The remnants of an unknown traveller’s food container were found by excavation technician Regula Gubler and archaeologist Kathrin Glauser atop the 2,676-metre (8,780-foot) high Loetschen Pass in the Bernese Alps in Switzerland.
The pair first investigated the site in 2011, when they found parts of an archer’s bow.
In the years since they have found more pieces of the bow, bits of leather, stone arrowheads, a jar made of wood that held flour and the wood lunchbox.
The fragments of leather are thought to have come from a kind of rucksack.
Glauser said of the lunchbox: “It is simply something very special and unique if you can hold something in your hands which 4,000 years ago someone else had in their hands.”
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Permanent cold up in the mountains has meant that the finds have decayed very little.
The good fortune for Gubler and Glauser is the result of bad luck for whoever the items belonged to, as he or she is thought to have died on a journey through the mountains.
Ms Gubler said, after pointing out that the traveller would have had no reason to discard their belongings: “I already feel that something has happened to this person. Perhaps he still lies somewhere up there, under the rocks.”
The walker may have been caught in sudden bad weather and perished from cold, she and Ms Glauser speculated.
The researchers say although they hope that his or her body will one day turn up but admit that the prospects are slim.
However, melting glaciers mean that whatever secrets remain hidden in the ice are more likely to be revealed in the next few years.