Abstract
25 years after the discovery in the Ötztal Italian Alps, the 5,300-year-old mummy keeps providing key information on human biological and medical conditions, aspects of everyday life and societal organization in the Copper Age. The hand axe found with the body of the Alpine Iceman is one of the rare copper objects that is firmly dated to the early Copper Age because of the radiocarbon dating of the axe wooden shaft. Here we report the measurement of the lead isotope ratios of the copper blade. The results unambiguously indicate that the source of the metal is the ore-rich area of Southern Tuscany, despite ample evidence that Alpine copper ore sources were known and exploited at the time. The experimental results are discussed within the framework of all the available coeval archaeometallurgical data in Central-Southern Europe: they show that the Alps were a neat cultural barrier separating distinct metal circuits. The direct evidence of raw metal or object movement between Central Italy and the Alps is surprising and provides a new perspective on long-distance relocation of goods and relationships between the early Copper Age cultures in the area. The result is in line with the recent investigations re-evaluating the timing and extent of copper production in Central Italy in the 4th millennium BC.
Highlights
The Tyrolean Iceman, a 5,300-year-old (Copper Age) natural mummy discovered in the Italian Otztal Alps in 1991 [1,2], provides direct archaeological and anthropological perspectives on prehistoric Europe
The results of the chemical analysis of the impurities contained in the copper metal performed by mass spectrometry (Table 1) agree with the early determinations performed by surface X
Arsenic and silver at a concentration of about 0.4 wt% and 0.1 wt%, respectively, are the only elements that are clearly detectable by X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, as all the others are around or below the limit of detection of the technique
Summary
The Tyrolean Iceman, a 5,300-year-old (Copper Age) natural mummy discovered in the Italian Otztal Alps in 1991 [1,2], provides direct archaeological and anthropological perspectives on prehistoric Europe. Long-distance connections in the Copper Age: New evidence from the Alpine Iceman’s copper axe by mass spectrometry [19], and (ii) the interpretation of the measured data by referring to an exhaustive geochemical dataset of known copper ores to determine the metal source [20,21,22] These conditions were met early in 2016, when the scientific committee controlling the scientific sampling and investigations on the Iceman and his implements granted permission to microsample the metal inside an existing fracture [11, 15] in the talon of the axe blade (Fig 1). The microsampling produced enough copper metal to perform both chemical and isotopic analyses, as requested by the scientific committee
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