Ötzi the Iceman’s clothing

[Duncan Head]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/18/it-becometh-the-iceman-otzi-clothing-study-reveals-stylish-secrets-of-leather-loving-ancient

[Jim Webster]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/18/it-becometh-the-iceman-otzi-clothing-study-reveals-stylish-secrets-of-leather-loving-ancient

he may just have been driven out of the community because of his bad taste

[Patrick Waterson]

One of the scans revealed an arrowhead in his left armpit (no trace of a shaft).  This indicates we may be able to reconstruct how and why he died, and why he had arrow shafts without heads in his quiver.

A shot to the armpit has a good chance of severing the axillary artery (the one which supplies the arm) and this seems to be what happened in this case.  By all accounts, a severed artery is extremely painful, and this may explain the arrow with the fragmented shaft found near the corpse: he was drawing it from the quiver when hit, and the pain caused him spasmodically to clench his hand, producing a characteristic three-piece breakage of the shaft near the fletchings.  He would have bled out rapidly, and his slayer may have closed to make sure and then tugged out the shaft, leaving the arrowhead behind.

This probably took place amid the general background of an inter-tribal action, probably sufficiently intense to preclude systematic looting, and perhaps resulting in a pursuit of the losers followed by a storm, which prevented location and recovery of all the corpses (assuming this was culturally important).  The headless arrow shafts probably represented 'kills'; if the arrowhead tended to part company when the arrow was pulled out of the victim, the headless (and presumably bloodstained prior to being rinsed in a melting glacier) arrows would have been a convenient method of keeping score.

If there is anything to the above, it suggests a stalk-and-shoot kind of warfare involving skirmishing and cover and keeping individual scores; essentially a light infantry approach.  Also, the shooter who bagged 'Otzi' must have been quite a good shot.