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This was very unfortunate and led to the destruction of important evidence on the site. The ice mummy became an immediate sensation. The find spot was investigated by archaeologists shortly after the find was made, but the appalling weather conditions and the onset of winter quickly stopped the fieldwork.
A well-organized and thorough excavation of the gully was conducted in in A few more artefacts and a number of fragments were recovered, and a large number of samples were collected. A painstaking reconstruction of where the artefacts were found was also undertaken, based on interviews with people who had been at the site prior to the first proper investigation. However, it was puzzling that artefacts were found at some distance from the body, such as the quiver, which was found 7 m away.
Together with two colleagues, the archaeologist Konrad Spindler in Innsbruck took charge of the investigations, with the collaboration of a number of colleagues from Austria, Italy and other countries. Remarkable results concerning his death, his life and his times have been published. Some of his equipment had been damaged in a violent encounter, and he had no time to repair it. He was in pain from broken ribs.
Exposed on the surface, he freeze-dried, which led to the exceptional preservation of his body. A short time later, a glacier covered the area, and buried the body and the artifacts for more than five millennia, like in a time capsule.
As glacial archaeologists, we were kindly treated to a guided tour of the museum and told the story of the find and the scientific results. Subsequently, he must have been covered by snow and the glacier ice.
Time of death was believed to be in the late summer or fall. The basis for this conclusion was that a sloe was found near the ice mummy, and sloes ripen in late summer. The excavators of the site pointed in their report to the possibility that the mummy and the finds had been displaced by recurrent thaw and re-freezing processes. An important piece of independent evidence that this might be the case appeared in This time of year may be spring in the valley, but at m where he died, this is still winter.
Even considering the windswept ridge where the find lay, the gully would very likely have been covered in snow, perhaps deep snow.
How could he have died down in the gully then? They also believed that the mummy and the finds had been moved by recurrent thaw and re-freezing processes. However, the discussion again drew attention to the uncertainties associated with the natural processes on the site. This takes us to the next curious aspect of the find — the broken equipment. However, there may be a simpler and more natural explanation for the broken equipment and missing pieces.
We learned from a careful analysis of our Lendbreen site is that there are a number of natural processes that affect artefacts lost on the surface of snow and ice. The simple version is that the artefacts may displace from the original place of deposition, they may break into pieces and the broken pieces may scatter. Often artefacts go through all three processes.
The snow and ice cover will melt away during very warm summers, and some of the artefacts originally lost on the ice and snow will melt into hollows below.
Such hollows are more protected from the elements and are more likely to preserve snow and ice over the summer, i.
Artefacts that do not make it into such hollows are more likely to be lost over time, as they are more exposed. The exposed artefacts gradually disappear, with wood and birch bark being the last materials to preserve. This pattern can be seen very clearly in the artefact distribution maps at Lendbreen.
Pieces of wood and birch bark surround the edges of a large hollow with more favorable preservation conditions, where textiles, leather and horse dung are preserved. Wood and birch bark are very durable, probably because they go through a natural conservation process of freeze-drying due to the cold and dry environment. When the ice melts completely, the artefacts end up resting on the rock and stones below. This is not because they were originally lost there when there was no ice, but because the layer of ice and snow in-between melted away at some point.
During this process, meltwater and strong wind may disperse the artefacts. Once resting on the rocks, the artefacts may break into pieces, due to ice and snow pressure or trampling by animals.
After breaking into pieces, the individual fragments may be displaced by meltwater or strong winds. At Lendbreen, we have found fragments of the same artefact hundreds of meters apart. Many of the artefacts have parts missing. That does not mean that people brought these items into mountains in an already broken state. They were broken by natural processes on the site. The dispersed and broken equipment with missing pieces is likely to be a result of natural processes on the find spot, not a hasty flight.
When the snow and ice melted, his body and most parts of his equipment ended up a gully underneath. The missing small parts never made it into the gully, probably because they were displaced by meltwater and wind.
Once melted down on to the bare terrain below, and snow and ice recovered the site. Are there any traces of the artefacts that did not make it into the gully? Remarkably, there is, even though the excavation in did not extend outside the gully. He found very poorly preserved remains of a birch bark vessel underneath a stone just south of the gully, outside the excavated area. These remains turned out to be part of a better-preserved birch bark vessel recovered in the gully. The find is in complete accordance with the Lendbreen find circumstances.
This piece did not make it into the gully, perhaps together with other artefacts and fragments of less durable materials, now lost. It only survived because it was lying beneath a protecting stone.
After freeze-drying on the surface of the snow, he and most of his belongings later entered into the gully as the snow and ice surrounding him melted away. Snow and ice covered his resting place a short time after he died, sealing it off from the environment. Otherwise, the reasoning goes, the ice mummy and the artefacts would not have been preserved. As the ice built up, a glacier developed here. This type of preservation is at odds with the way other ice finds are preserved.
Archaeological finds from the ice are mostly found in association with stagnant ice, i. The most frequent habitat for all of these mosses is in the Schnalstal Valley, one of the valleys leading up to the high-elevation spot where the Iceman was found. Researchers are still studying everything from the Iceman's fatal wound to the contents of his belt pouch , but the new paper is Dickson's definitive summation of the samples of moss taken from the site.
The piece is the first statistical analysis of the samples, he said, but also a summary of all the work done since the s.
Originally published on Live Science. Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science covering topics from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior. A freelancer based in Denver, Colorado, she also regularly contributes to Scientific American and The Monitor, the monthly magazine of the American Psychological Association. Stephanie received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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