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The Material Culture and Middle Stone Age Origins of Ancient Tattooing

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Aaron Deter-Wolf at State of Tennessee
Aaron Deter-Wolf
  • State of Tennessee
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Abstract

Although tattooing existed throughout the ancient world, there have been few archaeological identifications of actual tattoo implements outside of Oceania. This chapter discusses the archaeological footprint of ancient tattooing and uses cross-cultural comparative ethnographies to examine the material culture of the practice. These data show that identifying tattoo tools in an archaeological setting requires convincing association of those materials with pigments, supported by various additional items from a tattoo toolkit. Applying these associations to the archaeological record allows for identification of the oldest potential tattoo tools to date and suggests tattooing originated during the Middle Stone Age in southern Africa.
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Tattoos and
Body Modifications
in Antiquity
Proceedings of the sessions at the EAA annual
meetings in The Hague and Oslo, 2010/11
edited by
Philippe Della Casa
Constanze Witt
Zurich Studies
in Archaeology
Vol. 9_ 2013
Author Note:
In the time since this chapter was first published, there have been important advances in
archaeological efforts to identify tattooing tools through microwear signatures. Thanks to that work,
and particularly the efforts ofGates St-Pierre (2018), we now know that use-wear on the bone tools
from Blombos Cave discussed in this paper is *not* compatible with tattooing. The contextual
argument presented here for identifying tools based on patterns of artifact associations still stands.
Please see:
Gates St-Pierre, C. 2018. Needles and bodies: A microwear analysis ofexperimental bone tattooing
implements. J. Archaeol. Sci. Rep. 20: 881–887. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2017.10.027
Impressum
Herausgeber
Universität Zürich
Abt. Ur- und Frühgeschichte
Karl-Schmid-Str. 4, CH 8006 Zürich
www.prehist.uzh.ch
Produktion
Chronos Verlag
Design & L ayout
Elisabeth Hefti, Juliet Manning
Druck
Freiburger Graphische Betriebe fgb
© Texte: Autor/innen
© Bilder: Autor/innen
ISBN x-xxxx-xxxx-x
Portrait of George Tihoti
Tihoti the tattooist came to Huahine from the Marquesas Islands
and his personal tattoos as well as his tattoo designs in his prac-
tice are traditional designs from the Marquesan archipelago. This
portrait shows him in his normal daily dress at that time, and with
a pareo wrapped around his waist.
Photo by Phillip Hofstetter, California State University, East Bay.
Table of Contents
5 Aspects of Embodiment – Tattoos and Body Modifications in Antiquity
Philippe Della Casa & Constanze Witt
9 Matters of Identity: Body, Dress and Markers in Social Context
Philippe Della Casa
15 The Material Culture and Middle Stone Age Origins of Ancient Tattooing
Aaron Deter-Wolf
27 The Power to Cure: A Brief History of Therapeutic Tattooing
Lars Krutak
35 Flint, Bone, and Thorns: Using Ethnohistorical Data, Experimental Archaeology,
and Microscopy to Examine Ancient Tattooing in Eastern North America
Aaron Deter-Wolf & Tanya M. Peres
49 Body Modification at Paracas Necropolis, South Coast of Peru, ca. 2000 BP
Elsa Tomasto Cagigao, Ann Peters, Mellisa Lund & Alberto Ayarza
59 Interpreting the tattoos on a 700-year-old mummy from South America
Heather Gill-Frerking, Anna-Maria Begerock & Wilfried Rosendahl
67 Bronze Age Tattoos: Sympathetic Magic or Decoration?
Natalia. I. Shishlina, E. V. Belkevich & A. N. Usachuk
75 One More Culture with Ancient Tattoo Tradition in Southern Siberia:
Tattoos on a Mummy from the Oglakhty Burial Ground, 3rd-4th century AD
SvetlanaV. Pankova
89 Tattoos from Mummies of the Pazyryk Culture
Karina Iwe
97 The Tattoo System in the Ancient Iranian World
Sergey A. Yatsenko
103 Intentional Cranial Deformation: Bioarchaeological Recognition of Social Identity
in Iron Age Sargat Culture
Svetlana Sharapova
115 Roman Cosmetics Revisited: Facial Modification and Identity
Rhiannon Y Orizaga
3
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