Researchers have long thought that Ötzi, the 5000-year-old Iceman found in the Alps in 1991, died wounded and alone, perhaps the victim of a raging blizzard. But a provocative new paper tells a radically different story. The first comprehensive map of Ötzi's body and belongings suggests he was ceremoniously buried by his fellows in the warm summer months.

Previous studies of Ötzi focused on his corpse rather than the entire death scene. His body, found on the Austrian-Italian border by two German hikers, had been pierced by an arrowhead in the shoulder. And the goods he carried--a copper axe, dagger, quiver, backpack, birch-bark container, and an unfinished bow--lay scattered around him. Previous analyses assumed that he discarded these as he succumbed to death from his wounds and the harsh winter.

But the new study--published today in Antiquity Journal--comes to a different conclusion. Led by archaeologist Alessandro Vanzetti of the University of Rome, La Sapienza, the researchers say that Ötzi's body and artifacts were in fact carefully placed on a stone platform 5 meters away from where the body was later found. Among the larger artifacts, only the backpack frame, trapped against the rock, remained in place. Human and animal hair on the platform--which is uphill from the body's final resting place--are "inconsistent with the disaster theory that the Iceman died where he was found," the authors write. If Ötzi had lain down on the rock with his goods close about him, his possessions would not have been so widely scattered, they say. And an unfinished bow is an odd thing for a lone man to carry over a mountain pass.