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Using Primary and Secondary Sources To Examine

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35 views

Using Primary and Secondary Sources To Examine

Uploaded by

maizey.fisher
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Using Primary and Secondary Sources to Examine Ötzi

Read from the primary source The Man in the Ice and the secondary source “Who Killed the Iceman?
Clues Emerge in a Very Cold Case” to prepare for your writing assignment. Each source presents
different viewpoints about how Ötzi died.

Primary Source: From The Man in the Ice by Konrad Spindler

Evidently overtaken by a blizzard or sudden fog, or both, the Iceman was in a state of total exhaustion. In
a gully in the rock, perhaps familiar to him from previous crossings of the pass, he sought what shelter he
could from the bad weather. With his failing strength he settled down for the night. He deposited his axe,
bow and backpack on the ledge of the rock. It is possible that he consumed here the last of his food store:
a piece of tough dried ibex meat. Two bone splinters had inadvertently been left in the strip of meat as he
cut it off: these he chewed off and spat out. Meanwhile it had grown dark. To press on might prove fatal. It
was snowing ceaselessly, and in the gale the icy cold penetrated his clothes. A terrible fatigue engulfed
his limbs. Between his will to survive and increasing indifference towards his physical danger he once
more pulled himself together. He knew that to fall asleep meant death. He reeled forward a few more
steps. He dropped his quiver. Below him there was only loose scree. He tripped and fell heavily against a
boulder. The container with the hot embers slipped from his hand; his cap fell off. Again pain pierced the
right side of his chest. He only wanted a short rest, but his need for sleep was stronger than his willpower.
. . . He turned on to his left side to dull the pain. He laid his head on the rock. His senses numbed, he no
longer noticed the awkward position of his folded ear. His left arm, its muscles relaxed and probably
slightly bent at the elbow, lay in front of him. His right arm was almost extended and was hanging down
forward. His feet rested one on the other; the left shoe under the right. Soon his clothes froze to the rough
ground. He was no longer aware that he was freezing to death. Overnight the body froze stiff.

Secondary Source: From “Who Killed the Iceman? Clues Emerge in a Very Cold Case” by Rod Nordland

When the head of a small Italian museum called Detective Inspector Alexander Horn of the Munich
Police, she asked him if he investigated cold cases.

“Yes I do,” Inspector Horn said, recalling their conversation.

“Well, I have the coldest case of all for you,” said Angelika Fleckinger, director of the South Tyrol Museum
of Archaeology, in Bolzano, Italy.

The unknown victim, nicknamed Ötzi, has literally been in cold storage in her museum for a quarter-
century. Often called the Iceman, he is the world’s most perfectly preserved mummy . . . who had been
frozen inside a glacier along the northern Italian border with Austria until warming global temperatures
melted the ice and two hikers discovered him in 1991.

Copyright © Edgenuity Inc.


The cause of death remained uncertain until 10 years later, when an X-ray of the mummy pointed to foul
play in the form of a flint arrowhead embedded in his back, just under his shoulder. But now, armed with a
wealth of new scientific information that researchers have compiled, Inspector Horn has managed to
piece together a remarkably detailed picture of what befell the Iceman on that fateful day around 3300
BC. . . .

There are a few mummies in the world as old as Ötzi, but none so well preserved. . . . The glacier not only
froze Ötzi where he had died, but the high humidity of the ice also kept his organs and skin largely intact.
...

Ötzi had the physique of a man who did a lot of strenuous walking but little upper-body work; there was
hardly any fat on his body. . . . When viewed through the window of the museum’s freezer, where he is
kept now, his hands not only appear unusually small, but they also show little sign of hard use,
suggesting that Ötzi was no manual laborer.

Every modern murder investigation relies heavily on forensic science, but in Ötzi’s case, the techniques
have been particularly high tech. . . .

“Roughly half an hour before his death he was having a proper meal, even a heavy meal,” Inspector Horn
said. . . . Half an hour after Ötzi dined, the killer came along and shot him in the back from a distance of
almost 100 feet. The arrow went under his left armpit . . . a wound that would have been quickly fatal and
probably not treatable even in modern times, especially where it happened. By the angle of the wound, he
was either shot from below and behind, or he had been bent forward when he was hit from above and
behind.

“The aim of the offender was to kill him, and he decides to take a long-distance shot . . .,” Inspector Horn
said.

Secondary Source: Location of Ötzi Discovery

Copyright © Edgenuity Inc.


Secondary Source: Mummified Remains of Ötzi

© South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology

Copyright © Edgenuity Inc.

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