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Iceman - Ep 29
364 Plays3 years ago
Kim talks to stone tool specialist and experimental archaeologist Dr James Dilley about the film Iceman, a dramatic reconstruction of the last days of Ötzi the Iceman. We consider such important questions as “What was the social structure of Chalcolithic society?”, “Did they not have mittens?” and “Which 80s blockbuster was that actor in?”.
James - @AncientCraft https://www.ancientcraft.co.uk
Contact
- Twitter: @prehistpod and @kimbiddulph
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Transcript
Introduction and Last Episode Recap
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:11
Speaker
Hi, I'm Kim. Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed last month's episode about folklore at prehistoric sites. It generated some discussions about walking meniers in France and witches bottoms, but let's move swiftly on.
Guest Introduction: James Dilly
00:00:26
Speaker
Welcome to my guest James Dilly. Hi James, how are you? I'm pretty good, thank you. Yourself?
00:00:33
Speaker
Yes, I'm good. Thank you for coming back on the podcast. You were on it years ago now, weren't you? What were we talking about last time? I feel like we were talking about another film. Was it Aardman's Early Man? Oh, yes, we did do that one. But also, didn't we talk about Mesolith? Was it Mesolith? The graphic novel. Did I talk to you about that? Yeah. Was that the same show? Was it an earlier one? I think that might have been an earlier one. Yeah.
00:00:59
Speaker
Because I think the last one, I was in department, I can vividly remember sitting in department with all of my colleagues that were out after a seminar at the pub. And me thinking... And you, the dedication, thank you. I know, I know. You forewent the pub for pre-histories.
James Dilly's Academic Journey
00:01:18
Speaker
Oh, that was very good. I mean, it's great to have you on the podcast again, you have a very specific set of skills and expertise and knowledge.
00:01:26
Speaker
which is really key, particularly today. But when we're talking about prehistory, I mean, you've made a lot of the stuff that we talk about. And yeah, anyway, perhaps you can introduce yourself. I will congratulate you on air. Well done. You've just passed your viva for your PhD.
00:01:47
Speaker
Congratulations. Thank you. It's after many, many years hard work in the building before the PhD as a young kid thinking I want to be a doctor in archaeology. It's sort of happened now and it's like, oh, well, I can have a nice rest and go on holiday and think about all the wonderful things I can do and then thinking, yeah, well, I can probably. It's a pandemic. It's terrible.
00:02:14
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. It's a bit of a different world now, isn't it? Tell us about what your PhD research was on.
Aurignacian Research and Challenges
00:02:23
Speaker
So my PhD research was looking at quite a specific time of the Paleolithic. And as many people know, the Paleolithic is a seriously long period of time right at the start of the human timeline. And for Europe, it covers well over a million years ago up until around
00:02:44
Speaker
13 or so thousand years ago, although there's some give or take depending on where you are. I'm looking at a period that ranges from about 40,000 to 30,000 years ago. But again, there's some give and take where you are. And it's a sub period of the Upper Paleolithic. And the Upper Paleolithic is when modern humans like us are knocking around in Europe. And the sub period I'm looking at is called the Aurignacian.
00:03:09
Speaker
which is right at the start of the Paleolithic. So you've got these pioneer anatomically modern humans coming into Europe through the Balkans and making their way westwards. And I was particularly interested in one of the iconic artifacts, one of the type artifacts from this particular time. And it's not a stone tool,
00:03:30
Speaker
and certainly not a bronze tool that I'm generally more well known for. It's actually a piece of antler or many pieces of antler that have been made into spear points and particularly the spear points I'm looking at and the ones that are well known from the origination are called split base points and they're pretty simple. They kind of look like pointy clothes pegs, I suppose, that just fit onto a beveled piece of wood as a peg would just fit onto a washing line or you could use it to
00:04:00
Speaker
peg a bit of cloth to something to make a den as a kid. It's pretty simple, really. But I was quite interested as to why you have stone spear points before, and you have stone spear points afterwards. So why do you get antler spear points? It just seems a strange thing to go for. Not unheard of, but
00:04:21
Speaker
strange for it to be so consistent through an entire period that lasts around 10,000 years over a huge geographic area. It struck me quite early on during the research that during the Aurignacian, it would have been a pretty difficult time to live in particularly northwestern Europe
00:04:41
Speaker
simply for the climatic conditions in places like central France that today we might go on holiday for the warm temperatures would have had an average July temperature of five degrees during the origination. Wow. And that gives you some idea of
00:04:56
Speaker
how cold it might have been in the winter months. But that comes with a lot of implications that because it's so cold, that really limits what can grow in that type of environment. When you think of places that have really cold environments for most of the year, if they're not complete Arctic tundra, they're at least boreal tundra or just open step grassland.
00:05:20
Speaker
Now the one thing we often think about when we think of hunter gatherers or Stone Age camps are these big TP like structures and people running around with great big long spears with fires all over the place and you just couldn't have had that.
00:05:35
Speaker
you could not have just burned fires just for the fun of it just to have a fire because there just wouldn't have been the firewood. It just could not grow on an environment that had such a short growing season with such poor soil and certainly for spear shafts that would have to be made of nice long flexible bits of wood something like ash or hazel just wouldn't have grown in that environment.
00:05:59
Speaker
So what does that mean for these people who would have been hunting things like reindeer or bison or horses? We've got the spear tips, but I think the implication that has been missed totally in the literature is that sometimes rather than just purely focusing on the, I suppose, to bring back a phrase that is often used in various archaeological circles, the sexy part of archaeology, whether it be sexy hand axes, which of course has been frowned on somewhat as a theory.
Prehistoric Resource Management
00:06:29
Speaker
because spear points are pointing and you can fit typology and you can look at the morphology and not there's anything wrong with that but it means that you could potentially be missing the key part of something like a spear because you can have a spearhead but it's not really a spear if it's just the spearhead it's just a short pointy piece of something that could be a knife.
