Initially mistaken for a modern-day mountaineer killed in an accident, Ötzi the Iceman, as he came to be called, was shown through carbon-dating to have died about 5,300 years ago. The ice was literally broken during the summer of 1991 when German hikers in the Ötztal Alps spotted a tea-colored corpse half-embedded on the Italian side of the border with Austria. Glacial archaeology is a relatively new discipline. “They offer a window into the unexpectedly rich lives of prehistoric hunters and foragers like no other.” “The circumpolar world is, or was, full of miraculously preserved sites like Nunalleq,” Knecht said. As global temperatures gather pace, permafrost and glaciers are thawing and eroding rapidly across vast areas of Earth, releasing many of the objects that they had absorbed and revealing aspects of life in a once-inaccessible past. Until recently, the site had been deep-frozen in the subsoil known as permafrost. “It is also a rare and detailed archaeological example of Indigenous warfare.” “It is a complex murder scene,” Knecht said.

(Rick Knecht/University of Aberdeen via The New York Times) Climate change reveals long-frozen artifacts but also causes them to decay rapidly. An undated photo provided by the University of Aberdeen in Scotland shows a mask belonging to the Yup’ik people of Alaska emerging from the permafrost.

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