The intricate details of a tattoo carved into the skin of a South American mummy have been revealed in all their breathtaking glory.
A team of scientists used techniques used to study dinosaur fossils to create the elaborate tattoos seen on the mummies of the Chancay culture, a people who lived in Peru about 1,200 years ago. The detailed work was revealed.
“Laser-stimulated fluorescence allows us to erase centuries of deterioration and see the tattoo in its full glory,” said paleontologist Thomas Kaye of the National Foundation for the Advancement of Science.
“The Chancay culture, known for its mass-produced textiles, also devoted a great deal of effort to personal body art. This may indicate that tattoos were a second major focus of art. It probably has deep cultural or spiritual meaning.”
Humans have adorned their bodies with permanent tattoos for thousands of years. The oldest evidence of this practice dates back more than 5,000 years in multiple regions of the world, but it is not easy to find because the soft tissue breaks down so quickly.
If the skin is preserved (usually through mummification), remaining tattoos may be difficult to see because the skin darkens and becomes leathery and the ink lightens and bleeds into surrounding tissue.
Enter Kay and his colleague Michael Pitman, a paleontologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. For the past decade, the duo has been using laser-stimulated fluorescence (LSF) to uncover hidden details in dinosaur soft tissues.
“Two years ago, I was contacted by Judita Bank, a fellow PhD student at the Jagiellonian Institute of Archeology in Krakow, Poland, to improve my research on tattoos taken from mummified human remains. asked if they could use our technology,” Pittman told ScienceAlert.
“We told her that we expected the imaging to work and would probably do better because it preserves more of its original chemistry compared to fossilized remains. Within a short time, we were on a plane to Peru to collect data from all over the world.”We found the most amazing results from Chancay culture tattoos. ”
This is the first time this technique has been used to study tattooed mummies, and the results can be described as nothing short of amazing. Researchers tested more than 100 individuals. Although not all people were found to have tattoos, the skin of those who had tattoos fluoresced brightly under laser stimulation, while the tattooed areas did not.
This produced a high-contrast image that largely eliminated the effects of ink smear, revealing tattoos so finely carved that it was difficult to determine how they were created.
However, the 0.1 to 0.2 millimeter wide lines suggest a single-needle puncture tattoo, rather than an incision and rubbing of dye, as previously suggested for ancient tattoos.
This is consistent with recent experimental research that found that the 5,300-year-old Iceman Ötzi tattoo was created using a puncture tattoo.
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“We still don’t know exactly how the tattoo was created, but it contained more detail than modern tattoos.” #12 Tattoo needle (0.1-0.2mm compared to 0.35mm),” Pittman said.
“This suggests a traditional tattoo technique using needles rather than ‘cut and fill.’ Based on what was available to the Chancay people, the tattoos were probably cactus needles or pointed animal tattoos. It is thought to have been made using the bones of
We won’t know for sure until the ancient tattoo tools are recovered, but other inferences can be made about the Chancay culture based on the level of detail in the tattoos. It would have taken some time and effort to complete them. That means they had a strong meaning to the people who created and produced them.
The researchers were also able to compare tattoos to patterns on textiles and pottery. Chancay people known. The complexity of tattoo designs rivals these other art forms, suggesting that tattoos were an important part of the aesthetic life of the Chancay people.
There is also some variation in the complexity and quality of tattoos, which can mean varying skill levels of the artists who created them. Comparing this to today’s tattoo artists, some marks may have been created by apprentice-level tattoo artists, while more intricate designs may have been created by artists with years or decades of experience. Possibly.
And ancient masters who died long ago may still be able to pass on our own techniques, centuries after they lived.
“I still can’t believe how thin the lines were in the high-detail tattoos we studied,” Pittman said. “The fact that a standard #12 modern tattoo needle cannot do this shows that there is still much to learn from early tattoo making, even when tattoos are more than 1,000 years old.”
This is new ground in the study of ancient tattoo practices and techniques, and the research team is currently working hard to further study it. They plan to extend their research to mummies around the world to uncover the different ways and reasons why our ancestors placed different marks on mummified bodies.
“Tattoos contain so much information about the culture and what’s important to the person getting the tattoo,” Pittman explained.
“As our detailed tattoo discoveries demonstrate, studying early tattoos provides a rare opportunity to learn about these aspects in a way that no other archaeological evidence can.”
This study Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