00:06:47
Speaker
whereas just a spear shaft can still be a spear as we know from the much earlier spears from places like Clacton or Schöningen in Germany, which are just fire hardened wooden spears. So my, I guess, angle of the PhD or a key part of it was to say, well, hang on, guys, just because, you know, you assume that these things would have existed, perhaps the greater implication is that they made these split based antler points.
00:07:12
Speaker
not because they were hunting reindeer in particular but because they were actually trying to preserve these really valuable wooden shafts that they'd have to find somewhere and at least if the split is in the antler rather than the wooden shaft that you typically think of then the spearhead is more likely to break on impact and the spear shaft is not.
00:07:34
Speaker
Wow. With stone points, they're usually set into a split shaft, wooden shaft, aren't they? Yeah, with a notch. So that's where the weakness is going to be. Yeah, I see. That's fascinating. Because of those climactic conditions, it completely changes the toolset. It's an amazing kind of fix for that problem.
00:07:59
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. Very ingenious. Well, yeah, this is it. If you look at it in quite a narrow view, yes, it's a very clever way of getting around a problem. And experimentally testing these spears, both in a throwing range and firing them into ballistics gel, they're extremely good at making deep penetrative wounds into ballistics gel as our proxy, and it must have been efficient. But we can actually start to look at the broader picture of humans
00:08:28
Speaker
coming across a problem that would severely impact their lifestyle and managing resources and making key survival decisions to try and combat them. Various people have looked at that over the years, quite famous anthropologists and archaeologists have looked at the way that hunter-gatherers have moved around and networked seasonally and looked at how they've managed tools and equipment, but not
00:08:56
Speaker
with more of an ancient view, I suppose, to European prehistory. They've either had a view to more recent groups around the world in places like Australia or Africa, and perhaps occasionally suggested, oh, well, people might have done this in European prehistory, but not actually had a really high resolution
00:09:16
Speaker
view on the archaeology and in some cases just picked apart some previous experimental research which has been good but in some cases some researchers were using very narrow shafts of poplar as their shafts for testing the spear points and poplar's famous for making matchwood which is very liable to splitting that's why they used it. That's just totally the wrong material to use but it was just through lack of consideration.
00:09:46
Speaker
Yeah, it sounds simple when you say it. But actually, again, it's going back to this key thing that to actually get into the mindset of these people to understand them, we have to try and have a broader view of the implications and not just think, well, this is a spirit might do this if we do this with it. And it's similar to this from this site, you've got to think of the bigger picture sometimes.
00:10:09
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. It seems like a really basic thing to get the, you know, different woods have different properties. I mean, it's just not good enough to have any kind of wooden shaft. So you had fun throwing lots of spears at ballistics gel then.
00:10:26
Speaker
Yeah, well, unfortunately, not so much at ballistics, gel. And this was something we actually talked about during the viva. Because one of the key points that kept being brought up is, well, why didn't you just keep testing and test, you know, make more tests. And right at the start of the PhD, I pointed out that
00:10:44
Speaker
If you wanted to create this real world scenario, where you actually test in these things, you'd a have to go to some grassland somewhere like Mongolia or somewhere around the steppe, you then have to find some reindeer and bring them in. And you then have to try and hunt them and knock them over with these things, which is very expensive, but more importantly, is not very ethical.
00:11:06
Speaker
Yes. So, you know, you're never going to perfectly reconstruct these scenarios. But what I tried to do was break down those components, I suppose, and look at the way that these spears fly, do they need stabilization in the form of feathers, to give them some drag like arrows do, as fletching.
00:11:25
Speaker
do they break on impact with just the ground if it's a missed shot and then once you've worked out these things fly like javelins that's fine you can then move on to impact and then you can start to use ballistics gel or harder surfaces to see what that key part of the impact would look like and by breaking down
00:11:45
Speaker
those sections, you can actually start to have more of a critical view of those points. And I'm sure, you know, if you had all the money in the world, because I was self funded, you know, you could probably devise some very clever experimental tests, but that wasn't the main focus of the thesis, it was actually looking at the environmental evidence as well, the charcoal data, the pollen existed from the origination or
00:12:10
Speaker
in terms of a climatic stage, it's known as marine oxygen isotope stage three, that was very cold period, as I said, so there's lots to look at. And that wasn't a key part. And I suppose you could have gone at various angles with a PhD and a good PhD is something that once you've finished, you can make several papers out of and that's what it does. But yeah, at the end, it was kind of like, well, I could have done some of that, I could have done a bit more of that. And it's where do you stop really? And that is Yeah,
00:12:40
Speaker
Indeed, yeah. But you are pretty handy, aren't you? You have not only done all of these experiments as well as all the research, but you make lots of replica artefacts for loads of people and sell them. You make them for museums, you make them for TV shows, including the whole kit, really, clothing, and from all sorts of periods, as you said, you make
00:13:08
Speaker
bronze axes and swords and knives, as well as doing earlier Stone Age stuff.
James Dilly's Early Interest in Archaeology
00:13:16
Speaker
How did you get into all of that? Well, probably when I was about nine or ten, I've always lived in Royston in North Hertfordshire. And if anyone's listening to this from Royston in North Hertfordshire, then you'll have some idea of the amount of chalk and flint that we have here. Yeah.
00:13:35
Speaker
Yeah, very, very deep chalk deposits here, I think it's 900 meters in places, if not more. It's pretty serious stuff if you're putting any foundations in, which we had to do recently for a new workshop that was backbreaking, although an antler pick and a bronze pick worked quite well. That's another story.
00:13:55
Speaker
But I can remember pestering my dad to help me smash open a piece of flint. And quite rightly, like a responsible parent was questioning the purpose of this and pointing out that flint is sharp and dangerous. And I didn't realize at the time that of course, there's lots of broken bits of flint around the field, but I wanted to see one being broken in front of me, not really with a connection to making tools, I was just interested as to what was inside.
00:14:23
Speaker
And at the time, I was part of my local young archaeologist group in Cambridge, and they offered holidays around the UK in Nottingham and Cornwall. For the Cornwall one, it was focused towards prehistory and experimental archaeology.
