Archaeology typically works with populations, with cultures, with artifact assemblages.

It establishes what groups of people did without being able to identify what specific individuals experienced.

The evidence speaks in the aggregate.

Ötzi speaks as an individual.

He was a specific man who ate a specific meal on a specific day, who carried specific objects for specific purposes, who died in a specific way at a specific place.

The specificity makes him real in a way that archaeological abstraction cannot.

The murder helps too, because murder is a narrative form that human beings find inherently compelling.