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  • 标题:James H. Dickson. Ancient ice mummies.
  • 作者:Robb, John
  • 期刊名称:Antiquity
  • 印刷版ISSN:0003-598X
  • 出版年度:2013
  • 期号:June
  • 语种:English
  • 出版社:Cambridge University Press
  • 关键词:Books

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].

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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])
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