00:14:40
Speaker
and memes who enjoyed most kids playing with Lego and banging nails into old bits of wood when you're allowed to out in the garage. Being able to try something that was a mix between that practical making side and the history that was starting to become more interested and particularly prehistory was the perfect mix and it was there that I was introduced
00:15:04
Speaker
to things like flint knapping to sea or bronze casting. And from that point on decided, right, well, that's what I want to do. And as soon as came back from the holiday, went straight out into the garden, started mashing any piece of flint I could find with limited success, but it was a start. And from then on, I just
00:15:22
Speaker
kept going with it through school and secondary school into college, just started. I say started kept breaking up pieces of flint and finding bigger and bigger pieces in local fields and then having to go and find quarries more flint.
00:15:37
Speaker
And then it must've been about age 16. My dad helped me make my website ancient craft. She was 10 years old, two years ago now, but I started to get requests from museums in the nearby area for displays of Flint app in or replica tools. And it just started to take off really. Yeah, it's amazing. As you said, it is what it is, make replicas that go mostly around the UK, but often into Europe and outside of Europe.
00:16:07
Speaker
other museums all the time and doing bits of media stuff. It's just crazy and very, very varied, but it keeps me occupied. And one day I might be out casting bronze swords or the next day be filming in Scotland somewhere or it's mad, but you get to see an awful lot of the country. So many people and get to see so many amazing sites and artifacts. I wouldn't change it for anything.
00:16:35
Speaker
Yeah, in fact, we bumped into each other, didn't we, in the city of London where I work, which was the weirdest place that I would have ever thought I would come across you because, you know, whenever I follow all of your stuff on Twitter and what have you, and you're always in the wilds of Scotland or something. And you were just, you've been invited to go and see a nice find from Havering.
Examining the Havering Horde
00:17:00
Speaker
I was and as you rightly said I'm usually found in my normal habitat in the wild amongst the wild haggis and that sort of thing around the hilltops but yeah I was invited among a few other specialists in Bronze Age metalwork to go and preview
00:17:20
Speaker
the Havering Horde. Although it had been found in 2018, it had gone through conservation, and this was the first time it had come to the Museum of London in preparation for their new exhibition, which is now at the Museum of London Docklands, not the Museum of London over by Bank. It's over at the Docklands, which is near Canary Wharf. But it was a
00:17:42
Speaker
Large late Bronze Age enclosure where several hordes were found very close together and became part of the same hoarders they're pretty much about the same deposit that are what are known as a founder's hoard so sometimes you get hordes of gold work or hordes of complete objects.
00:18:03
Speaker
This was a hoard of mostly broken up objects, which is usually associated with metalworking, where a metalwork could break up these pieces of metal into a convenient size to fit back into a crucible for melting down and starting again. And I was brought in to look at these 450 odd objects to give my metalworkers or metalcasters
00:18:26
Speaker
opinion on how some of these were made or broken. So it was quite an honor and very, very special to see some of these objects and pick them up and get really good look at them. Yeah, it's I was very jealous that day. I was walking down to my Roman bath house, which is lovely, of course, but it is Rome. And it's kind of I've had to learn to love the Romans. And so you
00:18:51
Speaker
You do. I'm getting there. I'm getting there. But so we are going to be talking about this film, Iceman, which was released in 2017.
Discussion on the Film 'Iceman'
00:19:01
Speaker
And basically, you know, I thought you were a really good person to talk about this because you have studied at sea and his kit, you've remade a lot of his kit.
00:19:11
Speaker
several times over, I expect. You made me bits and pieces that are similar to what he was carrying. And then in 2017, this film about the Iceman was released and I thought, yay, finally, his story is being told. This was produced by a German company and it's mainly with German actors, but that doesn't really matter. It's not in German, which we'll come to a little bit later. It did take a while for it to get
00:19:36
Speaker
to the UK, though, that was the issue. So finally got hold of a DVD, I think, last year. And then things got in the way of actually recording this. So it is based on Ertsey, the guy found in the Ertstil Alps in 1991. I was 13 when Ertsey was found, and I was blown away by the discovery of this man, frozen
00:20:03
Speaker
under a glass of air and then suddenly discovered by hikers. I was really impressionable at age 13 and Ertsey is the reason that I became an archaeologist, basically. I was hooked from that moment on. I'm a bit older than you, Auntie James.
00:20:20
Speaker
Well, yes, I think so. He could have um, denied a bit more about that. Going by you saying that you were, I was thinking when he was discovered, I think I was yet to appear on the earth. You weren't even born yet? Oh my goodness. Wow.
00:20:42
Speaker
But so we're going to talk a bit more about the film after this break. Hi, we're back. Now, James, what was it about Ertsey that was so amazing? I mean, obviously you learned about it after you were born at some point. But what makes his discovery or his that particular site, what makes him and his kit so exciting for archaeologists?
00:21:09
Speaker
I suppose to try and sum it up briefly to encourage anyone who somehow doesn't know about CD Iceman because they themselves have been living under a rock. He is probably one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the 20th century, obviously came right at the end of the 20th century 1991.
00:21:30
Speaker
but it's the only prehistoric human remains that have been found with such a complete assemblage of artifacts around them because usually when human remains are found in a grave or wherever, we might get some pottery, some stone, very occasionally some bits of organic, usually just the hard organics like bone or antler.
00:21:54
Speaker
ornamentation or other bits. But with Earthsea, we had everything that can't have been very much that wasn't preserved to have string, tree bark, his eyes and his eye color, just everything. It's hard to sort of put it in to one very rapid. This is exactly the top things that were found with Earthsea. It is a unique find to have a person with all their kit. It
00:22:22
Speaker
I guess the best way to imagine it is if someone went out hiking with their modern camping rucksack and all the kit that you'd get from a camping shop and keeled over nearly five and a half thousand years ago and everything was preserved because they went straight into a freezer. We just don't have anything like that from any other grave from anywhere near that kind of time.
00:22:46
Speaker
No, because it's not really a grave, is it? Because he died alone and his body and his kit was never curated by family, and then they chose what to put in his grave as well. He's buried with everything that he had on him, which is not buried. He obviously died and was then covered accidentally by a glacier with everything.
