James H. Dickson. Ancient ice mummies.
Robb, John
JAMES H. DICKSON. Ancient ice mummies. 192 pages, 97 colour and
b&w illustrations. 2011. Stroud: History Press; 978-0-7524-5935-6
paperback 18.99 [pounds sterling].
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
About three-quarters of Dickson's Ancient ice mummies
discusses Otzi, the Neolithic Ice Man from the South Tyrol; the other
quarter discusses a few other Alpine ice mummies, all much more recent,
and a few North American ice mummies, primarily the Kwaday Dan
Ts'inchi Man who died in British Columbia several centuries ago.
The focus of Ancient ice mummies is to review the scientific evidence
for these ice mummies critically, and to summarise it for both academic
and non-academic readers.
Dickson, a botanist by profession, has studied the plants
associated with Otzi, particularly the mosses, and he takes the stand of
a no-nonsense hard scientist looking critically at the evidence on the
Ice Man's life and death. By now, two decades after the sensational
discovery of the Ice Man's mummy, hundreds of scholars have written
thousands of pages on him. The Ice Man is (I would guess) the most
intensively studied single body in all of human history. The stack of
papers written about him must outweigh his body many times over; Dickson
seems to have read most of it. For those who do not follow the
literature closely, this book is a very good guide to many aspects of
Otziology. While some aspects of Otzi's second life as a scientific
media star remain distressing--his inept and destructive recovery, for
example--it is truly amazing how much has been learnt from the
persistent application of the most disparate branches of science.
Accidentally ingested pollen in his gut, for instance, tells in detail
of movement between highland and valley environments in his last days.
In the process, Dickson takes an evident pleasure in puncturing
ill-founded speculation on the Ice Man, speculation which abounds. Aside
from a scathing swipe in the epilogue at the idea of an 'Otzi
curse', Dickson does not stoop to skewer the wilder froth such as
allegations that Otzi was a homosexual or a fake. Instead, he
concentrates upon slipshod academic work. Konrad Spindler, the central
investigator and author of the best-known popular books on Otzi, turns
out to be a prime target, prone to making authoritative statements with
no evidence and pushing a rickety theory of how Otzi died fleeing an
attack on his home village. The palaeopathologist Luigi Capasso is
portrayed as another scholar prone to go wildly beyond the evidence in
quest of a headline. A substantial proportion of the Otzi literature is
based upon poor evidence (such as the unwarranted factoid that his knife
was found held in his right hand) or superseded evidence (such as his
fractured ribs, which were in fact broken after death by taphonomic
causes). Aside from the entertainment value of such critiques, it is
very useful to read a wide-ranging reassessment which is willing to
scrutinise critically all the purported facts and to point out
discrepancies and unfounded assertions. Dickson notes, for instance,
that almost none of the allegations that Otzi used various plants for
medical therapy are founded or probable, that we know little of the
original position of the body, and (contrary to 'disaster'
theories of his death) that he had eaten well shortly before his death.
Traces of metals in Otzi's hair may indicate that he participated
in metal-working, but they may also result from environmental
contamination of the mummy after death or from cultural practices such
as eating arsenic as a medicine.
There are limits to Dickson's no-nonsense,
sticking-to-the-scientific-facts approach. The most serious one is that
he rarely thinks about Otzi's social context, and this tends to
blot out any sense that Otzi actually lived in a world culturally quite
different to ours, perhaps unimaginably so. This deprives us of any real
anthropological motive for studying Otzi beyond the inherent fascination
of ice mummies and their useful preservation of organic information. It
also leads Dickson into occasionally dubious waters. To take one
example, was Otzi a shepherd, a hunter, a warrior, a metalworker, a
chief?. Dickson carefully weighs the claims for each occupation. Yet to
most prehistorians, it is patently obvious that Neolithic and Copper Age
Alpine society did not have a rigidly specialised division of labour, or
for that matter, much in the way of formal social hierarchy. An adult
male in Otzi's society probably did all of these things to some
degree, and many more besides; trying to give Otzi a full-time job title
is an anachronism comparable to asking a Copper Age fighter to which
army regiment he belonged.
Such limits notwithstanding, Ancient ice mummies provides a very
useful, readable, up-to-date and reliable summary of the state of
scientific research on Otzi and other bodies preserved in ice. As
Dickson points out, we have learned much from them we would never have
learned in any other way. One positive, if small, side effect of global
warming is that many more may yet come to light.
JOHN ROBB
University of Cambridge, UK
(Email:
[email protected])