Excerpt from:

http://www.zeiss.com/C125679B0029303C/EmbedTitelIntern/inno11e_0811/$File/in
no11e_0811.pdf

Just who does the Iceman belong to?

In the very first media reports, it was partly assumed that the site of the
find was not located in Austria but on Italian territory. It was therefore
up to the Italian authorities to decide what should happen to this discovery
that was causing such a worldwide sensation. Although the doubts about the
nationality of the location appeared somewhat bizarre at first, different
views on the exact course of the frontier line were indeed justified, i.e.
on whether it runs north or south of Ötzi’s icy grave.

When Tyrol was divided after World War I, the victorious Allied Powers fixed
the frontier between Italy and Austria on the watershed between the river
valleys of Adige and Inn. But what if nature ignores the decisions of
politicians, if melting
glaciers change the topographic conditions and water channels?
People in South and North Tyrol have continued to use the bridle paths
linking the areas from time immemorial, and have driven their flocks to
pastures which have been officially documented for centuries, on both sides
of the main Alpine crest. Until the discovery of Ötzi, no one had been
particularly interested in where to the exact meter the frontier ran through
eternal ice and uncultivatable land according to the delimitation of 1919
under international law. However, the increasingly heated discussion about
the location’s nationality finally necessitated the re-measurement of the
national border. As it turned out, the inconspicuous rock trough housing the
glacier mummy for thousands of years is in fact located on Italian
territory, exactly 92.56 meters from the border line. In other words, the
province of South Tyrol was the rightful owner of the find.

In September 1991, a couple from Nuremberg climbing down from the
Finailspitze peak in the Ötztal Alps spotted a human corpse half protruding
from ice and melt water residues in a rock trough not far from the marked
trail. They informed the landlord of the Similaun lodge who reported the
discovery to the Italian police in Schnals and their Austrian counterparts
in Sölden, as the site of the find on the edge of the Niederjoch glacier was
obviously located on the frontier line between Italy and Austria.

The very next day, an Austrian rescue team arrived by helicopter on the site
located at an altitude of 3120 meters. Due to the onset of bad weather,
however, they had to return empty-handed to the valley.
Among the first reaching the site on foot were the two South Tyrolean
mountaineers Reinhold Messner and Hans Kammerlander. They subjected the
corpse and its surroundings to closer scrutiny, and found remnants of
clothes and various utensils, including a bow, suggesting that the dead man
could hardly be a 20th century victim of a mountaineering accident.

This guess was confirmed a few days later. The body and the collected pieces
of equipment had been brought to the Department of Forensic Medicine of
Innsbruck University, where Prof. Dr. Konrad Spindler of the Institute of
Pre- and Early History was consulted. He dated the find to be early Bronze
Age – a sensation which hit the headlines worldwide.
The mummy was then transferred to the Institute of Anatomy where it was
preserved in a cold storage room at minus temperatures and with a humidity
similar to glacier conditions.
All articles found on the site were transferred to the Central
Roman-Germanic Museum in Mainz, Germany for preservative treatment.
The global climate is warming – a process which, though scarcely felt, is
nevertheless clearly visible.
Glaciers have been receding for years, and not only in the polar zones, in
the high mountainous regions of Central Asia or in the northern and southern
areas of America! Even in the European Alps, experienced hikers are baffled
to see a trail which ran above the edge of a glacier as recently as the
previous year now passing through rock and rubble. The increasing melting of
snow and ice masses has presented the archaeological community with a
sensational find and an outstanding research object. A museum has been set
up in Bolzano in South Tyrol to house this discovery.

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