00:23:10
Speaker
And so it's not really a burial as such and it's almost like it shows more about life than it does about death. Yeah, exactly. I mean, quite early on during the investigation, there were suggestions that he was actually intentionally buried and it was just luck to have the other objects. And part of that persuasion was the fact that
00:23:33
Speaker
because the ice had moved an awful lot, because he was found within the Utsuglassia, you could plot out where a nearby moraine had moved around within the rocky gorge that he was found in and scattered him and all of his objects. So how can you say it wasn't necessarily a particular burial?
00:23:53
Speaker
But it seemed very, very unlikely that it was a burial. Contemporary burials have actually some similar artifacts which have survived things like copper axes, or arrowheads, or flint knives, but they are in a much better condition, particularly the stonework, they look as if they've been made to be buried with very little evidence of reuse, whereas Utsi's kit, particularly again, for the flint work,
00:24:20
Speaker
had clearly been re-flaked and re-sharpened over several episodes leading up to the point when he met his untimely demise. So it's quite unlike other burials and the fact that he was so high up at 11,000 feet, that is again quite unlike other burials.
00:24:39
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. It seems like quite a way to go in order to bury somebody. I mean, there are other organic people, there are bits of people out there, like the bog bodies of Denmark and stuff or Ireland or Cheshire.
00:24:55
Speaker
again, they seem to have been almost stripped of a lot of their kind of personal possessions before being thrown in these bogs. And then, possibly also, it's to do with when they were discovered, because a lot of bog bodies were discovered, say, in the 19th century or early 20th century, when preservation wasn't quite the same, you know, the actual technology to preserve wasn't quite as good. So, all of this organic stuff that he's got is just
00:25:24
Speaker
so well preserved so that it can be studied by some different specialists. This film is lovely. So much has been done on each bit of his kit and on his body, on what was in his stomach, on his DNA, x-rays on the body, so much that you can build up a picture, a story of his life.
00:25:50
Speaker
This is where this film comes in, basically, this idea of what happened to him. So he was up, as you say, at 11,000 feet in the Ertstel Alps. That's where he was found. But where did he actually come from? And when he was first discovered, there was a bit of a border dispute, wasn't there, about whether he was actually across the border in Switzerland or Italian.
00:26:17
Speaker
And it was found to how the border was actually rediscovered because of Ertzi and he became, and it was clear that actually he'd been found just inside Italy. But also his DNA was quite interesting. Oh, was it stable isotope analysis? I can't remember which it was. Yeah, that basically showed he was from Northern Italy, what we now call Northern Italy.
00:26:45
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's there's a lot. Well, even from the discovery, when he was first found, and eventually recovered. And I recommend having a look on YouTube for some quite old PBS documentaries that look at the Iceman mystery, because it actually shows footage of the recovery. And if you
00:27:04
Speaker
particularly like prehistory and archaeology and the iceman discovery you will wince watching this because they just pull out the body and try and wiggle it out and use ice cream to free him and they did an awful lot of damage in the process because they apparently didn't quite realize that this wasn't
00:27:24
Speaker
just a more modern, unfortunate accident from a hiker or skier. It was only a little bit later that someone realized when they pulled out a flint knife that this is probably not a modern burial. They had had a lot of problems with bad weather windows trying to recover the remains. There was just a whole number of ridiculous things going on that you would have thought really, you know, you didn't think there.
00:27:50
Speaker
I went over to the Innsbruck University forensic lab first, and it was at that point that Comrade Spindler realized that these remains were several thousand years old, possibly near to 4000 years old and of course he's actually older than 5,300 years old.
00:28:09
Speaker
But as he said, he was actually found, I think it was 92 or 93 meters inside the Italian border. Very, very close. But looking at the stable isotopes that were in his teeth showed that he only lived within that nearby area radius of only about 32 kilometres.
00:28:29
Speaker
So not very far at all. In terms of his DNA that you mentioned, his only living descendants are in very, very isolated communities around Europe in places like Sardinia. Other than that, there's very little left of his ascendancy. It's interesting how you do get these examples, whether it be Neolithic farmers from much earlier being replaced or should I say hunter gatherers being replaced by Neolithic farmers.
00:28:56
Speaker
their descendants just disappear. I know there's a famous example of a relative of the cheddar man actually being found in cheddar. There have been a few researchers that have called into question that research as it was done quite some time ago to say the least. Yeah, of course, we've got more recent evidence that looks at showing what cheddar man looks like, which is another topic. But there's just so much
00:29:24
Speaker
about Earthsea that we know and there will always be new bits coming out and you mentioned the contents of his stomach and I think one of the most amazing things that really gives you that really detailed picture of what his last day or so would have been like is that his stomach will
00:29:43
Speaker
wasn't seen for quite some time, they couldn't find it. And the reason was that it was pushed up behind his lungs, due to the ice pressure. And it was just a case where we can't find it. And we don't want to be too invasive in looking for it because it would just cause damage. Yeah, when they finally did find it, we're able to open it.
00:30:01
Speaker
to see what was inside it they found einkorn grains and einkorn is very early kind of wheat or the first kind of wheat really that would have grown on the arid hills of central turkey around Anatolia in that area that eventually came across to
00:30:17
Speaker
Western Europe. He also had ibex meat, which is a type of wild goat. He also had some small pieces of fern leaf, which is not a edible plant. If you eat a lot of it will give you pretty bad stomach upset which
00:30:32
Speaker
raised some eyebrows, but there was also a small amount of elk meat as well. But my particular favourite out of that whole story is that upon closer inspection of the two types of meat that were in his stomach, they realised that the meat had not been cooked. It could not have been boiled over 100 degrees or even near to 100 degrees because the cell structure was still in good condition that showed it hadn't been boiled.
00:31:01
Speaker
However, there was a very, very high carbon particulate count. What does that tell us that well, rather than cooking the meat, he was eating smoked meat. Really, really detailed information about a near five and a half thousand year old body that you can actually not just say, Oh, well, he would have eaten this, but this is how they prepared the food.
Critique of 'Iceman's' Historical Accuracy
00:31:22
Speaker
Yes. It's it's just amazing, really.
