Where is otzi the iceman kept

But it wasn't enough to save him. The Iceman was shot in the shoulder with an arrow. The arrowhead is still lodged in his back and pierced a vital artery that resulted in his death shortly afterward.

Otzi remains in the same position in which he was found. The latest study, published Wednesday in the journal Plos One , examined "subfossils" of pieces of vegetation that had frozen on or around the 5,year-old mummy, known as Otzi the Iceman.

Otzi's body was frozen in ice until it was discovered by a couple hiking in the North Italian Alps in Since then, nearly every part of him has been analyzed -- from what he may have sounded like, to the contents in his stomach and how he died. For the past 25 years, his mummified body has been a window into early human history, providing a peek into what life in the Alpine region was like during the Copper Age.

This new study offers clues about Otzi's route up the glacier. Researchers from the University of Glasgow and the University of Innsbruck recovered at least 75 species of bryophytes, non-vascular plants such as mosses and liverworts, that had been preserved in ice with Otzi. Science reveals the menu of Otzi the Iceman's last meal. Researchers believe these non-indigenous plants could have been carried on Otzi's clothing, or perhaps by the dung of large herbivores like the Alpine Ibex, a type of wild goat.

Read More. As time passes and more finds are made, this situation normally changes. The earliest finds no longer appear peculiar, but fit a pattern that was not visible initially. We have seen the same thing happening during our glacial archaeology work here in Innlandet County, Norway. Finds that initially appeared odd and hard to understand, turned out to fit a pattern not visible to us, when we first started out.

There are now hundreds of sites and thousands of finds. He is still an odd find. Similar very old finds sealed beneath moving glaciers are unknown. He informed the authorities, both on the Austrian and the Italian side. It was initially not clear whether the find had been made on Austrian or Italian soil. Bad weather delayed the recovery of the body until Monday September The great age and importance of the find was not immediately understood by the authorities.

It had been a very warm summer, and several other and more recent bodies had melted out of the ice as well. Focus was on recovering the body, which is normal procedure, when the dead are returned by the glacial ice. A number of people visited the site to see the body, before it was recovered.

They stepped on the fragile objects and removed artefacts before their locations were noted. This was very unfortunate and led to the destruction of important evidence on the site. The ice mummy became an immediate sensation. The find spot was investigated by archaeologists shortly after the find was made, but the appalling weather conditions and the onset of winter quickly stopped the fieldwork.

A well-organized and thorough excavation of the gully was conducted in in A few more artefacts and a number of fragments were recovered, and a large number of samples were collected. A painstaking reconstruction of where the artefacts were found was also undertaken, based on interviews with people who had been at the site prior to the first proper investigation.

However, it was puzzling that artefacts were found at some distance from the body, such as the quiver, which was found 7 m away. Together with two colleagues, the archaeologist Konrad Spindler in Innsbruck took charge of the investigations, with the collaboration of a number of colleagues from Austria, Italy and other countries.

Remarkable results concerning his death, his life and his times have been published. Some of his equipment had been damaged in a violent encounter, and he had no time to repair it. He was in pain from broken ribs. Exposed on the surface, he freeze-dried, which led to the exceptional preservation of his body. A short time later, a glacier covered the area, and buried the body and the artifacts for more than five millennia, like in a time capsule.

As glacial archaeologists, we were kindly treated to a guided tour of the museum and told the story of the find and the scientific results. Subsequently, he must have been covered by snow and the glacier ice. Time of death was believed to be in the late summer or fall. The basis for this conclusion was that a sloe was found near the ice mummy, and sloes ripen in late summer. The excavators of the site pointed in their report to the possibility that the mummy and the finds had been displaced by recurrent thaw and re-freezing processes.

An important piece of independent evidence that this might be the case appeared in This time of year may be spring in the valley, but at m where he died, this is still winter. Even considering the windswept ridge where the find lay, the gully would very likely have been covered in snow, perhaps deep snow. How could he have died down in the gully then? They also believed that the mummy and the finds had been moved by recurrent thaw and re-freezing processes.

However, the discussion again drew attention to the uncertainties associated with the natural processes on the site. This takes us to the next curious aspect of the find — the broken equipment. However, there may be a simpler and more natural explanation for the broken equipment and missing pieces. We learned from a careful analysis of our Lendbreen site is that there are a number of natural processes that affect artefacts lost on the surface of snow and ice.

The simple version is that the artefacts may displace from the original place of deposition, they may break into pieces and the broken pieces may scatter. Often artefacts go through all three processes. The snow and ice cover will melt away during very warm summers, and some of the artefacts originally lost on the ice and snow will melt into hollows below.

Such hollows are more protected from the elements and are more likely to preserve snow and ice over the summer, i. Artefacts that do not make it into such hollows are more likely to be lost over time, as they are more exposed. As revealed by an X-ray in , the Iceman was felled by an arrow to the left shoulder sometime during early summer.

Theresa Machemer is a freelance writer based in Washington DC. Her work has also appeared in National Geographic and SciShow. Archaeologists also found a leather pouch containing a tinder fungus, a scraper, a boring tool, a bone awl and a flint flake. Unlike modern tattoos, these were not made with a needle; instead, fine incisions were made on his skin, and the resulting wound was filled with charcoal.

Researchers do not think the tattoos were decorative; rather, they might have served a little-understood therapeutic or medical purpose, perhaps a form of primitive acupuncture. Researchers speculated as to whether he had fallen into a crevasse, died of exposure to the elements or had simply lost his footing on the treacherous ice and tumbled to his death. The first injury consisted of a flint arrowhead embedded in his left shoulder, a detail that was picked up during an X-ray originally conducted in , as reported by Scientific American.

The second injury was a severe head wound, possibly from a blunt object. At first, researchers debated which injury might have caused his death. But a study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface revealed that the arrow was the main cause of death. It's possible that he suffered the head wound at the same time as the arrow wound or afterward, Live Science previously reported.

Why he was killed, however, remains a mystery. The mummy provides a window into the life and times of an individual who lived over 5, years ago — a man who lived in a world far removed from our modern era of digital communications, space travel and sophisticated technologies of all kinds.

Yet the clothing he wore and the tools he carried suggest he was acutely adapted to his environment and was well-versed in the plants, animals and technologies of his era. Tom Garlinghouse is a journalist specializing in general science stories.