The Online Reflector

The hardest thing about judging the age of tattooing is that tattoos are on skin, and skin is never well-preserved, according to Chad Martin, a University of Indianapolis assistant professor of history and political science.

Some of the oldest physical evidence of actual tattooing dates back to ancient Egypt.

“The research that’s happening right now that I’m involved with, in which a number of different people both here in the United States and abroad are involved with, is sort of getting into what the archaeological footprint of tattooing is and how we can find this in the ancient world,” said Aaron Deter-Wolf, a pre-historical archaeologist with the State of Tennessee Division of Archaeology.  “And the most obvious answer, of course, is mummies—is preserved human remains.”

However, there are many other signs pointing to the existence of tattoos much earlier, according to Deter-Wolf.

“I gave a paper in September at the European Association of Archaeologists meeting suggesting that tattooing as a practice may go back all the way to the Middle Stone Age, which is more or less 84,000 years before present,” Deter-Wolf said.  “There are some people who, in the 1960s, in a cave site in France, found what they identified as possible tattoo tools.”

According to Deter-Wolf, these tools included not only pointy bone needles, which were commonly used as tattoo needles, but also red ochre—an earth pigment that could be ground to create a red ink. There also were bowls in which the ochre could be ground and mixed.

Deter-Wolf also said that tattoos were used in Native American tribes to signify to which lineage they belonged.

These tattoos also served as rites of passage when children came of age.

“It [tattooing] is an incredibly labor-intensive and painful process, which is why groups like Native Americans are using it as part of their rites of passage initiation,” Deter-Wolf said. “It’s not just something that’s given to you for the sake of turning 16. For example, it’s something that you have to actually have the spiritual and physical fortitude to withstand the process to earn these markings.”

Martin also said that tattooing was meant to signify an important change in life.

“[Tattooing is] using your body as a canvas to some degree,” Martin said. “Some people use it for rites of passage, so that would be something you’d have done to indicate that you’d become a man, become a woman [or] gotten married.”

According to Deter-Wolf, there were three basic ways to tattoo skin.

The first was called “skin-stitching.”

Deter-Wolf said it traditionally was used by and limited to the Arctic Circle and South America. Someone would take a bone needle and  a thread infused with a charcoal-based or soot-based pigment and would stitch through the skin.

The second way, used mostly in the South Pacific, was referred to as “tapping.”

In this method, a person used a tattoo chisel set at a right angle to a handle, and that handle would have a sharp needle or a set of needles coming down from it. The person would then tap the top of the handle with a wood or bone mallet,  knocking the individual needles repeatedly into the skin.

The third way used a sharp tool such as a thorn, sharpened bone needle or a piece of stone, such as obsidian or flint, to puncture individual holes into the skin of the recipient. Then pigments, generally soot mixed with water, were rubbed into the surface of the wound.

Tattoos also were traditionally used with acupuncture.

A famous example is Otzi the Iceman, who was discovered preserved in ice on the Austrian-Italian border in 1991.  Deter-Wolf said that the tattoos on Otzi’s body were consistent with what likely would have been a medicinal practice during that time.

According to Deter-Wolf, one of the most unfortunate things  about the history of tattooing is that no one can, at this time, be sure of when tattooing actually began.

“Unfortunately, we’re never going to find a preserved human remains that old,” Deter-Wolf said. “So it’s all kind of speculative.”