00:31:25
Speaker
That is amazing. I don't think that detail made it into the film. It seems like that I was a bit disappointed with the cooking actually, which seemed to be stick it on a stick and put it in the fire, which seemed a little bit... The whole setup that they created about Earthsea's life felt a bit primitive in that pejorative way, that the houses had looked
00:31:49
Speaker
at the beginning, very flimsy. I mean, Ertsey's outfit is really quite a construction. It's a tailored outfit, basically. Yes, it's made out of skins, but a lot of work has gone into it.
00:32:05
Speaker
But everybody's hair was messy. I hate that. I really do. It gets to me. And they were all dirty. And as I say, the food culture was not there. Now, I know Italian food is like the nearly probably the best in the world, according to me nowadays, but it wasn't back then, according to this film.
00:32:28
Speaker
which is very strange. And you know what else? Right at the beginning of the film, he is having sex with his presumably his mate, his wife, whatever you would call it, whilst his son plays flute in the corner, which was interesting. It's kind of like, yeah, I've often thought, how do people have sex in prehistory? Anyway, we won't get into that too much. But it was the only time where you could have seen his tattoos. And they really didn't
00:32:55
Speaker
didn't show that or didn't show him getting any tattoos, which I thought they would have in the film. Because I think the discovery of his tattoos was such a big thing. I mean, don't you think I think that was a bit of a missed opportunity?
00:33:12
Speaker
Yeah, and there's I guess to briefly talk about the tattoos is that again, like much of the the assemblage, there's nothing quite like it. No, several later bodies with tattoos on them, but not from this age. And again, if you haven't
00:33:29
Speaker
for people listening haven't come across the Ice Man's tattoos, have a little look, but they're mostly lines in quite specific areas that are concentrated around joints or areas where you might feel pain, which I've often thought is quite interesting as someone who does flint napping and similar tasks is that sometimes I can feel aches and pains in specific areas, but on the other side and I'm right handed. So that may say something about Etsy's handedness. But that's interesting.
00:33:58
Speaker
When they x-rayed his body, they found that he did have quite a bit of osteoarthritis in his joints as well, didn't they? It was quite old, I mean, for that time. It was probably around 40, 50 years old when he died. He obviously had a very hard life, as you'd expect. These tattoos may have been used as almost like a medicinal thing to try and combat the pain in the joints.
00:34:28
Speaker
work. But it's all down his spine, in his wrist, his knees, his ankles, they're covered in little, as you say, lines or crosses or circles. I actually got a few of his tattoos done a few years ago for myself, just to mark the fact that he is important to my whole life, really, but not quite as many as he had, because I was at 61, I think he had. Yeah, I think it's low 60s.
00:34:58
Speaker
Yeah, they keep on finding them though, don't they? Most of his left buttock is missing due to the interest in recovery style, so there may have been more. Right, yeah. So to start with, I was a little bit
00:35:13
Speaker
disappointed in that. Well, I know I was hoping that they would show that later, but they get into the kind of the story of the last days of Earthsea. And throughout their speaking, they don't speak a lot, actually, there's a lot of grunting, which feels a little bit like some early films about cavemen in that very stereotypical way. But they do use a language and they're using the Ratic language throughout with no subtitles.
00:35:42
Speaker
And they basically say at the beginning, you don't really need to know what they're saying, you can kind of figure it out, which was fine. That was absolutely fine. It would have been strange, I think, if it had been dubbed into one's native language, that would have been a bit odd. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, I can definitely remember some specific scenes where there was a distinct lack of talking. To almost an extent, it was getting a bit awkward.
00:36:11
Speaker
Yeah, I thought so. I thought when you met that couple. Yeah, that's the particular scene I was thinking of where they were just all sat around the campfire and just looked at each other.
00:36:21
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. It was very strange. It would have been like that. If people had such a complex society where they're exchanging things over a long distance, making quite stylised pottery, but can only fathom a handful of words out of the very limited vocabulary that they could have only had for this film, it just doesn't seem right.
00:36:44
Speaker
No, it doesn't. What I would love to see is a film that doesn't play to our wider public preconceptions about prehistory in the Stone Age, although of course he's in the Copper Age anyway, and actually show them as sophisticated and complex as they were, and with skills, amazing skills, to create beautiful objects
00:37:06
Speaker
useful object, objects, you know, houses that probably didn't have gaps in the walls. And well, yeah, maybe he's shown at the beginning as kind of some kind of priest. I feel don't you think because someone dies in childbirth, a woman dies in childbirth, and then he they bury her. I didn't I haven't actually, I just thought to myself,
00:37:34
Speaker
they put her in a cave and did various things over her body. And he took then his whole his, sorry, these are spoilers here, his whole village is then is then massacred by these raiders. And he is off in the mountains, he comes back and he deals with all the dead bodies and takes them into this cave. And I actually haven't looked up whether or not in northern Italy, they have cave burials in the
00:37:59
Speaker
Neolithic and Chalcolithic and Bronze Age. I have a feeling that that's possible. I don't know if you know that. I think that is the case in some instances, but it's not uniform. Yeah, okay. But he seemed to be the one doing all this big ceremony and calling to the, I don't know, a sky god maybe or something in that bit.
00:38:25
Speaker
Yeah, with the special special rock in its wooden box, which is the Yeah, we'll get to that. We'll get to that because they don't show you that right. That is like, for me, it felt like that a bit in is it in Pulp Fiction, where they open the boot of the car and it, they get this gold sheen over their faces, but they won't show you what's in the back of the car. And it felt like that in this box, they he opens the box, but you can't see what's in it right until the end.
00:38:50
Speaker
I thought that was a bit like Pulp Fiction, which is a bit of a strange thing to add into the film, but there you go. The opening bit just felt a bit
00:39:03
Speaker
rickety. I think it was all the filter that they used to produce the film was interesting. It was very washed out. And I helped. It felt like the Revenant didn't it? It was the Revenant set in the Chalcolithic.
