Word: innsbruck
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...remarkable specimen," says Werner Platzer, an anatomist at Austria's University of Innsbruck. "Scientists have never before had an . opportunity to examine such an ancient body." But the Iceman has provided posterity with more than just his body; he literally died with his boots on. His glacial grave has yielded pieces of his clothing, weaponry and other equipment. While most remains of ancient humans are found surrounded by funerary objects (if anything at all), the Iceman "was snatched from life completely outfitted with the implements of everyday existence!" exclaims Markus Egg, the German archaeologist who is overseeing the delicate process...
Word of the find spread, and over the weekend about two dozen curiosity seekers trudged to the site. Some collected fragments of garments and tools as souvenirs, and one used a pickax to free the body from the melting ice. Overnight, however, the temperature dropped. By the time Innsbruck forensics expert Dr. Rainer Henn arrived to investigate the death, on Monday, Sept. 23, the body was again locked in ice. Having neglected to bring tools, Henn and his team resorted to hacking it out with a borrowed ice pickax and ski pole, largely destroying the archaeological value of the site...
...crude recovery. He had also been castrated; it turned out that his penis and most of his scrotum were missing, perhaps accidentally broken off during his recovery and taken by a visitor. Flown out by helicopter and transferred to a hearse, the Iceman and his possessions were transported to Innsbruck. There, one final indignity awaited the body. It became the centerpiece of a press conference in the local morgue. While the Iceman and his tattered belongings lay on a dissecting table under blazing klieg lights, reporters and other hangers-on joked, smoked and even touched the body. Not until late...
...only then, after five days of heavy-handed mistreatment, that the Iceman was given professional succor. Arriving at the morgue, Konrad Spindler, head of Innsbruck's Institute for Prehistory, was stunned, immediately realizing the significance of the shriveled body. "I thought this was perhaps what my colleague Howard Carter experienced when he opened the tomb of Tutankhamen and gazed into the face of the Pharaoh...
...hundreds of Bronze and Iron Age bodies have been found in the bogs of northwest Europe, the "Iceman from the Similaun," as he was dubbed by the Austrian press, is much better preserved. It was a find of "extraordinary scientific significance," says Professor Konrad Spindler at the University of Innsbruck, where the Iceman was flown for detailed study...