Science Friday - An Archaeologist And A Tattoo Artist Decipher Ancient Ink

Episode Date: August 28, 2025

Researchers recently used near-infrared photography to get a detailed look at ancient artwork showing scenes of wild animals tangled in a fight. But these weren’t paintings on a cave wall. They were tattoos on the arms of a Siberian woman who lived 2,300 years ago. What can ancient ink tell us about our ancestors? Sticking and poking their way into this with Host Flora Lichtman are archaeologist Aaron Deter-Wolf and his research collaborator, tattoo artist Danny Riday.Guests: Aaron Deter-Wolf is an archaeologist for the Tennessee Division of Archaeology in Nashville, Tennessee.Danny Riday is a tattoo artist and independent researcher based in Les Eyzies, France.Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey, I'm Flora Lichtenen, and you're listening to Science Friday. Today in the show, archaeologists are turning their attention to an art form that's been largely overlooked. Tattoos. To modify is human, and it has been since the beginning. Last month, researchers used near-infrared photography to get a brand new, detailed look at human art from thousands of years ago. A beautiful scene of wild animals. kind of tussled in a fight. But these weren't paintings on a cave wall or a rock somewhere. They were tattoos on the arm of an ancient Siberian woman who lived 2,300 years ago. Ancient tattoos may

seem like an unconventional academic focus, which is why I love the story so much. So what can ancient ink tell us about our ancestors? A lot, according to my next guests. Here, to stick and poke our way into this topic are Aaron Dieter Wolf, archaeologist for the Tennessee Division of Archaeology based in Nashville, and his research collaborator, Danny Riede, a practicing tattoo artist based in Léz-Z-France. Welcome to you both to Science Friday. Thank you so much, Laura. It's great to be here. Yeah, absolutely. It's a pleasure. Okay, Aaron, let's start with you. Let's start with this new study on this ancient Siberian mummy. First of all, what did her tattoos look like? Can you describe them? So this woman had a series of tattoos on both of her arms. Both of her forearms were

tattooed with scenes of animals that, as you said, are tussling or engaged in fighting or battle. And then both of her hands also then have series of tattoos on them on the thumbs and across her first knuckles of her fingers. I mean, I'm looking at it. It's so beautiful. First of all, I feel like Anyone listening really should check it out. We're going to put it on our Instagram at SciFri so you can see it. And it looks like three, I don't know, tigers, would you say that? Sort of going after elk? How would you describe it? Elk, deer, horse deer. You know, there's this whole style of art has been called a Scythian animal style. And one of the fun things about this has been that Danny, who has been collaborating with me for years on projects related to animals. ancient tattooing. One of his practices is working in Scythian animal style art. He does a lot of work there. And so his knowledge and view of these pieces was really just incredible and I think really important to the process. Well, Danny, you're a tattoo artist, and I know you've been collaborating with

Aaron on this research for years. Do we know how they were made? So our assessment that they were made via the handpoke tattooing technique that is holding a sharp utensil made of one and or more needle points between the first few fingers and poking by a repetitive series of pricks. The tattooing implement dipped into pigment and then pricked into the skin. And one of the cool things that Danny was able to identify by looking at these images is the presence of more than one tool, is that there are differences in the thicknesses of lines that shows us that they were not just using a single tool, but they had at least probably a single point tool for very fine line work, and then a bigger tool that was made out of a cluster of needles

that was used then for larger lines. Like a tattoo kit. Exactly, like a tattoo kit. Yeah, people in the past, you know, they, they use different tools to create different designs. You know, the people that were doing this tattooing especially, they were, they were not just one-offs. This was a generational practice.

These people were crafts people. And they had undoubtedly learned this through these, you know, long-term transmissions of knowledge going through generations. Like any artist, probably. Like any artist, absolutely. Yeah. Aaron, how many academics focus on ancient tattoos? Oh, I think there's at least seven of us.

How did you get into this and why? So I got my first tattoos when I was in graduate school. I went to graduate school to study Maya archaeology. And when studying the ancient Maya, one of the things that we've known about them for years is that they decorated and modified their bodies. They tattooed. They scarified their faces. They did all kinds of amazing things. So working at archaeological sites in Guatemala and Belize, we would find obsidian blades that we could intuit and understand were used for body modification, were used for bloodletting or tattooing. But in my research and in my work as an archaeologist in North America,

I had never encountered a tool that I could confidently say was used for tattooing. And as I began to look into this a little more, I realized that this was actually the case all over the world. We know that ancient Egyptians tattooed, but we have no idea what tool they used. We know that Outsi the Ice Man tattooed in the European Copper Age, but we had no idea what tool was used to do that. And so as an archaeologist, this really bothered me because what we're supposed to be doing out there is understanding culture of the past. And if we can't find these tools that are so important and are part of such an important process, what would be like not being able to find people's houses, right? How could we talk about the past if we couldn't find people's houses?

