresco. Perhaps he had even prayed before this stone or made a pilgrimage just to touch it. In a mystical sense, each swing of his ax partook of the sacred. To chop down a sapling was to be linked to some god whose own ax had helped bless the world, to some hero whose weapon had rid the land of evil. The spiritual importance of stelae endured among the Iceman's descendants. Only last summer Hans Nothdurfter of South Tirol's Department of Archaeology in Bolzano found a Copper Age stela beneath an 18th-century wood altar in a church in the small South Tirolean village of Laces. It was covered on both sides with mysterious engravings, including an ornamental belt, radiant sunlike objects, and a copper dagger just like those depicted on Arco I. The practice of invoking the spirits honored on monuments for good luck and fertility must have persisted well into Christian times. Even 4,000 years after the Iceman died, Roman Catholic bishops were threatening “worshipers of stone” with excommunication. Laces lies only 11 miles by air from the high pass where the Iceman perished. The stela cannot be carbon-dated. But if the monument is as old as he is, the Iceman probably knew of it. He might even have worshiped before it. Stelae give us one window on the spiritual life of the Copper Age; burial sites afford another. The most famous is Remedello Sotto, south of Brescia. Its 124 separate graves provide us with a wealth of artifacts, including beautiful flint blades, probably made just for the burials. An unusual silver pin and numerous arrows and metal weapons suggest to some scientists that no common men were buried here. The Iceman's Remedello-style ax could indicate he was a big man in a hierarchical society. It was long thought that such single burials were the norm across most of northern Italy. However, in 1981 British archaeologist Lawrence Barfield of the University of Birmingham uncovered a startling Copper Age burial site, called Rocca di Manerba, on the western shore of Lake Garda. At this site Barfield found no carefully arranged individual graves. Instead the cemetery was a chaotic mass of human bones. The skeletons had apparently been ritually defleshed. Barfield speculated that the bodies had been exposed to the elements or buried for a time. Then the skeletons had been taken apart and burned. Finally they were deposited in a mass crypt. All the individuals at Manerba were so buried. If the Iceman had belonged to a community like this, he would have been an ordinary man in an egalitarian society. The third window into the Iceman's soul is rock art—the figures that Chalcolithic artists etched into cliffs and other rock surfaces. Some 300,000 rock figures, many of them carved by Copper Age artists, have been discovered in a narrow northern Italian mountain valley called Val Camonica. Only 50 miles from the Iceman's resting-place, the valley must have been known to him. I wandered for two days among the dazzling and perplexing petroglyphs, guided by archaeologist Angelo Fossati of the Footsteps of Man Archaeological Cooperative. One recurrent image was a circle with radiating spikes. It was as if some Copper Age visionary had once seen the setting sun framed by the antlers of a great stag on the horizon. Had the image become his people's sign for revelation? Fossati showed me a chain of humans linked arm in arm, encircling a stela. Here surely was a rite of celebration, a life-affirming dance. Row upon row of chamois, deer, and boars invoked a hunting magic. And countless daggers and axes once more declared the supernatural power of a tool or weapon made of copper. From Val Camonica I drove west to Aosta. Here the Iceman's contemporaries built a religious complex so grand that he might well have made a pilgrimage to it. Some 45 stelae have been unearthed at Aosta since 1969, mostly under the direction of archaeologist Franco Mezzena. The finest of these features a bow, several arrows, and a copper ax. The site also displays structures called dolmens—large tombs that resemble stone houses. In one Mezzena found the jumbled bones of 70 skeletons. Two Aosta dolmens are built on raised stone platforms, one of which is shaped like a huge wedge and points northwest. Some researchers believe this form represents the magical blade of the copper dagger. An equally stunning complex of dolmens and stelae has been found in the Swiss town of Sion by archaeologist Alain Gallay of the University of Geneva. The engravings in Sion look exactly like those of Aosta. Moreover, the dolmens are built on similar dagger-shaped platforms, also oriented to the northwest. Clearly there was regular traffic between these sites. They shared the same spiritual tradition. And they did so despite being separated by the Great St. Bernard Pass, which until the recent opening of a tunnel required a slow drive on a road contorted with hairpin turns. As I wandered among the sites where Copper Age communities had interred their dead, I saw how much emphasis they placed on a proper burial. Whatever people the Iceman came from, they must have been deeply disturbed by his disappearance. It was not a just closure with the gods. It was against the order of things for him to die as he did. The ones who cared for him were cheated of the purgation of their mourning. He had simply vanished, and no one knew where he was. Last December, 14 months after my fascination with the Iceman first took me to Innsbruck, an unexpected phone call summoned me back. Werner Platzer had invited four of the world's leading experts on naturally mummified humans to examine the Iceman. Each had seen the body months earlier. Now they would evaluate how well Platzer's efforts to preserve the body were working. After their examination I could get a four-minute look at the man. At noon on December 17 the experts entered his chamber. Later they would tell me that the Iceman had dried out perceptibly during his stay in the freezer. “Given the present state of the science, there's nothing more you can do to prevent desiccation,” said Elsebet Sander-Jørgensen of Denmark's Silkeborg Museum. An all-out effort to stabilize and preserve the man, they all concurred, was more vital than any further research on the body. After the experts finished their examination, Platzer ushered me into the Iceman's 10-by-20-foot chamber. He ordered me to stand on a carpet just inside the door. Then I saw the Iceman, just 15 feet away, lying on his back inside a plexiglass box with regulated air flow. The experts were still discussing anatomical details. All I could do was stare and struggle with a tumult of emotions. How thin and frail he looked, his limbs like sticks! His ribs protruded against his skin, taut and brown, like tanned rawhide. The head, staring upward, had a fierce, angular dignity. Platzer was saying that the Iceman's upper left arm had been broken. The injury may have occurred in Vent as workers forced him into his coffin. It had snapped rather than bent, I thought, as if repudiating the science that would wrench him from his world into ours. My gaze fixed on the Iceman's other arm, resting at his side. The hand lay in an open clench. The hollow between palm and fingers had exactly the shape of his ax handle. Even the careless workers who had hacked him out of the ice had noticed this, giving rise to a rumor that he died clutching his ax. The rumor was false. On the day he died, the Iceman had propped his ax against a stone 12 feet away. But then, as he stretched out across the rock slab and drifted toward eternity, his fingers had closed halfway, as if he were clasping the memory of his ax. If so, it was the last thing his body had to say. I had a hundred questions to ask the ancient voyager, but my four minutes were up. I turned and walked out of his chamber, leaving the Iceman for the ages. Source: National Geographic, June 1993. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2007. © 1993-2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.