The South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology

Ötzi is a glacier mummy from the Copper Age, who, thanks to extraordinary circumstances, has been preserved down to the present day. He was discovered accidentally by hikers in 1991, together with his clothing and equipment, on the Schnalstal/Val Senales Valley glacier.

Over 5300 years ago, Ötzi was crossing Tisenjoch/Giogo di Tisa in the Schnalstal/Val Senales Valley, South Tyrol, where he was murdered and preserved naturally in the ice.

He is therefore older than the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge and the result of a series of highly improbable coincidences. Ötzi lived during the Copper Age, a period of the late Neolithic. He was still using stone tools but owned an innovative and very valuable copper axe. The skill of extracting and processing metal had recently arrived in Europe from Asia Minor. The advent of copper marked the beginning of the Bronze Age.

Ötzi and his artefacts have been exhibited at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano since 1998.

The mummy is stored in a specially devised cold cell and can be viewed through a small window. Ötzi’s numerous pieces of equipment and clothing have been painstakingly restored. Visitors have been amazed by the skills of Stone Age people. The mummy was dubbed Ötzi by the Austrian journalist Karl Wendl, who was looking for a catchy name. The name refers to the discovery site in the Ötztal Valley Alps.

https://www.iceman.it/en

Chronology of Events

• 19th September 1991 - 1-30 pm.: A human corpse is found in the Austro-Italian Alps. No-one realizes the significance of the discovery at the time. Erica and Helmut Simon come across a brown object protruding from the ice. Helmut thinks that it's some refuse in the shape of a big doll. Erika Simon suddenly realizes that it's a human corpse. They take it to be the body of a climber who perished in an accident.
  
  
• 19th September 1991 - Late Afternoon.: Alois Pirpamer, a mountain guide in the upper Ötz valley, thinks it could be the Veronese music professor Carlo Capsone (born 1903) who went missing whilst hiking in the mountains in 1941.

• 20th September 1991 - Afternoon: Anton Koler, gendarme inspector in Imst, determines that the body must be at least 100 years old.
  
  
• 21st September 1991 - Afternoon: The extreme mountaineers Reinhold Messner and Hans Kammerlander reach the 12th stage of their South Tyrol tour. In the Similaun mountain refuge they hear about the corpse and his axe from the folk music researcher Gerlinde Haid and the folklorist Hans Haid. Messner thinks the corpse could be 500 to 3,000 years old - from the transitional period between the bronze and the iron age.
  
  
• 21st September 1991 - Afternoon: Hans Kammerlander suspects death from exhaustion. The other members of the group believe that the corpse is that of a deserter from the First World War.
  
  
• 21st September 1991 - Evening: Reinhold Messner phones Ezio Danieli, an Italian-speaking journalist from the South Tyrolean newspaper Alto Adige. The journalist thinks that 500 years is more realistic; it could be a mercenary from the time of Frederick of the Empty Pockets (1382-1439).
  
  
• 23rd September 1991 - Midday: The forensic pathologist Dr Rainer Henn and his co-workers recover the Iceman. They find the flint dagger and surmise that he could have been a prisoner or adventurer.
  
  
• 23rd September 1991 - 4 pm: The body is flown to Innsbruck and taken to the Institute of Forensic Medicine. Professor Hann says half in jest "It's probably a prehistoric native of the Ötz valley.
  
  
• 24th September 1991 - 8 am: Dr Hans Unterdorfer of the Institute of Forensic Medicine greets the archaeologist Professor Konrad Spindler with the words "We've found a primordial Tyrolean!". Professor Spindler ventures an initial estimate "At least 4,000 years or older".
  
  
• 24th September 1991 - 5 pm: Professor Hann and Professor Spindler hold the first press conference in the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck. "The discovery of the corpse in the mountains has become an archaeological sensation!"
  
  
• 25th January 1992: The results of Carbon-14 dating tests on the tissue and bone samples of the glacier from Tisenjoch at laboratories in Zurich and Oxford are presented. They indicate that Iceman is 5,350 to 5,100 years old. He therefore lived between 3,350 and 3,100 B.C.