Bear-leather shoes and Roman 'good-luck' coins: The lost worlds emerging from glaciers

As glaciers and ice patches melt, they reveal untold stories of human skill, adventure, faith – and deadly conflict.

Some 5,000 years ago, a tattooed man in his 40s, with brown eyes and thinning black hair, climbed a steep mountain in the Ötztal Alps, on the border between what is now Italy and Austria, to a mountain ridge more than 3,000m (9,800ft) above sea level. He was wearing a striped goat-fur coat, a bear-fur cap, and sturdy shoes with bear-leather soles, and he seemed to be in a rush. Although he was genetically predisposed to obesity, his active lifestyle had generally kept him fit and muscular. He had some health issues – stomach problems, knee issues – but that did not stop him. Nor did his extraordinary amount of gear, some incomplete, as if packed in a hurry: unfinished bow and arrows, a precious copper axe, medicinal mushrooms, and even two portable stoves made from birch bark.

He was about to cross the high ridge, perhaps hoping for safety on the other side, when an arrow hit his shoulder, severed an artery, and killed him. Snow and ice covered his body and belongings. He lay there, undetected, for thousands of years.

Elsewhere in the Alps, other bodies and belongings were also frozen in the ice for centuries, or even millennia. But a few decades ago, they began to emerge. Glaciers retreating at an ever-faster pace revealed the eerie, sometimes grisly remains, giving rise to a new scientific field: glacial archaeology, the study of ancient finds from melting glaciers. They present a surprisingly detailed and unexpectedly long timeline of adventure, innovation and danger in the high mountains.

"There've always been individual cases of bodies or objects emerging from the ice. Glaciers swallow people and things, and at some point, spit them out again," since the ice masses move, says Thomas Reitmaier, director of the archaeological service of the Canton of Grisons in Switzerland.

There is even an Alpine German word for the process of things emerging from glaciers: "ausgeapert", meaning something is exposed by melting snow or ice. However, as global warming and record hot summers have sped up glacier loss, the melting ice has exposed an unprecedented, huge range of archaeological finds, Reitmaier says – sometimes baring thousands of years of history, all at once.

The discoveries show the human ingenuity it took to trudge over Alpine ridges and passes, to trade, to flee, to hunt, to herd, or to conquer. They include many technical innovations – such as the world's oldest snow shoe, dating from almost 6,000 years ago – as well as traces of ancient spiritual practices. Nervous Romans, who feared rockfall and avalanches, sacrificed coins to various mountain gods, before attempting dangerous Alpine crossings as they expanded their empire across Europe.

Some of the most poignant and mysterious discoveries are not even that old. In the 17th Century a woman in her 20s, dressed in a man's coat and mismatched shoes, tried to cross a glacier in Switzerland. She carried with her a wooden bowl, a wooden spoon, and a rosary. She died – of a fall, perhaps – and, like the fugitive man thousands of years before her, was covered by snow and ice until she emerged in the late 1980s.

Perhaps surprisingly, the discoveries also suggest that our most popular Alpine travel routes didn't change much for thousands of years. In 2003, a then-record hot summer laid bare the vast hidden history of the Schnidejoch ridge in Switzerland, Reitmaier says. "You have a continual line of objects stretching from 4800BC, through the Middle Ages, and up to the present day," he says. "Whenever that pass was open, humans crossed it, and they lost things, or they died and left things behind." It was only with the advent of roads, railroads and tunnels that these passes lost their crucial importance for getting us from one place to the other, he says.

The best-known, and most intensively studied, of these finds, is the 5,000-year-old murdered Tyrolean Iceman mentioned earlier, also known as Ötzi, after the Ötztal Alps where he was found. Conserved by the ice, he was found in 1991, in the relatively early days of the glaciers' retreat.

"Before Ötzi's discovery, archaeologists generally assumed that humans didn't visit or cross over the high mountains in the distant past," because the terrain was just too difficult, says Andreas Putzer. He is an archaeologist and curator at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, where the ice mummy is kept. "But Ötzi taught us that humans did go up there, and that really started the archaeological research in the high mountains here in the Alps," he adds.

Decades of research on Ötzi and his belongings have brought an entire world back to life. Scientists have discovered which plants and animals he gathered, farmed and hunted. They've traced the long migration of his ancestors from Anatolia (in modern-day Turkey) to Europe, and mapped his farming community's far-flung trade network. He lived at a time when people in the area already lived in villages in the valleys, and farmed there, says Putzer, but some also still roamed widely to hunt.

Standing in front of a display case with Ötzi's bear-fur hat, Evelyn Egger, an archaeologist at the museum, explains that the institution has expanded its space to accommodate new discoveries. "Scientists just keep making new discoveries," she says – for example, about Ötzi's genetic predisposition to obesity, diabetes and baldness, partly offset by his healthy lifestyle.

An analysis of pollen and fragments of mosses in Ötzi's digestive system, and on his clothes and gear, has even allowed researchers to reconstruct his final journey, since the plants grow at different altitudes and on different sides of the mountains. During his last 33 or so hours, he walked northwards from high up near the tree line, at about 2,300m (7,500ft), then back down to the forest, through a gorge, and back up to above 3,000m (9,800ft).

Ötzi's hasty journey may be linked to the cause of his death, other research suggests. Days before he died, he suffered a stab wound to his right hand, and shortly before his death, received a blow to his back. His luxurious gear indicates he may have been a leader of some sort, who was perhaps involved in a power struggle. The copper axe, for example, was made with copper imported from Tuscany and similar axes were depicted on stone carvings and found in graves from that time, suggesting such axes were high-status symbols. His bear-fur hat, clothes and array of tools were expertly crafted. 

