THE MAN IN THE ICE. By Konrad Schindler. Crown. 305 pages. $25.
IN SEPTEMBER 1991, two German hikers strayed a bit off the beaten path while crossing a glacier at the Austrian-Italian border. They saw something unusual sticking out of the melting ice. It was a body.
The Italians didn't want to get involved and the Austrians thought it was a case for the coroner. Then they looked at the body and decided it was not a recent death. Maybe it was that Italian music professor who disappeared in 1941.
But it turned out that body had been found in 1952, and this body looked older, maybe something from 100 years ago. Someone else suggested 500 and archaeologists perked up their ears.
When Konrad Schindler first saw some of the artifacts found with the body, he said maybe 4,000 years ago, and was met with incredulity. His quick estimate, it turned out, was off. The body actually was more like 5,300 years old.
Archaeologists had never seen anything like Oetzi (nicknamed for the Oetztal Alps in which he was found). First, there was his extreme age, much older than any other body yet recovered from the past.
Then, too, he wasn't just a few bones and teeth, but a whole body, one that had been mummified with a minimum amount of damage because he had been covered by the glacier right after he lay down and died on a late September or early October night all those millenniums ago.
This casual, rather than ceremonial, burial also was very important. Ceremonial burials may include grave goods, which give archaeologists a look at some items ancient peoples had. But these items are highly selective and don't tell fully how those people actually lived.
Oetzi was buried with everything he needed to get through his day: clothes, tools, weapons, accessories. Almost everything was as well preserved as he was, a treasure trove of information about life in the late Neolithic (Stone Age).
In describing the finds, Mr. Schindler time and again uses words like "unique" and "only known."
Step by step Mr. Schindler -- who heads the international team examining the body (as distinct from its possessions) -- recreates the finding and the excavation of the body. Piece by JTC piece he discusses the items found with Oetzi and then goes over the body itself in as great detail.
Some information was lost in the retrieval. Greater care wasn't taken for two reasons. First, the great age of the body still hadn't been realized and extraction was for forensic rather than archaeological purposes. The body was damaged and some of its attending artifacts were damaged or allowed to disintegrate.
Secondly, there was Oetzi's location, some 10,000 feet up in the Alps, definitely hard to get to, especially with weather threatening to close in, as it did within days.
"Over the past 5,000 years the chance of finding the Iceman existed for only six days," Mr. Schindler writes. "Fortunately, Erika and Helmut Simon found it midway into this period."
But Oetzi wasn't all answers. He also presented scientists with a very large problem: He was giving them an unbelievable wealth of information about a primitive culture, but which culture? Neolithic is far too unspecific since archaeologists have identified several cultures living in the general area at the general time. Researchers have an easy way of distinguishing between these cultures, but it is based almost entirely on the one artifact the Iceman didn't have with him: pottery.
Mr. Schindler goes through the trial-and-elimination of seeking to figure out the body's affiliation despite lacking the telltale clue of pottery styles.
He uses the same technique to examine possible answers to other important questions, such as: What was Oetzi's livelihood? What was he doing at the Hauslabjoch pass? Why did he die?
Sometimes Mr. Schindler, who seems more at home in a lab than in the field, says he thinks he has answers. But the reader may question some of his conclusions.
For instance, to a North American eye the match between some of Oetzi's artifacts and those from various known cultures is not as exact as Mr. Schindler suggests.
The main drawback of the book, though, is what's left out. "The Man in the Ice" was written a year and a half ago. The English translation first appeared last year in Britain. It is too bad the American version -- to be released this week -- doesn't include a new chapter detailing recent findings and conclusions as the research slowly continues. (Because of the desire to preserve the body, Oetzi can be examined for no more than 30 minutes every few days.)
Until these newer facts are included in a new book, this one is and will remain the book to read about the Stone Age equivalent of King Tut. Not only does Mr. Schindler have unparalleled access to the material, but he and translator Ewald Osers have combined to offer a fascinating book -- one of the archaeological finds of the century.
Myron Beckenstein, an editor with The Sun, is a member of the Archaeological Society of Maryland.