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## His Equipment: Status, Skill, and Mystery
The objects found with Ötzi are among the most studied artifacts of the European Copper Age, and they have driven substantial scholarly debate about his social role and the circumstances of his death.
The most significant single object is the copper axe. Its head is 9.5 centimeters long and made of nearly pure copper, the analysis of which traced the metal to sources in what is now southern Tuscany — a provenance that speaks to the trade networks and exchange systems operating across Europe in the fourth millennium BCE. The haft is sixty centimeters of yew. Copper axes of this type were rare and valuable objects in the late Copper Age; having one in this condition would have marked the owner as a person of some wealth or status in his community.
He also carried a finished chert-bladed knife with an ash handle, a quiver containing fourteen arrows (two of them finished with flint tips and fletching, twelve unfinished and untipped), and a longbow of yew wood that was itself unfinished — 1.82 meters long but not yet strung. Two birch bark baskets held food supplies, including berries. A belt pouch contained a scraper, a drill, flint tools, and a bone awl. He carried a fire-starting kit with flint and iron pyrite, along with plant materials from more than a dozen species. A tinder fungus for starting fires and a bracket fungus (birch fungus) with antiparasitic properties — the latter possibly carried for medicinal use — completed the kit.