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Oetzi the Iceman and Schnidi

Everyone knows something about Ötzi, the Iceman of the Ötztal valley in the Tyrol of Austria. For example, many know that he was found, slightly embarrassingly for Austria, just inside South Tyrol, which is on the Italian side of the frontier. He is now at rest in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano.

Schnidi, by contrast, is less well known. There are reasons. First and foremost, he doesn’t exist. He, or quite possibly she, is a collage of human detritus spread over the northern approach to the Schnidejoch, a 2,756 m pass in the Bernese Alps in southwestern Switzerland. More remarkably, Schnidi is spread over 6,500 years of Alpine prehistory. Like Ötzi, though, he has a lot to tell us, and a lot to ask us.

The archaeological finds at the Schnidejoch are documented by Martin Grosjean and co-authors in the Journal of Quaternary Science. They were exposed by the recession of a small ice patch, recently detached from the larger Tungel Glacier, during the record-breaking hot summer of 2003.

This is the second remarkable thing about Schnidi. Among the clothes he discarded were perishable goatskin leggings and shoes, from as long ago as 4,500 BC according to new results announced in 2008. Apart from making the early part of Schnidi a good deal older than Ötzi (about 3,300 BC), this means that 4,500 BC was the last time it was as warm in the Bernese Alps as it is now. The leggings must have been preserved beneath the ice since then.

The Schnidejoch is not a particularly hard climb, but a kilometre or two downvalley a moderate advance of Tungel Glacier from its modern extent would close off the valley, making the route difficult if not positively impassable. This is the simplest explanation for the next remarkable thing about Schnidi. He clusters in time. There is late Neolithic clothing and hunting gear from 2,950 to 2,500 BC; arrows, pins and other material from the early Bronze Age (2,150 to 1,700 BC); shoe nails, coins and a woollen tunic from Roman times (the first century BC to the second century AD); and a few items from mediaeval times.

These intervals coincide rather well with nearby evidence for warm periods, but they are also complementary because Schnidejoch is much higher than the other sources of information, and it is a “binary and non-continuous archive” — the pass was either open or closed.

Ötzi and Schnidi raise all sorts of questions, some sobering and some frivolous. Why do we westerners see Ötzi as someone who can tell us things, while aboriginal Americans see his counterparts on their continent as in need of re-burial, to be left in peace? All I can offer is the reflection that it is a pity we can’t tell things to Ötzi, and the thought that if I were to make an exit like his I would be rather happy than otherwise to have the chance to tell things to my distant descendants.

Why was Schnidi so careless of his belongings? They are strewn over about 100 m of the route just below the the pass. It is easy to see why the discards are preserved just here, in the former accumulation zone of a now-vanished glacier. But I cannot think of a reason why they should have been discarded just here.

Did Schnidi’s religion oblige him, as thanksgiving for a successful crossing of the pass, to take off his trousers? More plausibly, perhaps our ancestors were about as careless as we are, losing stuff at random all along the route, but only the items buried by the ice have been preserved. On this interpretation, the Schnidejoch, when the valley was passable, was a moderately busy thoroughfare. In that case, why didn’t the travellers cross by either of the passes lying a few kilometres to east and west, which are 200 to 500 m lower than Schnidejoch? Perhaps they did. Those passes may never have been in the accumulation zone of a glacier, in which case the Bernese Alps might have been even busier than implied by the Schnidejoch evidence.

Lastly, a question I have asked before, knowing that it won’t be answered. What was Schnidi’s word, or words, for the glacier over which he walked? He or she is concrete evidence for human interaction with glaciers in Roman times, and yet we have no record of a word for glacier in Latin.

Posted by Graham Cogley on October 4, 2010 3:00 PM | Permalink