Incredibly complex tattoos found on “ ice mother ” of 2,000 years

For the first time, archaeologists had a detailed look at complex tattoos on a 2000 -year -old ice mother, found deeply buried in the mountains covered with Siberian permafrost.

These tattoos would be difficult to produce even today, say the researchers, which suggests that the old tattoo artists had a considerable degree of competence.

With the help of modern tattoo artists, an international team of researchers examined the mummy tattoos in unprecedented details and identified the tools and techniques that ancient companies may have used to create body art. The results were published in the journal Antiquity.

As if it was now, being ink was a common practice in prehistoric societies. The study of practice is however difficult, because the skin is rarely preserved in archaeological remains.

The “icelles” of the Altai mountains, in Siberia, are a notable exception – they have been buried in rooms now locked in permafrost, sometimes preserving the skin from those inside.

The Pazyryk people were nomads on horseback that lived between China and Europe. “The tattoos of the Pazyryk culture – Pastors of the Altai mountain age – have long intrigued archaeologists because of their elaborate figurative conceptions,” said Gino Caspar, archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute in Geoanthropology and the University of Bern, in a mail press release.

Scientists were unable to study these tattoos in detail, due to the limits of imaging techniques. Many of these tattoos are invisible to the naked eye, which means that scientists did not know that they were there when the mummies were initially excavated in the 1940s.

Researchers need infrared imaging to visualize old tattoos because the skin degrades over time, and the colors of the tattoos fade and bleed in the surrounding skin, which makes them weak or invisible to the naked eye. Infrared light, with its longer wavelengths with respect to visible light, penetrates more deep into the skin and reveals what is below the surface. So, so far, most studies have been based on drawings of tattoos, rather than direct images.

But the progress of imaging technology has finally allowed researchers to take high resolution images of mummies and their tattoos. The researchers used a high-resolution digital photograph to create a 3D scan of tattoos on a woman of 50 years of the Iron Age, whose preserved remains are hosted at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

The artistic renderings of newly discovered tattoos reveal detailed tattoos of leopards, stags, roosters and a mythical half-lion, half acute.

The researchers discovered that, as with many modern humans, tattoos on the right -hand man of the mummy are much more detailed and technical than those on the left. This suggests that the two different old tattooers, or the same tattoo artist after strengthening their skills, were responsible. The analyzes also suggest that the artists have used several tools – with one or more points – and that the tattoos have been carried out on several sessions.

This suggests that the tattoo was not only a form of decoration in the Pazyryk culture, but a qualified profession which required construction skills and technical capacities. Many other people were buried on the same site, indicating that the tattoo was probably a common practice.

“The study offers a new way of recognizing the Personal Agency in the modification of the prehistoric body,” Caspari said in a press release. “Tattooing emerges not only as a symbolic decoration but as a specialized profession – the one that required technical skills, aesthetic sensitivity and formal training or learning.”