As Earth Warms, Human History Is Melting Away

Climate change is revealing long-frozen artifacts and animals to archaeologists. But the window for study is slender and shrinking. From a report: Glacial archaeology is a relatively new discipline. The ice was literally broken during the summer of 1991 when German hikers in the Otztal Alps spotted a tea-colored corpse half-embedded on the Italian side of the border with Austria. Initially mistaken for a modern-day mountaineer killed in a climbing accident, Otzi the Iceman, as he came to be called, was shown through carbon-dating to have died about 5,300 years ago. A short, comprehensively tattooed man in his mid-40s, Otzi wore a bearskin cap, several layers of clothing made of goat and deer hides, and bearskin-soled shoes stuffed with grass to keep his feet warm. The Iceman's survival gear included a longbow of yew, a quiver of arrows, a copper ax and a kind of crude first-aid kit full of plants with powerful pharmacological properties. A chest X-ray and a CT scan showed a flint arrowhead buried deep in Otzi's left shoulder, suggesting that he may have bled to death. His killing is humankind's oldest unsolved cold case. Six years later, in the Yukon's snow fields, hunting tools dating back thousands of years appeared from the melting ice. Soon, similar finds were reported in Western Canada, the Rockies and the Swiss Alps. In 2006, a long, hot autumn in Norway resulted in an explosion of discoveries in the snowbound Jotunheimen mountains, home to the JÃtnar, the rock and frost giants of Norse mythology. Of all the dislodged detritus, the most intriguing was a 3,400-year-old proto-Oxford most likely fashioned out of reindeer hide. The discovery of the Bronze Age shoe signified the beginning of glacial surveying in the peaks of Innlandet County, where the state-funded Glacier Archaeology Program was started in 2011. Outside of the Yukon, it is the only permanent rescue project for discoveries in ice. Glacial archaeology differs from its lowland cousin in critical ways. G.A.P. researchers usually conduct fieldwork only within a short time frame from mid-August to mid-September, between the thaw of old snow and the arrival of new.

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