Talk:Ötzi

Was the axe cold forged?

Paragraph three of the ‘Tools and Equipment’ section includes the following sentence:

The 9.5 cm (3.7 in) long axe head is made of almost pure copper, produced by a combination of casting, cold forging, polishing, and sharpening.

The next citation is to an article in The Telegraph which makes no mention of forging, polishing or sharpening. The following citation is to an archived copy of a page on the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology’s Iceman website which says ‘The narrow end was produced by cold-hammering after the blade was cast.’ Cold hammering is cold forging, so this may be where this information came from. Similarly, the nearest current equivalent page on the Iceman site says ‘The blade was cast in a mould, cooled and then compressed by hammering’.

So far so clear. However, a 2017 paper, ‘Long-distance connections in the Copper Age: New evidence from the Alpine Iceman’s copper axe’ from a respectable peer-reviewed journal strongly suggests this is wrong:

The neutron diffraction study clearly indicates that the Iceman blade was produced by casting copper in a bivalve mold, it never underwent mechanical hardening, and it was repeatedly used in the soft state, as testified by the non invasive texture analysis of the cutting edge. More extensive studies on Copper Age axes carried out by standard metallographic techniques show that in many cases a recrystallized microstructure is observed, produced by heat treatment of sufficient intensity to erase the strain and deformation caused by use, perhaps followed by slight mechanical hardening of the blade and edges. Although metal hardening in the fourth millennium was technically already developed for daggers, and metal working was certainly used for ornaments, apparently the axe blades were mostly used in the soft state to favor ductility over hardness

Mechanical hardening is an inevitable consequence of cold forging, and sometimes the specific reason you would opt to cold forge a cast artefact. In the case of an axe, hardening makes a blade blunt less rapidly, but also makes it fracture more readily. Ideally you want the former without the latter, but that wasn't an option with Copper Age technology, so a compromise is needed. This paper makes it clear that, both in general and in this specific case, a shock-resistant axe which needed more frequent sharpening was preferred.

My guess would be that the Iceman website was written before this somewhat non-obvious detail came to light, and has not been updated in light of it. Absent a more recent scholarly source contradicting the 2017 paper, can I suggest that as a minimum striking the words ‘cold forging’ from the article? If we're feeling more confident, we might add the following after that sentence, citing the 2017 paper:

In common with most Copper Age axeheads, it has not undergone cold forging.

– 185.219.110.178 (talk) 18:28, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

I am not clear on whether the conclusion is directly supported by the source or if this is WP:OR/WP:SYNTH. I have requested review by an expert, please leave this request marked "answered" until we get a response. GiovanniSidwell (talk) 16:20, 3 March 2023 (UTC)