00:39:21
Speaker
Yeah, and it was good for the scenery. But I don't think it did any favours for just the quality of the film at all. If they were purely going for cinematography, then you know,
00:39:36
Speaker
I'm not saying it's a good style, it's just a style, but it's a strange choice. And as you said, it's just sort of houses that look as if they're sort of summer houses that were a bit, you know, quickly put up and put together. When everyone looking a bit shabby, it's
00:39:52
Speaker
It was disappointing, as you said. Yeah, it was a little bit disappointing. Let's take a break now. And when we come back, maybe we'll try and find some of the positive aspects of this film. So let's think of some of the positive aspects of this film then, James. Obviously, Ertsey is very well known for his personal possessions, his suite of objects and clothing that he had with him when he died.
Ötzi's Possessions in Film
00:40:17
Speaker
Have they got those things right?
00:40:19
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. And they've got a lot of them in there. And they show a lot of them being used. Some of the famous objects, of course, include his axe, his knife, his backpack, the grass mat or cable both the nets, his quiver, birch bark containers, one of which was carrying an ember, which we see in the film. And of course, the clothing that he's wearing as well. There's a lot there, which is really good. Yeah, when it goes up into the
00:40:49
Speaker
Yeah. When he goes up into the snow line and he puts his fur hat on, I was like, yay! They're getting it all out there. I think he puts his special shoes on at that point as well. They had like a net around the shoe, didn't they? Yeah. Can you talk over the shoe? Because I always get it slightly wrong about where the grass was and the fur was and the net was.
00:41:12
Speaker
Well, the construction of the shoe has been reinterpreted several times but the base is quite thick cowhide leather with a net that's connected to it with a leather cord that's sewn around the edge of this thick
00:41:31
Speaker
leather sole and the net, it would have been in the shape of the foot. And it's that that held the shoe on the foot as the person walked. And then there was a leather cap that covered the front. There may have been a leather back into it, but it hasn't been found. One of the shoes is in very good condition and the other is not in great condition at all because it was badly damaged.
00:41:53
Speaker
But within that net was quite densely stuffed grass that would have kept his feet warm and having made several pairs of the shoes and tested them in deep snow, they do work really, really well.
00:42:08
Speaker
Yeah, that's good. Grass both keeps the heat in to keep you warm, but it stops the heat escaping and that may initially sound like the same thing. But if too much heat escapes when you're in snowy conditions, then the snow will melt around whatever you're wearing and you'll get cold very quickly. So it insulates that yeah, it's just insulate your foot and it also insulates the snow from your foot. Yeah.
00:42:33
Speaker
Yeah, that's really good. Obviously, socks haven't been invented at that point, or at least that's what we assumed given that he was wearing this grass, but maybe just grass was better than having a sock. I've worn prehistoric shoes with grass in and it does make it much nicer to wear. That's just in lowland, very mild conditions.
00:42:57
Speaker
So his kit is shown pretty well. I have always loved the overtunic that he wears. It's almost like it's striped pelts. They've kind of taken wide strips of a black sheep, I think, and then one of a slightly lighter colour and sewn them together in a series of wide stripes, which is almost... It seems really like it's a fashion item. Dare we say decorative.
00:43:26
Speaker
decorative, exactly. The rest of it is showing them just surviving and then this is a beautiful item to be wearing. It must all be a shade of brown in prehistory. That's the only colour you're allowed.
00:43:41
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. But that brings me back to the couple that he meets. So whilst he's tracking the men who have killed all his family, he's actually managed to rescue a baby. And he comes across this couple who are living in the foothills of the Alps,
00:44:00
Speaker
and they're on their own. It's not a couple, though, because I think it's a father and his daughter. There's a big age difference, and then she makes pass at Ertsey, so I assume that they're not married. Anyway, and he gives them the baby. But what I wanted to say is the man in that couple is wearing a beautiful, beautiful tunic made out of something white, pure white it was, and I'm like, really?
00:44:25
Speaker
What would that be? I can't even imagine what it would be made out of, unless it was like an Astrakhan type thing, but with white wool instead of black? I don't know.
00:44:41
Speaker
I mean, sheep would have been around more goat-like, I suppose. And you would have occasionally got mutations that would have been white. I mean, that's how white was originally encouraged to be more common. It was just through mutation. And it may have been based on that, but he wore it because it was valuable in that sense. But you would have occasionally got white goats or ibex as we occasionally get white deer as well. You know, you always get white deer mutations.
00:45:10
Speaker
I think I did see kind of almost like curls on it. So whether it was, unless it was, it was supposed to be a knitted thing, but I'm not entirely sure that knitting was available anyway, but it was quite, it was just a very striking piece of clothing that I really loved. And I think it was, it was chosen especially for that character because he's quite a well-known Italian actor actually. And did you know, I'm just trying to remember his name. Sorry, this is terrible.
00:45:40
Speaker
Franco Nero. That's it. Did you know that he was in Die Hard Two? I didn't know he's in Die Hard Two. I knew he's been an awful lot Django unchained. Oh, yeah, he said he's been in loads of those things. But he was the general Esperanza who was in Die Hard Two, the guy on the plane. Really? Yeah, it's not amazing. I think that's fantastic.
00:46:01
Speaker
So many big films and this. Yeah, and so many other big films, really, really famous actor, very striking blue eyes as well. And I think maybe that's why they chose this white to really cut his hairs all white. And it was he was just such a dramatic figure. And I wanted to know more about him and his his he seemed much more, I don't know, engaging, but let's see. Anyway, there you go.
00:46:28
Speaker
back to the positives. He goes after these guys and does finally catch up with them eventually. What's interesting, I think, is the need for Ertsey to have survived the raid and avenged the deaths of his family and friends
00:46:53
Speaker
of before he himself dies. So he does manage. I'm sorry, this is a spoiler, but he does manage to catch up with these guys. And then there's a really amazing scene, I think, where they're fighting with their copper axes. I just I mean, clearly you can fight with an axe. It's it can be a weapon. I just I don't know if there's any evidence of this. Are there any that would be a big job to look through all of the evidence of
00:47:22
Speaker
pathology on any skeletons of that date to look for specifically axe wounds, but I don't know, what did you think of that? I mean, they had to, Ertsey had several distinctive injuries that were linked to fighting shortly before he died, and they had to get them in there somewhere, otherwise that would have been a major part that was overlooked.
