Historical Note
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The Ice-Man's Toolkit of Materials Splendor During the Late Neolithic Erika and Helmut Simon made an extraordinary discovery on September 19, 1991. During their annual hiking holiday in the Alps along the Austrian-Italian border, the retired couple stumbled across the remains of a man protruding from the ice. Radiocarbon dating proved that he had not perished this century—or even last century—but during the Late Neolithic Period, some 5,000 years ago. The ice-man's clothes were predominantly of fur and consisted of a cap, jersey, loin cloth, leggings, plaited-grass cloak, and a pair of shoes stuffed with straw for warmth. His body was exceptionally preserved, even showing the presence of parallel-line and cruciform tattoos over his lower back and legs. The tools and weapons that he carried on his ill-fated trip were also well preserved and discovered around him just as they were left. The inventory included a backpack, beltpouch, net, bow-stave, quiver of arrows and arrow-production equipment, flint dagger and scabbard, retouching implement for flint tools, bone awl, fire-lighting equipment, two birch-bark containers, three flint tools, and a copper ax. Some birch fungi and sloe were found in the containers. Public curiosity is always piqued by mummies. Beyond the goulish attraction, bodies seem to elicit more empathy than site foundations or artifact assemblages. Unfortunately, the amount of information actually provided by stray bodies tends to be minimal because their contexts usually reveal little of their personal history. For instance, we could not determine who the ice-man was, why he was traveling across the Alps, where he was going, whether he was traveling alone or in a group, or why he was lost. Even his tattoos could not be ' definitively decoded. Ethnographic parallels can provide some indication of what they may have represented, but their deeper significance and symbolic meanings could not be discerned without knowing more about the world from which he came. The ice-man is exciting to archaeologists interested in ancient technologies, however, because of the diverse and perfectly preserved toolkit discovered with him. People tend to carry only the basic necessities when hiking through inhospitable places. Thus, the artifacts found with the ice-man must comprise the range and types of objects that a person living during the Late Neolithic period would have considered essential for survival. When
viewed in this manner, the types of artifacts—and the materials from which they were made—take on greater significance.
If Neolithic people were so sophisticated, however, why was the ax made of copper? The yew bow-stave measured 182-cm long. It was unfinished, suggesting that the ice-man had broken his previous bow and was carving a new one. Yew is a tough, flexible wood and one of the finest natural materials for bows. A finished bow of this type could have shot an arrow approximately 60 m. Most of the 14 arrows found in the quiver with the bow were made from viburnum wood and measured between 84.5 and 87.
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