BOOK REVIEW / Out of the freezer: 'The Man in the Ice' - Konrad Spindler, trs Ewald Osers: Weidenfeld, 18.99

THIS IS a book about keeping a cool head . . . and then keeping a cool head. The first head belongs to the 5,000-year-old man whose body was discovered in a glacier in the Austrian Alps in 1991; the second to Dr Konrad Spindler, the leader of the team investigating the find, and author of this fascinating if rather deliberate account of what he calls the 'archaeological event of the century'.

Spindler is not a man given to exaggeration. With almost po-faced meticulousness, he repeatedly tells us that it would be wrong to speculate on this or that aspect of the Iceman's life: 'Any attempt to assess the value or otherwise of an object is simply beyond the methodological facilities of our discipline,' he writes at one point. His book sifts in dogged detail the wealth of evidence thrown up by the Iceman and his possessions, which, buried in the ice, had remained in an astonishingly fine state of preservation. At the same time Spindler retains a layman's sense of wonder at the discovery, as well as a touching respect for the human being behind the scientific study.

A middle-aged Dutch couple on a walking holiday came across the Iceman: 'We suddenly saw something brown sticking out of the ice,' they said. Spindler's account of the days that followed, as word of the discovery spread and locals, police, officials, television crews and self-appointed rescue teams headed for the remote spot where the Iceman lay, is one of the best things in the book.

To begin with, nobody had any idea how old the corpse was. It was five days after the discovery, when Spindler first saw it in the leathery flesh in the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck, that the uniqueness of the case was confirmed. And 'case' is the word. For while the tone of the book is mainly academic, it also works as piece of detection. Indeed, it is not the body that gives the Iceman's age away, but his flange-shaped copper axe-head and the flint of his dagger. From this equipment and clothing, Spindler builds a vivid picture of Alpine life in the early Bronze Age, and explores the various ways in which the Iceman might have met his death.

At times the process is rather laborious. We have discourses on Neolithic agriculture and the relative merits of birch, yew and alder in constructing the Bronze Age equivalent of the rucksack. But even Spindler has a finite appetite for detail, admitting, in what gives us a rare glimpse of the man behind the scientist, that 'there is nothing more boring than sorting through shards of pottery from the Altheim culture'. He also cites improvements in some areas of modern medicine that resulted from skills developed during the project, but this justification isn't needed: the way our imagination is fired by a story like the Iceman's is enough in itself. Not that there is any discovery that is really comparable. The Turin Shroud, perhaps, but that was as much about religion as science.

What the Iceman represents is the ultimate time capsule. Whenever anybody buries a box containing a personal stereo, a newspaper, a credit card and an instruction for it not to be opened until 2500, you wish someone had done something similar around 3000 BC. In a way, that is what happened on the Austrian mountainside where the Iceman fell victim to the cold all those years ago.