Walking along beside Ötzi's clothes and belongings laid out in display cases in the museum, Egger stops and gazes at his coat, made of strips of black and brown goat and sheep fur. "It's warm and long, and it's also very carefully made. It's not only functional, it's also beautiful."

Putzer points out the sophisticated design of Ötzi's shoes: "Ötzi wore shoes that were really adapted to the high mountains, with a very strong, grippy sole made of bear leather, and they were stuffed with hay for warmth." The upper part was made of supple deer leather. This sturdy footwear was very different from the lighter footwear found in lowland communities of that time, Putzer says, in places such as Alpine lakeside settlements, known as pile dwellings. "The shoes from those lakes were basically sandals. Even today, only tourists wear sandals like that here in the mountains," he says.

The design of other Alpine gear such as snow shoes and sleds has also remained much the same over hundreds and even thousands of years, because it just works, he says: "Even back then, they knew what they needed to cross these Alpine ridges, and were well-prepared." In the museum in Bolzano, the world's oldest snow shoe, which was also discovered along the Italian-Austrian border, is displayed along other everyday objects found in the ice, such as a centuries-old sled. All are similar in design to their modern-day counterparts.

Reitmaier says other finds from elsewhere in the Alps, such as tools and weapons from the Schnidejoch, show a similarly sophisticated understanding of what it takes to tackle the mountains. "They used the right wood for each purpose, and always the best materials. Today we would call it hi-tech," he says. 

Glacier finds are special because they are so exceptionally well-preserved, says Reitmaier – and because the people and objects usually ended up on the mountain half-way through a task or journey, in the midst of ordinary life.

"It's not like a grave, where the contents reflect a burial rite," he says. "Instead, Ötzi and the others were snatched from life, from their daily activities. It's like a time capsule, very different from other archaeological sources."

The objects are "things we would never find in the valley, because they would rot away down there – such as equipment made from wood, leather, fur and so on", he says.

While many of those objects belonged to people who spent their whole lives in the Alps, others mainly saw the mountains as something to cross as quickly as possible – the Romans, for example.

"The Romans describe the Alpine scenery, how terrible it is, but they also praise the cheese from the Alps, and write that it's delicious," says Putzer. But the Romans really only used the Alps as a crossing, for trade and for their military campaigns across Europe, he adds. Remains of Roman military settlements have been found in the mountains, at 2,200m (7,200ft) above sea level – in this case, not on a glacier, but simply on a high site that offered strategic views of the valleys below.

"The Romans weren't huge fans of the high mountains," agrees Reitmaier. "They quickly created a well-built road network, across the main passes, and they left behind some traces of way stations in the mountains, where they changed horses – infrastructure for the empire, mainly." They also left Roman coins at crossings, "for a safe passage through the Alps," he adds.

Roman authors vividly wrote about the risky Alpine terrain, and the threat of rockfall and avalanches, as well as the danger of over-indulging on Alpine cheese.

It's not only the deepest past that offers mysteries. One of the most puzzling glacier finds is not that old compared to the others – the young woman with the mismatched shoes and man's coat, found on the Porchabella glacier in Switzerland, who died around 1685. She had lice in her hair and carried a comb to try to deal with them. Despite the vivid details of her equipment, her identity remains unknown.

"When we talk about her story, it immediately gets very speculative," says Reitmaier. "We don't know if she was alone, or with others. We don't know why she was there. She was fairly well-equipped, and I'm sure she knew that she was going into the high mountains."

She was not a herder, he says, and the location made it unlikely that she was looking for a lost animal. He points out that at that time, Europe had quite recently been devastated and impoverished by the Thirty Years' War, and she may have been migrating as a result, perhaps with a group of people – "but again, that's just speculation", he cautions.

Ötzi may continue to reveal more secrets as research on his body and belongings continues. He is displayed discreetly, behind a small window in a dimmed side room, so that visitors can decide if they wish to view him, or only visit the main part of the museum. In case of a problem at the museum, two other cold storage cells are kept ready for him in the city at all times, one of them at Bolzano's main hospital, says Egger.

Meanwhile, the ice that once revealed him has further retreated. "I first visited the site where he was found in 1993, and when you go up there today, you see how massively the glacier has shrunk. You don't need generations to document that, one lifetime is enough to see the change," says Putzer.

As precious as these finds are, archaeologists warn that on the whole, the vanishing glaciers are bad news – not just for the environment but also for our grasp of history. Without the ice, artifacts soon disintegrate, says Reitmaier.

More like this:  

• How climate change is reshaping the Alps

• Antarctica's mysterious upside-down icescape

• The mountaineers collecting hard-to-reach data

"It's like if you leave open your freezer, and then at some point, the frozen meat in there rots, and eventually, it's gone," he says. "That's why we really need to appeal to the public, to lay people, who go hiking in the Alps, to alert us if they spot a potential find, because these areas are huge, and we can't monitor all of them."

He fears that "glacial archaeology may turn out to be a very short-lived field – once the ice is gone, we won't have that archive in the glaciers anymore".

In the meantime, every discovery matters. "We need to save as much as we can and explain to people that even the tiniest object can tell an exciting story. That's the most important message to get across: even if it looks plain and not that old, it can actually be really thrilling, and very, very old." 

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