00:47:43
Speaker
Including the arrow in his left shoulder, which is always mentioned. He also had a severe cut to the inside of his hand, which is consistent with self-defense and blunt force trauma to his head, which must have been in some kind of close contact with someone with a stick or something. But I suppose in the fighting sense, whether people would have been fighting and
00:48:08
Speaker
even would go back into the early Neolithic, let alone the change to the Chalcolithical Copper Age. People have been bowling each other over for thousands of years before we get to this point. So I like that they included that bit and a couple of other bits because
00:48:27
Speaker
What I didn't want them to show was that it was nice and peaceful during the late Neolithic Chalcolithic. People got along and they helped each other. They said, no, no, they didn't. I'm afraid that people were nasty to each other and had been for a very long time.
00:48:47
Speaker
I didn't again like the other camp when he sort of stumbled across this other camp that had its one tent. It was just all a bit like, oh, let's quickly throw together this scene. And we'll just put this stinky here. The one near the beginning.
00:49:01
Speaker
the second camp when he fights the I think it's two guys that are left and the you in the comes across their family and sort of sleeps in their tent. It's just Yeah, it's just one tent, isn't it? It's kind of a bender covered with hides. It looks like it's a bit bit feels a bit mezzolithic. Yeah, it feels a bit mezzolithic. But the whole apart from that fight, which they had to put in somewhere, it just felt a bit
00:49:29
Speaker
I don't know that they didn't. I think one of the key things that people pull apart in the reviews is the plot, because you've pretty much got an open canvas as to what you go with. At some point, he's got to get hit a couple of times and then shot in the back and then found up somewhere quite high. And that's about it. Other than that, you can pretty much put in whatever you like to within reason. Yeah.
00:49:52
Speaker
I think it definitely takes away from what could have been something quite good from as we were saying the really good representation representation rather of the kit even to show him setting up his trapping net, which they go into really quite specific detail with some of the key bits and then there's just there just happens to be a plot in the background.
00:50:15
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's how it feels. And he happens to fall down. When he fell down in this ice hole, I felt like, oh, is that the end of the film? Is that when he dies? But it was like, no, but so much hasn't happened yet. He hasn't been shot. What's going on? And that was so odd. And he'd only saved the life of someone else.
00:50:39
Speaker
earlier so that person could come and rescue him from that cave. And I think the only reason they put that ice cave in there was so that they could show him trying to use the copper axe as an ice pick. And I think that was the only reason that was in there. And also showing that he didn't have any gloves.
00:50:55
Speaker
So because he blows in his hands, his hands gets very cold. He doesn't have any gloves. Were gloves not invented yet? And then they must have been I mean, I guess that's a good point to discuss Ertsy as a find is that to be up 11,000 feet that we look at the things that he was actually wearing the leggings with a loincloth
00:51:18
Speaker
no tunic, but this coat. And then this whether it be a grass cape or a mat, that's not as well as the shoes that is not a lot to be wearing in quite cold conditions. That really is not very much is going to keep the cold out and having worn some of that said replica kit before when you don't have full pairs of trousers, you know, it gets a bit drafty. And certainly if you're a bit cold, it's
00:51:45
Speaker
He basically is wearing chaps, isn't he? And then he has a loincloth that folds over the top of his belt in the front and in the back. So very breezy, I would have thought, in between. I suppose, you know,
00:52:00
Speaker
it's been speculated whether he was a shepherd or something, so he was going up on the mountain, but he's not, as you say, not actually fully prepared for that kind of altitude. I mean, he could easily have, he should have had his gloves on a string wrapped up, you know, up his sleeves and then he wouldn't have lost them. I don't know whether this is of any bearing really, but at Hallstatt,
00:52:23
Speaker
salt mine, which obviously is a bit later. Even in the late Bronze Age mine, they don't have gloves, they have these palm covers that are just bits of hide with a fur on, I think, with a hole in it where you can put your thumb, so that's how you keep them on.
00:52:43
Speaker
And then when you get the Iron Age levels at Halstadt, they've got proper mittens, almost as if they finally get invented at the beginning of the Iron Age or something. But it does seem like a really... I mean, a mitten is a pretty simple thing to make. I've even made them and I'm not very good at making stuff.
00:53:05
Speaker
that's why I get you to get mixed up for me. It is fairly simple shape. I mean, it's not as if gloves is just a mitten. But but this is it. I mean, how much do you go by exactly what was found? And how much do you make assumptions that certain things are pretty simple and would have been used?
00:53:24
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, they had to make some assumptions and I'm glad they tried to stick quite closely to the kit so that it could show the shortcomings here and there. I mean, even things like his arrows were only one or two of them were in a condition that they could have been used. The rest were half made arrows or of different lengths that suggest they weren't all made for him or by him. They might have been taken from someone or he was given some.
00:53:53
Speaker
Even his copper axe hadn't properly been work hardened. So if he tried to fell a tree with it or do any serious cutting, it would have buckled the blade pretty quickly. Just a lot of his kit was not in a state to be readily used. It was a half finished state.
00:54:09
Speaker
which is quite interesting. And again, he was not preparing to go over the Hauslypjök pass. No, no. Where a lot of other finds have been found from the same time period as a single leather legging very similar to Ertsi's has also been found in a few other bits and pieces. Really quite a well used pass, but we just got nothing again as complete as the Ertsi assemblage.
00:54:35
Speaker
That's interesting that it's a well-used pass because it seems from this story in the film that this is a one-off thing where he's gone and followed these men to their tiny settlement and no one knows about these connections and it seems odd because what we know about this period and earlier periods and later periods is that they are
00:55:04
Speaker
You know, you can't live in isolation in a tiny village. You have to have connection with other people. And you would probably have traveled relatively long distances because they'd be by foot to meet with other people. I mean, not that regularly, but, you know, probably seasonally. Yeah. But there you go. I mean, what's really interesting, not really interesting, I was frustrated by it again, is what was in that box.
