Horatio:
“I guess the suspect was trying to make a point.”

YEAAAAAHHHHHHH!

You’d have to be some kind of extra desperate to then go digging around in the open bloody wounds of your victim, on the side of a mountain, with the wind howling around your ears like the voices of a thousand angry spirits.

First: Otzi may have been doing a little recon for his chief, in preparation of a mid-winter raid. But Otzi didn’t cover his tracks very well and he found himself being hunted by the people he was sent to scout out. I’m guessing somebody took a swipe at him with a knife at one point, so they almost caught him there. He may have even killed that attacker. He carried on into the hills, doubled back without successfully losing his pursuers and headed for the hills again, where they finally caught and killed him. Leaving Otzi’s body un-looted may have been a result of his attackers not wanting anyone to know they ever saw Otzi.

Second: He may have been an outcast already, possibly even a known brigand. He heads into a village to loot some needed supplies and faces a knife-wielding villager, from whom he narrowly escapes. He flees to the hills, bandages himself but is soon driven back into town by hunger. He grabs what he can and flees, but is chased into the hills and shot by the villagers. They leave the filthy brigand’s personal effects and only take back what is rightfully theirs in the first place.

google image searching leads to some larger, higher-def pics that verify this. it’s shriveled up, sure, but it looks like it’s all there!

The leaving of the bronze axe proves that this was no mere robber or brigand; no, somebody had it in for Otzi. . .

Judging from his age (46: anyone weak would not live so long) and gear (bearskin shoes: who killed the bear?), knife wounds and many tats, Otzi was seemingly a formidable man; perhaps the arrow was a trophy: ‘THIS was the arrow that killed the great!’

I wonder if he was a ‘good’ guy shot in the back, or a ‘bad’ guy receiving a just revenge. . .guess it’s moot at this point

Did he catch the blame for something? Did he get accused of carrying an illness? I don’t think one person hunted him down. It had to be a group who invested a lot of resources in killing this guy.

Definitely serious business.

He has a central European genome.

the reason there is usually little transfer between the fields of forensics and other fields is the speculative part in sciences.
you can claim that skeleton X is “a noble viking warrior”, like a big museum claims. in fact its a young girl. no consequence. no perpretrator confessing last-five-mins-of-CSI like how he did it. no lawsuits for false testimony. no deconstruction of expertise in public.

so after all its nice little stories and a few true clues.

Those guys have always existed.

Not everyone in the past was a specimen of their Age.

It’s really worth just checking out the script: http://www.amazon.com/Mnemonic-Theatre-Complicite/dp/0413747204

Or this blog post:
http://thephoenixfalls.wordpress.com/2008/05/12/theatre-de-complicite’s-mnemonic-a-post-modern-smorgasbord/

Or Complicite’s site, which has great picks and video of the production:
http://www.complicite.org/productions/detail.html?id=5

That’s one of the reasons why many theorize Otzi’s death was murder by an acquaintance, rather than an attack from some other tribe or village.

The axe and dagger may have been recognizably Otzi’s. Had Otzi vanished and somebody else showed up in “town” with his weapons, folks would see that as foul play. If Otzi had been an enemy or brigand or trespasser, his goods would’ve been a rightful prize.

That’s also the reason for trying to remove the arrow. If Otzi’s {friends|loved-ones} found the body, they might be able to use it to ID the killer. Another non-issue if the killer was a stranger.

I like to think Otzi ran off with somebody’s wife. It’s the romantic in me…

seriously, though, i had no idea what an Ibex was, so i wiki’d it and found this truly badass photo of one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Capra_ibex_ibex_%E2%80%93_03.jpg