An international research team led by the University of Bern analyzed the tattoos of a Siberian glacial mummy over 2000 years old. For this study, scientists collaborated with a contemporary tattoo artist.
The mummy, a woman in her fifty years, comes from the Siberian culture Pazyryk. It was buried in the permafrost of the Altai region, which allowed an exceptional conservation of tattooed skin.
The tattoos of the mummies of the Pazyryk culture are of crucial importance for the archeology of Siberia, because they allow to better understand the lifestyle of the inhabitants of this region at the Iron Age, said on Wednesday the Alma Mater Bernese in a press release.
‘The tattoos of Pazyryk culture have long fascinated archaeologists by their elaborate and living representations,’ explains Gino Caspari, researcher at the Institute of Archaeological Sciences at the University of Bern and at the Max-Planck Institute in Geoanthropology of Jena (D).
The mummy was tattooed on the hands and forearms. While the hands on the hands are mainly simple patterns, for example a rooster on the left thumb, the forearms have some of the most complex Pazyryk tattoos currently known, scenes of animal fighting. In both cases, predators attack a kind of momentum.
For a complete tattooed skin analysis, the team created a three -dimensional mummy image using infrared digital photography with submillimetric resolution.
In collaboration with contemporary tattoo artists, scientists have analyzed tattoos in detail, which allowed them to identify specific tools and techniques used during the realization. They found that a perforation technique with different tools was used.
Crafts similar to today
The analyzes have shown that tattoos in the right forearm were thinner and more technical than those in the left forearm. This indicates that different tattoo artists have been involved or that the same person tattooed at different stages in their training.
These discoveries show that tattooing in the Pazyryk culture was not only a means of aesthetic expression, but a specialized craft that required technical skills, aesthetic sense and training.
‘Our study opens up new perspectives on the individual room for maneuver in the shaping of the prehistoric body,’ explains Mr. Caspari. ‘Thanks to our study, the tattoo does not only appear as a symbolic ornament, but as a complex craft that has nothing to envy to the art of modern tattoo,’ he said, quoted in the press release.
‘It was as if we could really meet people behind art for the first time, see how they worked, learned and also made mistakes. The images started to come to life, ‘concludes the researcher. The study was published in the specialized antiquity journal.
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