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Hanke, Klaus 
2 DOCUMENTATION OF THE ICEMAN MUMMY "OTZI" 
Otzi is the oldest human mummy preserved by freezing. He is a Bronze Age man who died over 5,000 years ago when 
he was apparently caught in a snow storm during a hunting trip on a mountain between what is nowadays Austria and 
Italy. Together with the body were clothing, a bow and arrows, a bronze ax, and flint for making fire. It has been found 
by chance when a couple of mountaineers came across the site, when the snow on the glacier was low only for a couple 
of days. We have been asked by the Research Institute for Alpine Prehistory of Innsbruck University to do a 
photogrammetric documentation of the mummy "Otzi" prior to further investigations and possible destroying or hurting 
of its corpus' surface. 
The photogrammetric recording was done using a LINHOF Metrica semi-metric camera mounted on a 40 cm stereo- 
basis. There were a lot of difficulties to overcome. We had to work in a sterile environment, disguised like medical 
doctors during a surgery. The photographic acquisition had to be done when the room was cooled down, but even there 
the mummy could lie only for 30 minutes without thawing. The temperature of the surface must not exceed 18° Celsius 
and the humidity must be guaranteed to be above 70% at any time. So the iceman was bedded on ice-cubes to keep the 
temperature and humidity stabile. For the documentation we planned 8 different positions for the mummy, which was 
lying in a sterile box to prevent any infection (both, in one or the other direction). The light had to be a cool one and to 
prevent any (re)activation of germs or fungi, no flash was allowed to be used. 
  
  
  
  
Fig. 5: One of the photos of the documentation of iceman mummy "Otzi" 
The Linhof Metrica that we used has a focal length of 90 mm for a film format of 4" x 5" (93 mm x 116 mm effective). 
The photos have been digitized and stored on a KODAK Photo CD pro at a resolution of 4096 x 6144 pixels for further 
digital processing. Figure 5 shows one of the original images. The restitution of the surface to create a 3D model is still 
going on and proves to be a very demanding task. 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 
I want to thank LINHOF Munich, Germany for giving away the camera and for their kind support and understanding of 
the difficulties during our work. 
  
International Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXIII, Part B5. Amsterdam 2000. 357