Description of the attraction
The Archaeological Museum of South Tyrol, located in Bolzano, is one of the main attractions of the city and the entire region of Trentino-Alto Adige. Its most valuable treasure is the world famous mummy of Otzi.
The museum was founded in 1998 specifically to store a mummy found seven years earlier on the Similuan glacier. It was discovered by two German tourists from Nuremberg. They considered the mummy to be the body of a relatively recently deceased climber, but when it was taken to the University of Innsbruck in Austria, it was immediately recognized as the mummy of a primitive man.
According to scientists, the man who received the name Otzi lived around 3300 BC. Today it is the oldest human mummy in the world. It was thanks to her that scientists managed to "look" into the incredibly distant copper age of the European continent. Among the tools found with Otzi, the world's oldest surviving ax, fire-making equipment, a quiver with 12 arrows and a sheathed sword were also found. And, of course, clothes.
The Similuan mummy is now kept in a special climate controlled chamber at a temperature of -6 ° C and a humidity of 98%, which reproduces the conditions of the glacier where it was found. In addition to the original finds in the exhibition dedicated to Otzi, you can also see various reconstructions of his living conditions and get acquainted with multimedia materials telling about Otzi's life in the context of the early history of the Alpine region.
Interestingly, after the discovery of Otzi, the media immediately started talking about the curse of the mummy, clearly inspired by the "curse of the pharaohs." It is reliably known about the death of seven people involved in the discovery, research and study of the mummy, among whom were the same German tourist Helmut Simon and Konrad Spindler, who first examined Otzi in 1991. Four of these people died in an accident.
The Archaeological Museum of South Tyrol itself is housed in a former 19th century bank building. Its collections occupy 4 floors and introduce the history and archeology of the southern alpine region from the Paleolithic and Mesolithic times (15 thousand years BC) to the Middle Ages (800 AD). And in 2006, the museum hosted an exhibition dedicated to the culture of Chachapoya - a pre-Columbian culture that existed in Peru in the 10-15th centuries.
