Student

The first people that came upon the Ice Man were Helmut and Erika Simon that also meant that they were the first two to compromise the integrity of the site. When they got there they moved a birch bark bundle out of the way when they got (Page 8). The next person that came to the site was Markus Pirpamer, the manger of the Weisskugel Lodge. The way he affected the site was when he moved the axe from the rock next to the body to another rock that was close by, in addition to that he did some other general scavenging (Page 13). Anton Koler also came in and looked around the site, he even moved the axe in order to take a better picture of it (17 Page). Markus was the first to remove an item from the site, the axe (Page 17). Hans Kammerlander disturbed the site by taking the stick off the ledge near the string and fur and using it to hack away the ice around the body (Page 23).

There are many thing that the could have been done better as far as the excavating of the Ice Man, the biggest being how they did it. Because every showed up at first with the thought of it being a recant accidentally death of a climber, show because of that they took less care of the scene than they would have if the new it was an archeological find. Koler used a mini jackhammer to try and unbury the Ice Man and while doing so he struck the body itself. All the moving around of all the things makes it impossible to know exactly were everything was in relation to Otzi. I has prevented us from learning for sure f this was the original place of death, meaning has the ice melted and moved this whole group half way down the mountain. This is brought up by the fact that the body was found with the blue ski clip, obviously not something from the time of the Otzi. Another thing that went wrong with the excavation is the way he molded because of the way he was left in the ice over night, even though covered.

When dealing with the Ice Man the archaeologists had to apply different methods at different parts in time. At the very beginning before any of the real excavating had been started there was some relative dating done with the axe, using knowledge of previously found axes of this same type or style to try and put the Otzi in a time period. This actually was an example as to which applying such a method produced an incorrect result, for it was later when they radiocarbon dated mire than once to see if their new results were correct that they found out that their previous conclusion was nowhere near correct. The dating told us that the Ice man was around 5000 years old, making him the oldest and most well preserved human finding to date. Another thing they applied was making certain hypothesizes on varies things related to him such as the cause of death. They also applied ecofacts to the scene, this is what told them the direction he was heading when the fight and or chase begun, the did this by taking the grass that he had in his boots and comparing it to the growth patterns of current grass.

Since the book “Ice Man” has been put out we have learned a lot about Otzi. The knife becomes much more important than it was when the book was put out, because it was just a knife then. Based on the way his hand was when he died it appeared that Otzi died with the knife in hand. The blade of the knife if found to have blood on it. Also the cuts on his hands appear to be defense wounds on his hands cuts on his back and bruisers on his back, which brings up the new question of how he was killed, because all of these were made about two or three days before