The Mystery of Ötzi's Polished Stone
00:55:34
Speaker
So, the special thing in the mystery box, which seems to be what the raiders were after when they raided the village. They knew about it, they asked about it. It was called Tineka, and they took it when they found it. And Ertsi was going after them, partly to avenge the deaths of his family, but also to get this back.
00:55:59
Speaker
it feels like it was sacred to him. He used it in the ceremonies right at the beginning of the film when he was burying the dead and welcoming the baby as well, actually. And I looked, when I saw this, it was a polished bit of stone inside the box, wasn't it? And I was like, what? Where does that come from? But he throws it away before he dies. So, you know, very conveniently, it wasn't found on him. Yeah.
00:56:26
Speaker
This is from the early Neolithic. Yes. It was an heirloom, obviously, from Turkey. I mean, these obsidian... I looked it up and there are obsidian mirrors, which I never knew about, that have been found at places like Chatalhöyük in what's now Turkey. And it suddenly turns up with Ötzi in the Chalcolithic and I'm like, what?
00:56:53
Speaker
where we might differ because I mean, I haven't looked it up for what they put in the film or what they thought they put in the film. I thought it was a polished piece of Jadatite. Right. So maybe I'm assuming that might just be me. Was it green? So do they get that kind of thing?
00:57:12
Speaker
But it wasn't that time, certainly not that time, but they do get that rock from that aerial very, very close to that area. Hence. Yeah, yeah. And the sort of greeny colour. Oh, I didn't think it was green. But
00:57:27
Speaker
Yeah, well, I was talking about the really early Neolithic, you know, like eight thousand years ago, or even eight thousand B.C., in fact. But maybe yours is more likely. But I don't know where they got just. Yeah, I mean, that's where, you know, having a little bit of English translation might have helped. It's like, what is this thing? This this great obsidian thing or this great jadeite thing or whatever? Yeah.
00:57:55
Speaker
So whatever that was, it wasn't found with Earthsea anyway. And it was, because he threw it away at the end. Yeah. So it, but it was basically, it's like the, um, what is it that, uh, there is, it's a MacGuffin, like, like in a, oh, what's, I can't remember the name of the eight very, very famous director now who directed Vertigo and North by Northwest. You know, the guy.
00:58:21
Speaker
I can't remember his name. Everyone's screaming it at the moment. Alfred Hitchcock. Yeah, he always had the MacGuffin, which was kind of it felt like it was the great point of the film, but it was actually completely not the point of film at all. And it felt like that that was their MacGuffin. So it's really interesting to see how, you know, more recent film
00:58:46
Speaker
Tropes have got into this story about a 5,300 year old man. I suppose that's always going to be the way.
00:58:55
Speaker
Yeah, of course. And I feel like they should. And it won't happen because that would really be stepping on toes. But I feel like they should have another go at it. At some point. You can stick very, very tightly to the evidence, not just around Etsy. And it feels like they researched into Etsy, but not
00:59:18
Speaker
the world of Etsy around him that as we said, we get a really good view of Etsy and his kit. But when we start to look at the wider picture of the world around him in the film, it starts to come apart a little bit and gets a bit loose in places. Yeah, I would really like to see more and more of a sophisticated view of the or a view of the people as being much more sophisticated than they were depicted in this. And I was particularly upset
00:59:45
Speaker
So, I'm disappointed really about the depiction of women and their role in society, which was minimal, it seems. So, yeah, I mean, obviously the story was Ertsey's. It's not the story of his wife or whatever, but I still think that that could have had a little bit more of an informed view of how that could have been.
01:00:12
Speaker
shown a bit better on it, but I feel like I had a much tighter grip on it and kept some artistic license under a tighter leash.
01:00:25
Speaker
I almost think that they should have had more artistic license. I think that storytellers are fantastic at what they do and would have liked to have seen much more plot and much more of the wider world, as you say, whilst keeping the bits that we do know about.
01:00:48
Speaker
real. And they did, you know, his kit was great, the fact that he was from northern Italy in that area around Bolzano, which is where he now is, and that he'd gone up into the Alps. And yeah, I think that was all fantastic. And maybe more imagination could have gone into, in an informed way, obviously, but more imagination got into the story.
01:01:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly. As you said, I think it just would have made a more well-rounded piece and I wonder whether there would have been budget constraints at times. Oh yeah, maybe. There's a whole difficult thing, isn't it, making a film? Yeah, absolutely.
01:01:37
Speaker
So all in all the details with Ertsey were fantastic and perhaps the rest of the story needs a
Reflections on Portraying Prehistoric Life
01:01:45
Speaker
bit of work. But maybe we as archaeologists need to get better at telling that story as well. And we focus in on the detail so often because that's where we're so interested and excited without building up that wider picture of what his world was like.
01:01:59
Speaker
But thank you, James, for talking to me. We could go on and on, but I think we should bring it to a close now. I would like to share your Twitter handle, if I may, and your website on my show notes. Would that be all right? Yeah, that's fine.
01:02:17
Speaker
So if anybody wants to tweet at me or at James, then you'll be able to find those details down in the show notes. And of course you can get in contact with the Archaeology Podcast Network with any comments as well. Did you see the film? Do you disagree with us? Do you like it? Is there anything else that we missed out talking about because we didn't have time? Do get in touch and let me know.
01:02:45
Speaker
Have you seen Iceman? If not, make sure you get hold of the right film, as there are a few that go by the same name. Get back to me with your thoughts. Maybe you disagree with us about certain things. That's fine. I'd like to hear from you. Next month, we're going to have a Christmas special.
01:03:04
Speaker
I'm going to be talking about the history of Christmas traditions and how they're depicted in various novels, so you can take your pick. Maybe you'd like to read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, a classic, or maybe you quite fancy The Box of Delights by John Macefield. We're also going to be Touching on the Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, and one of my personal favourites, The Hockfather by Terry Pratchett.
01:03:32
Speaker
to talk to me about all these things, my guest will be Professor Chris Gosden. So tune in.
01:03:56
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.