And so I wanted to understand why we weren't finding these things and see if I could come up with convincing ways to identify them. There have been tattoo tools identified in the past in archaeological collections, but it's kind of been, oh, these look sharp and, you know, maybe they were using them to tattoo. And mostly those identifications are made by people who weren't familiar with the practice and didn't have tattoos themselves. And I think that's been a big part of this process has been that working with Danny and working with other people who are tattooed and understand tattooing, that's a sea change from the analysis that's been done over the past century of tattoo tools and tattooed mummies. Because most of the people doing that work weren't themselves tattooed. They might have seen tattoos, but they hadn't gone through the experience and they didn't understand how these things actually worked at a physical level. And so I think that's been a huge difference in what we're able to bring to the table. It's like an oversight, basically.

Yeah, it would be like trying to write about cooking without ever having eaten with a spoon. Danny, you're a tattoo artist. Why do you care about the research side of this? So I was trained as a traditional machine tattoo artist many years ago. And as I progressed as a professional tattoo artist, I kept finding that the older something was, the more interesting it was. A lot of my questions ended up leading towards how many traditional cultures were creating such intricate and outstanding works of art with such simple traditional tools. and it led me to completely abandon tattooing machines and pursue testing certain other implements on myself like sharp rocks, cactus thorns, lemon tree thorns and things like that.

And as my questions about ancient tattooing gathered and mounted, I started trying to reach out towards people I thought might have the answers. And Aaron is at the top of that list. Yeah. We met on Instagram of all silliness. And so yeah, we started talking, you know, we were, oh, the ice man, isn't it cool, he's got 61 tattoos. How are they done? We have no idea. How are tattoos made in the ancient Andes? Yeah, we have no idea. And so we sort of went from that to these questions of, well, how can we figure that out? And I think we've been able to make some really cool discoveries about how tattooing was done in the past and then, yeah, then learn about what that means for individuals. I mean, I know that you both worked on a very famous ice man, Oatsi.

He was extremely well preserved, right? Like over 5,000 years old. Did he have, what did his tattoos look like? So his are very different. So Outsi's tattoos consist of 61 separate marks that are just series of either short parallel lines or a couple of crossed lines that are on various places on his body. There's some on his wrist, a lot on his lower legs, below the knees, the front of his stomach and chest area. And one of the things that's really interesting about Utsi is we don't understand them from an iconographic perspective. We don't know what they're trying to show us.

We see them just as short lines. And I think because of that, it's been widely assumed that his tattoos don't mean anything. And that instead, they're more likely to be therapeutic treatments of some kind than to convey. an idea or a symbol. That's kind of a funny assumption because, you know, many people have geometric tattoos today and obviously they mean something to them. Absolutely. No, I think that that is a huge error that's happened to this point.

Danny Anderson, you did some of this experimentation on yourself to figure out how these ancient tattoos were actually made. Is that right? Yeah, that's correct. Aaron and I outlined a project in which. we would gain a clear data set of what marks different tattooing implements leave. And I perform that tattoo series on my leg so that we would have a controlled sample. Like what kind of implements?

So the different tools were, let's see if we can remember them all, hand poking within obsidian spike, tattooing with a single point bone tool made of deer bone, tattooing with a single point copper tool, because let's see the Iceman also had copper tools, we wanted to include a single point copper tool, and also what we would call incision tattooing, making a series of small cuts and rubbing ink into it. And then the other two tattoos were performed by my friend and colleague Moku Unui Orangi Smith, who is a traditional Maori tattooer,

who has done the two hand-tapping tattoos, one with a multiple point tool and one with a single point tool. You know, as a lay person here, this sounds pretty hardcore. Danny. Like, which hurt the least? Was it painful? Well, it's an interesting question because we imagine these kinds of tattooing techniques as being very painful. If you observe hand-tapping tattoos in progress that we would see across Polynesia, the outside observer really imagineses something atrociously painful when in fact it's quite the opposite. I find that hand-tapping tattoos are the most relaxing to receive hand-poking as well as is quite unsevere, really.

So pain is not really a factor when we consider the world of traditional tattooing. I will say that the one that took the longest was the one that our colleague Maya Jacobsen coached me through, which was a traditional technique of the Arctic Circle and Inuit peoples where an eyed needle is passed through the skin in what we would call subdermal or skin stitch tattooing. It was an extremely difficult tattoo to perform. and the results give us a really clear idea of what that looks like, and now we can compare that to many of our mummified human remains that we look at. A lot of people, when we talk about these things, that one of the first questions is, are you tattooed?

