A dedicated refrigeration system maintains his storage chamber at -6 degrees Celsius with 98 percent humidity — conditions designed to prevent the further deterioration that room temperature would accelerate.

Visitors can see him through a small window into his refrigeration chamber, preserved in the same frozen state that the glacier maintained for five thousand years.

The objects found with him are displayed in the museum with the kind of care that famous artifacts warrant.

The copper axe, under climate-controlled display, remains one of the most evocative artifacts from the European Copper Age — a supremely functional object, a marker of technological status, found beside the hand that held it for the last time five thousand years ago.

The museum’s research program has made Ötzi one of the most intensively studied individuals in the history of archaeology.