Was
the Iceman's death carved on an ancient stone stele?
Lorenzo
Dal Ri, director of the archaeological office of the Bolzano province,
has reported that an ancient stone stele
was used to build a church altar
contains carvings that seem to record the Iceman's death. Dal Ri told
a reporter that one part of the carved stele "shows an archer
ready to shoot an arrow on an unarmed man's back...[which bears] an
impressive resemblance with Ötzi's death. It is indeed a fascinating
hypothesis, though we can't say for sure this is the picture of Ötzi's
murder."
Dal Ri plans
to study the stele further. Although it comes from Ötzi's general time period
(the Copper Age), it must be more precisely dated. Even if further
study does not link the stele to the Iceman's death, the stone is
still important as an early representation of murder.
The stele
was reported in Brenda Fowler's book, Iceman.
Fowler refers to it as a statue-menhir
rather than a stele, but she is describing the same carved
stone.
She describes how an archaeologist named
Hans Northdurfter first found the statue-menhir:
Carved
into the massive stone were dozens of symbols and other
representations. Like other northern Italian statue-menhirs, this
one had originally been sculpted into a rather boxy, humanlike
shape. But it had been through a lot of recycling. The head section
was cut away, and the sides and the bottom were also shaved down.
All that remained was the chest region of the figure, bound at the
waist by a band of wavy lines. Clusters of dots and concentric
circles had also been chiseled into the rock. But what most
intrigued Northdurfter was the carving of a long-handled ax in the
upper left corner.... The blade protruded at a familiar angle, and
its edges flared out the slightest bit. Northdurfter recognized it
at once. The statue-menhir depicted a man with an ax that looked
like the Iceman's. And it was in his neighborhood... [l]ocated
within a day's hike of the Hauslabjoch....
The stele
can be found in the town of Laces (or Latsch), not far from the
Schnalstal valley where the Iceman made his final walk:
It is a small village,
with a traffic light, a few shops, and the church where the stele can
be found, Santa Maria sul Colle:
