The intricate details of tattoos carved into the skin of South American mummies are now revealed in all their breathtaking glory.
A team of scientists has used techniques used to study dinosaur fossils to reveal the incredible work that went into creating the elaborate tattoos found on the mummy of an individual belonging to the Chancai culture who lived in Peru about 1,200 years ago.
“Using laser-stimulated fluorescence, we can see tattoos in their full glory, erasing centuries of defacement,” says Thomas Kaye, a paleontologist at the National Foundation for the Advancement of Science.
“The Xiangkai culture, known for its mass-produced textiles, also invested considerable effort into personal body art, which could point to tattoos as a second major artistic focus, perhaps carrying deep cultural or spiritual significance.”
Humans have been decorating our bodies with permanent tattoos for thousands of years. The oldest evidence for this practice dates back more than 5,000 years in many parts of the world. But because soft tissue breaks down so quickly, it’s not easy to find.
If the skin has been preserved (usually mummified), the skin may darken and become leathery, and the ink may pale and spread into surrounding tissue, making existing tattoos difficult to see.
This is where Kaye and his colleague Michael Pittman, a paleontologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, come into the picture. For the past decade, the pair have been using laser-stimulated fluorescence (LSF) to reveal hidden details in dinosaur soft tissue.
“Two years ago, Judyta Bąk, a doctoral student at the Institute of Archeology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, asked if our technology could be used to improve the study of tattoos on mummified human remains,” Pittman told ScienceAlert.
“We told her that we expected our imaging to work, and that it would probably work better because it preserves more of the original chemical composition compared to fossilized remains. In a few months, we will begin collecting data from all over the world. We boarded a plane to Peru and discovered the most amazing results in the tattoos of the Chancay culture.”
This is the first time this technique has been used to study tattooed mummies, and the results are truly astonishing. Researchers surveyed more than 100 individuals. Not everyone has tattoos, but in those who did, their skin fluoresced brightly when stimulated by the laser, but the tattooed area did not.
This resulted in a high-contrast image with virtually no ink bleed effect, revealing a tattoo so intricately engraved that it is difficult to determine how it was created.
However, lines measuring between 0.1 and 0.2 mm in width suggest single-needle puncture tattooing, as opposed to incisions made and rubbed in with dye, as previously suggested for ancient tattoos.
This is consistent with recent experimental research showing that the 5,300-year-old tattoo of Ötzi the Iceman was created using punk tattoos.
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“We still don’t know exactly how the tattoo was created, but it involved more subtleties than modern tattoos. #12 Tattoo Needle (0.1 to 0.2 mm compared to 0.35 mm),” Pittman said.
“This suggests a traditional needle-based tattooing technique, as opposed to ‘cut and fill’. According to what was available from Chancay, the tattoos were probably made with cactus needles or sharp animal bones.”
We won’t know for sure unless some ancient tattoo tools are recovered, but we can make different inferences about the Chancay culture based on the level of detail in the tattoos. It would have taken some time and effort to complete them. This means they have strong meaning to the people who created and gave birth to them.
Researchers were also able to compare tattoos to patterns on fabric and ceramics. xiangkai people It is known. The intricacy of tattoo designs can be compared to other art forms, suggesting that tattoos were an important part of Chancay’s aesthetic life.
There were also some differences in the complexity and quality of the tattoos, which may indicate varying levels of skill among the artists who created them. To compare to today’s tattoo artists, some markings may have been created by an apprentice-level tattoo artist, while more complex designs may have been created by artists with years or even decades of experience.
And ancient masters, long dead, may inform us of our own techniques centuries after they lived.
“I still can’t believe how narrow the lines are in the detailed tattoos we studied,” Pittman said. “The fact that a standard #12 modern tattoo needle cannot do this tells us that even in tattoos that are over 1,000 years old, we still have a lot to learn from early tattoo making.”
This is a new foundation for the study of ancient tattoo practices and techniques, and the team is now keen to explore further. They plan to expand their research to mummies from around the world to help uncover the different ways and reasons why our ancestors marked their bodies.
“Tattoos can hold a lot of information, including culture and what is important to the individual who has the tattoo,” Pittman explained.
“Studying early tattoos provides a rare window into these aspects, sometimes in ways that cannot be obtained from other archaeological evidence, as our highly detailed tattoo finds show.”
