1. Partners
Re-visiting radiocarbon ages of Oetzi
the Ice Man
INTRODUCTION
A quarter of century ago remains of a frozen and mummified body were
discovered on the Hauslabjoch in the Ötztaler Alps (near the Similaun Mountain),
South Tyrol, Italy in 19.09.1991.The first step in investigation of this Ice Man was
to find out how old it was. Acceleration mass spectrometry (AMS) was used for
age determination because the smallest amount of the sample had to be used
for dating. A fragment of tissue and the bone were submitted to the laboratory at
ETH Zurich. In addition a small piece of grass was found in the Ice Man’s tissue
and analysed. The mean value of all the all the measurements was 4550 ± 27
BP (Bonani et al. 1994).
The Discovery
Tisenjoch - 3210 m above sea level, Ötztal Alps (South Tyrol,Italy)
METHODS
The samples from the Ötztal were kept in a glass jar
since November 1991 in the radiocarbon sample
preparation laboratory. In this study we perform
additional analysis on the remaining material that had
been stored frozen for 25 years. First of all, the sample
was controlled for contaminants by examination under
the binocular microscope. At that moment, pieces of
grass which was determined from the sample noted and
divided from the skin and muscle tissue. The Ice Man
sample is similar to Animal skin parchment, which can
easily dissolve in base. Therefore, the normal acid-
base-acid (ABA) treatment was to be attenuated to
clean the samples (Hajdas 2008).
RESULTS
Calibrated was done with
Combine Function of OxCal.
95.4% probability
3356BC (29.4%) 3328BC
3216BC (36.2%) 3178BC
3160BC (29.8%) 3122BC
One of the sub-
samples picked out
for new 2016
analysis,the sample
was controlled for
contaminants by
examination under
the binocular
microscope.
19.09.1991/1.30 PM
THURSDAY
REFERENCES
Bonani, G., Ivy, S.D., Hajdas, I., Niklaus, T.R., Suter, M. 1994: AMS C14 age determinations of tissue,bone and grass samples from the Ötztal ice man, 2, 247- 250.
Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
*ETH Zurich, Laboratory of Ion Beam Physics, Switzerland
Since 1998 Iceman
and his artefacts have
been exhibited at the
South Tyrol Museum
of Archaeology in
Bolzano, Italy.
Duygu Saracoğlu*, Irka Hajdas**, Mantana Maurer**, Maria Belen Röttig**, Susan Ivy-Ochs**, Hans-Arno Synal**
These
samples from
the first
analysis.