P.N.ZOYTLOW

Oetzi (or Ötzi)  is our most famous Very Old European. So famous that it is unlikely that anyone reading this report will not have heard of him. A few words of review will bring it all back.  On September 19,1991 a couple, the Simons, hiking at over 10,000 feet on the border between Austria and Italy, discovered the frozen and ice-encrusted body of a human being. This was Oetzi, nicknamed for the valley (Ötzthal) near which he was found. Subsequent testing determined that he had lived and died some 5300 years earlier. From this point on, many themes could be developed here such as (1) the remains were initially suspected by some as being  a hoax, possible a Peruvian mummy placed high up in this Alpine setting for some obscure purpose; (2) the Simons, Helmut and Erika, claimed “discovery rights” which set in motion lengthy litigation in Italian courts;  (3) the counterclaims of others, including a woman who testified to having spat on him in hopes of later offering proof of discovery by means of DNA testing; (4) that Oetzi the Iceman has a curse due to  a number of deaths among his discoverers or investigators; and (5) the conflicting theories as to the life and death of this ancient gentleman who happened to expire, probably due to wounds after a fight, some 93 meters or  just over 300 feet into Italian territory. Had he been found before 1919 he would be Austrian (and on display in Innsbruck) as the province of South Tirol was annexed by Italy after that date.  Of these future geopolitical distinctions Oetzi was blessedly unaware; he had his own problems, yet the wars and diplomacy of the last century determined his present resting place: the South Tirol Museum of Archeology,  Bolzano (once Bozen), in the Italian region known as Trentino-Alto Adige.

There is nothing new this Field Report can add to Oetzi’s story. Nevertheless, it seemed worth a visit to Bolzano and the Museum to see how he was doing and what sort of arrangements had been made for him.  Furthermore, what can we say about the encounter between Oetzi and his descendants?

The usual seventy-five minutes of research time was allotted to this report, beginning with the time just before entry into the museum and when finished viewing the subject.  This proved to be exactly the correct amount of time though nearly half of it was spent standing in lines. It would be simpler to write about standing in a queue and what happens to the mind during such episodes. The first of these queues began to form half a city block from the entrance to the Museum itself.  Small groups of twenty or so entered at a time. Much of this particular line consisted of local school children speaking (officially) Italian and (also officially) German. The precise cultural character of South Tirol/Alto Adige is still in the works. This in itself was interesting to observe, especially when the line passed the window of an upscale bakery which featured Sacher Torte in three sizes, ready to be mailed for an astonishingly steep price. What a bargain to pay ten dollars to see an old brown corpse instead of arranging shipment of a ten-inch sixty-three dollar chocolate cake, famous or not.  The children were inspired by the Sacher Torte, but only along the lines of who had actually eaten a piece and was it really so special?  The consensus was that there were better things on the market.

Once inside the Museum, the visitor leaves one line before joining another.  “The mummy is up those stairs and to your left,” said the young woman who took the admission fee.  Mummy? This was the first notice that our Oetzi was a mummy. Not in the brittle, desiccated Egyptian style, but a “wet mummy” because this individual was still full of moisture, meaning ice. He lay in a chamber which  duplicated  the frozen conditions of his lengthy burial in the Alps. The Museum kept him at 21 degrees F. and with an ambient humidity of exactly 98.65 percent. Not to do so would risk alteration of his condition and a deterioration of his value to science, and of course, his appeal to a paying public.

The second floor and a new queue.. This one would take another twenty minutes before the subject could be viewed. The first half of this wait moved along a corridor lined with useful information about Oetzi. Then the line took a hairpin turn into a darker hall where, eventually, each visitor had a turn in front of a small window set into the wall of a frozen chamber. This was where one viewed Oetzi. There was little to do in this darkened room except watch the people who had come to see him. Despite the darkness, this researcher was  able to check a wristwatch to measure just how long people stood at the little window and pondered Oetzi.  Nine visitors were timed in this manner, with the result ranging from nine to seventy seconds. The latter figure corresponds to a woman with three small children, each child being lifted up for its share of observation time. The nine-second visitor was a man in a ball-cap who peered into the window, crouched briefly to get a new perspective, shrugged, and  moved on. I assumed that a dead person found in ice after more than 5000 years might inspire a variety of reactive sounds, but the observers were mostly quiet except for two children who complained that they could not see a man in the window. The problem turned out to be that what they saw did not look like anything familiar.