And, you know, obviously, Danny is heavily tattooed. For me, I have become steadily more tattooed since engaging in this research. You know, it turns out when you hang out with tattoo artists that you're going to end up getting tattoos. And, you know, I do have lines on my wrist that were hand-poked with a deer bone. Danny did incision tattooing below that across my wrist as a way for me to experience what that was like. And also as, again, another measure for what we can compare to preserve skin in the archaeological record and how we can help to see how those ancient tattoos were made. After the break, what do these ancient tattoos tell us about why we tattoo ourselves today?

It's a reflection of our innate desire to modify not only our surroundings, not only our clothing, not only our tools, our weapons, our homes, but also our bodies. Do you see tattoos as a window into culture? What can they tell us? What can they teach us? Oh, they can teach us all kinds of things. If you think about this as an iceberg, the tattoo is really just the thing that sticks up above the water. But underneath the water is this whole bigger, entangely. mess of of culture that results in someone being tattooed. And so what we're really trying to do here is basically to dive down, to sort of claw our way under what the tattoo itself is on the skin and try to use that into a window to see individual parts of the past. What was the experience of this individual person? How did they get this thing done? And then from there branching out

to questions like, well, who made it? Why is that significant? What can we say about the artists or about the people who made and use these tools? And can we identify them in the archaeological record? But I think there's no limit to what we can learn about people individually and their culture writ large from tattooing. I want to go back to the Siberian woman for a moment. So when I look at this tattoo, it is hardcore. It's beautiful and it is also kind of hardcore. I know the Scythians were warriors, right? And they ride on horseback. Does this tattoo and seeing it in all its glory change or fill out our picture of these people or the role of women in this society? So for the greater Scythian culture, women held a place of greater importance than they did in their neighboring cultures of ancient Greece, ancient Persia and ancient China. the Scythians were more egalitarian in their cultural status.

Women could become warriors or own property or our own slaves. But of course, this was something that would have taken a couple different sessions to perform. Obviously, the left arm was maybe one session of several hours. The right arm is at least two different sessions of several hours each. The image on her right arm especially is quite sensational. None of this was done off the cuff. These were really carefully chosen, carefully selected. and masterfully tattooed images that this person obviously chose to have in a very visual part of

their body, the forearm was something that they would be able to show to others, which I think is a pretty significant part as well. Our co-author, Gino Kaspari, who was the first author on this paper, some of the things he's pointed out is that there are only seven examples of preserved skin from ancient Scythian cultures, and all of them are tattooed. So we have a very small sample, but 100% of the sample have tattoos. The other thing he's pointed out that I think is really interesting is that none of the tattoos are the same. They share artistic style and themes, but they are not identical from person to person, even within the same tombs, even within the same site.

And so that suggests that there may be a level of agency here that is separate from people just being awarded things for certain cultural reasons, that there might be some. freedom of choice of the tattooer or the artist as to who gets what and why. Okay. In studying this across cultures over time, what has this told you about why we tattoo ourselves at all? Like, what do these ancient tattoos tell us about this modern practice? I think what they give us an example of is really that to modify is human. and it has been since the beginning. It's a reflection of our innate desire to modify not only our surroundings,

not only our clothing, not only our tools, our weapons, our homes, but also our bodies. There are some modifications that are so normalized that we don't even consider them, like cutting our hair, trimming our fingernails, piercing our ears. These are what normal humans look like to us. And I think that tattooing, we culturally might see it as something extreme in Western society now. But given the stretch of time that it has likely been a part of our everyday life as a species, it's just us. And one of the things that I've sort of discovered in my research is that empires don't tend to like tattooing. Cultures that are trying to conquer and homogenize other groups, some of the first things that they will eliminate in conquered societies are things like spoken language and body decoration and tattooing.

And so the colonial era particularly was just really terrible for historical and indigenous traditions around the globe. And there are a lot of people now working to recapture those traditions. And I think that's really important too, right? We're doing this work archaeologically. But there are people who have tattooing traditions in their own heritage, unique indigenous traditions who are working hard, sometimes alongside us and sometimes in parallel to us to reconstruct these practices. and their work is really important to this as well. Thank you both so much for taking time to talk to me today. Absolutely. Thank you so much.

It's a great pleasure. Erin Dieter-Wolf Archaeologist at the Tennessee Division of Archaeology and Danny Rade, tattoo artist and independent researcher. You can see more of their research on Instagram at Archaeology Inc. And if you want to see this ancient ink that we've been talking about, check out our Instagram at SciFri. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to rate and review us.

you listen, it really does help us get the word out and get the show in front of new listeners. Today's episode was produced by D. Peter Schmidt. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.