Tuesday, April 29, 2003

Maybe I’m a little behind

Maybe I’m a little behind on my “to do” list, but I just finished reading the catalogue for the ol’ South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology’s “Iceman” exhibit.  You know, back in ‘91 some hikers found a body on a small rock face on top of the Alps, which ultimately turned out to be a dude from about 3500 BCE.  Which is pretty cool all by itself, but the catalogue has all kinds of great photos in it of exhumations and detail shots of the contents of the lower intenstine.  No, really, anthropology is a lot of fun and very interesting, and I enjoyed the catalogue.  ESPECIALLY:

p. 11: “...The official recovery of the body took place on the same day.... On account of the low temperatures during the night, the body was again frozen stuck.  It was finally freed with the help of ice-picks and ski-poles.  Bits of leather and fur, string, straps and clumps of hay appeared in the process.  These were collected in a pile next to the body.” Translation: “We got to the top of the freaking alps and, can you believe it, some kind of totally unexpected solid form of water had trapped our glacial corpse.  So we grabbed some axes and sticks and whaled on the general area until we smashed our way through to paydirt.  But somehow when we were hitting the five-thousand year old wood and fur artifacts with the axes we kinda messed some of them up, so we just heaped that stuff together in a little mound and tried to act like it was like that when we got there.” It’s not like the dude is going to ask, “what happened to my kindling?  Where’s my sloeberries?” They just didn’t want to come off like a bunch of looters.  This is the same general process as is referenced by the phenomenon of the “tel” in the mid-east, except somewhat accellerated.  Modern science wins again!

p. 18: “An examination of the gender of the mummy, which could not be definitively established when it was first discovered, was carried out in the Anatomical Institute and revealed it to be male.  The equipment also pointed clearly in this direction.” I think all that needs to be said here is “heh.” Also, I’d like to see the t-shirts that say “My academic advisor went to the Anatomical Institute to establish genders and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.” Anything’s possible.  The mummy himself was wearing a Napster hat, but we can’t tell if he got it new or traded it for some mp3s. 

Time to resume productive behavior.  I’m sure there’s some equipment for me to examine somewhere around the Institute…