In life Oetzi, was a 5’4” tall male weighing about 132 pounds (other estimates have him at 110 pounds) and thought to be about 46 years old. His bones showed traces of arsenic (from copper smelting?)  and analysis of his innards revealed much about his health and day-to-day circumstances. The intestines, for example, still contained evidence of several kinds of wild meat (deer, ibex) grains (notably spelt) and a number of unidentified vegetables and berries. Oetzi had many tattoos, but nothing with a familiar shape. [Digression: in early 2007, the acclaimed American actor and general celebrity, Mr. Brad Pitt, was discovered by paparazzi to have Oetzi’s outline tattooed on his left inside forearm.]

What happened to Oetzi?  Forensic scientists are certain that he suffered a back wound which bled, causing loss of consciousness and death at 10, 540 feet. Frequent snows covered his body and before long it was encased in the ice, ultimately preserving him for examination and display in our own times.

Finally, the murmuring of the crowd and the shuffling sound of the slowly moving queue ahead was gone and Oetzi’s window belonged exclusively to this researcher. The half-minute spent (three seconds more than average) gazing at the Iceman was not as matter-of-fact an experience as anticipated.  The lighting was dim and what you saw was a small, shrunken, brown-colored figure. Genuine flesh and bone, no synthetics as with Lenin or Evita, and such meager flesh as there was did cover the bones. The most dramatic aspect was the left arm stretched across the chest as if Oetzi had once backhanded a tennis racket.  He lies like a large glistening insect on a grey steel slab in this private morgue. Kafka comes to mind. If Oetzi had been found a century earlier the dissertations linking “The Metamorphosis” with the Iceman would have been plentiful and tiresome.

What was this all about?  While it was easy to accept the known, proven, or even some of the surmised details of his life, death and discovery, there was less to conclude about the experience of seeing him in his lightly frozen flesh here in Bolzano.  Oetzi is the Big Ticket Item for the Museum; what else do they have that compares? Now time was up, the seventy-five minutes had been nearly exhausted and the last ten or so were spent looking over the gift shop and its modest souvenir offerings of Oetziana.  Then it was out on the street again, passing the Sacher Torte merchant on the way to some strong coffee to clear the head after all that standing in dimly lit lines on the way to see the Oldest European. [Digression: the  Bianchi Oetzi is a mountain bike model you may buy if you want to pay an enormous sum.]

At breakfast in the Gasthaus the next morning. Only a few tables are occupied. The guests smile and nod at each other. Across the room another guest trombones with his nose, great vibrating blasts which cause the quiet talk at the tables to become difficult. Between blasts, a woman at the next table asks what things we did yesterday. Visit Oetzi.  Is that an ape-man or is he human like us? Very human, he could be your ancestor! Another blast on that horn.  She turns to her husband, should we go and see it?   It?  Would “it” have produced similar nasal tones?  Too late to know.

Why do we go to gawk at Oetzi?  Or Egyptian mummies?  Or the roasted citizens of Pompei?  Perhaps surveys could be conducted on people waiting in those lines. “I was curious. I heard it was interesting. My girlfriend wanted to see it.  Just something to do.” One can theorize that, at bottom, our own sense of mortality inclines us to inspect those who have gone before us. That chocolate and caramel mess on the table, could that be me?

And what would Oetzi say?  Who expects to be murdered and surface again on a slab in a museum thousands of years later? Perhaps he would have been pleased: the people who volunteer their flayed cadavers to be “plastinated” and posed as athletes in the popular Body Worlds show are said to be keen on such public immortality.  Oetzi did not have this choice, though his circumstances today are similar.  We know nothing of his sense of the cosmos or of his place in it.  He was a man with enemies who died a solitary death. Perhaps he would appreciate some sympathy beyond the casual gawking. Or would he have preferred more millennia in the ice?