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Experimental Traditional Hand-Poke Tattooing with Daniel Riday - Ep 135
2.8k Plays3 years ago
In this episode, Carlton interviews Daniel Riday, a tattoo artist specializing in traditional hand-poke and ancestral tattooing techniques. Daniel talks about his background in tattooing and how a simple Instagram DM to Dr. Aaron Deter-Wolf (@archaeologyink) propelled Daniel into becoming a collaborator in archaeological research on experimental tattooing methodologies.
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Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/ruins/135
Links
- The ExArc (experimental archaeology) website
- The full report of the experimental tattooing project on ExArc:
Literature Recommendations
- Archaeology Ink: The Archaeology of Tattooing by Larrs Krutak and Aaron Deter-Wolf
- The Book of Mummies by Gino Caspari
Guest Contact
- Instagram: @totemic_tattoo
- email: totemictattoo@gmail.com
- website: The Temple Tattoo the-temple-tattoo.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode and Guest
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to episode 135 of a life and ruins podcast. Re-investigate the careers of those living in life and ruins. I'm your host Carlton Gover. And today I am joined by this week's guest, Daniel Riddae. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us real quick. Can you please just tell our listeners who you are and what you do? Hi, good morning. It's good to be on the show. I'm a big fan of what you guys do on this podcast and glad to be included as a speaker.
00:00:42
Speaker
So my name is Daniel Raday. I'm a machine-free, hand-poked tattoo artist with a kind of artistic and visual focus on ancient history and the Paleolithic art of France and Western Europe. Right on, man. And today you're joining us from where exactly? Oh, I live and work here in North Island, New Zealand.
00:01:04
Speaker
where it is currently 8
Journey into Tattoo Artistry
00:01:05
Speaker
a.m. tomorrow. Tomorrow for me. Yeah, exactly. No, it's it's super fun having you. We've been talking with Daniel for months now and he was one of those guests that got unfortunately caught up in all the transitions of of the podcast. But today we're super excited to finally have him on on the show to talk. So do you have a background in anthropology or archaeology or archaeology like through education or anything like that?
00:01:31
Speaker
Nope, I have no formal education whatsoever. I'm enthusiastic layman. I think the anthropology archaeology interest
00:01:43
Speaker
kind of comes from, you know, when you really love something, you don't just love it at a surface level, you start investigating like all the aspects of it. And so for art, in general, when art became the main focus in my career and my life, I wanted to know what it was like, down to its roots. And so when you start digging down, you start finding that you need to start engaging in anthropology and archaeology to understand art and tattooing.
00:02:13
Speaker
at his core. That's awesome. So, you know, as you know, you've listened to the show, like this first segment is dedicated, like who you are. So what got you into becoming an artist and by extension, a tattoo artist?
00:02:27
Speaker
Every child is an artist until they're told not to be. And I was just one of those ones who was never told not to be. So I grew up doing art. Actually, I was going to try to move into concept design for like video games because I grew up in Seattle. Like I could have biked down to the Microsoft headquarters and done that. But that didn't seem like it would be fulfilling in the same way that I needed, you know. So I wanted to do.
00:02:54
Speaker
tattooing, but my wife and I were spending most of my twenties going around on backpacking trips around the world and you can't really settle down into an education while you're jumping from place to place. So when we finally settled down in Belgium, I started looking for a teacher and I got involved with a mentor in Southern Holland who introduced me to how to start my career in this field.
00:03:24
Speaker
And what's that process like of finding a teacher for this art? Like how long does it take to finally to be led on your own to tattoo people?
Life in New Zealand and Cultural Inspirations
00:03:35
Speaker
It varies so wildly. There's no formal education. I think some people are trying to start schools for it because the system is a bit old-fashioned. We have one mentor and one apprentice usually would be the deal. But there's no regulation about what that mentor needs to teach. There's no time frame for
00:03:55
Speaker
how long it needs to take. The old school guys, like some of the people I know, had to just wash cars for their mentor, you know, go bring the beer, go do something. And then finally, if the mentor felt like it after two years of having a slave, they might teach them a bit about tattooing. And so for me, my mentor didn't want to waste my time. I was already in my late 20s starting a family. I had to
00:04:21
Speaker
what, four hours trip one way to get to the studio where I would go take, you know, like a long walk, a long train, four buses, and finally arrive four hours later. And he knew that that was a sign of dedication enough to teach me without wasting my time washing cars or doing like menial tasks. So maybe my education was a little bit quicker because I had maybe a little more mutual respect with my mentor. But
00:04:51
Speaker
Yeah, with no formal outline or education process, it really varies wildly. Half a year to six years, nobody really has any gauge on it. Gotcha. So then how did you end up on the North Island and New Zealand? We had done a lot of backpacking trips. I'd gone to Asia twice.
00:05:15
Speaker
Central America met my wife in Nicaragua, and then when she and I had kind of finished Mexico and Central America, we jumped down to New Zealand for the working holiday visa and spent a year living in a van down here, saw the whole country, fell in love with the people and the landscape. And after living in Europe for a while and raising our kid in Brussels,
00:05:40
Speaker
we decided we'd kind of had enough of the big city. And when we thought of like, what would be the best place to settle down and raise a family, we decided to come back down here. Yeah. So now we live in a little off grid tiny house. I've got my tattoo studio out in my garden and it's all coming together. Dude, that's awesome. And what was it like to get a visa to live and work in New Zealand? Cause I know that it can be pretty strict with, with people coming in.
00:06:08
Speaker
Yeah, we got in at a good time. I think it was all pre COVID stuff. We've been here about five years or something. My wife is a midwife and the hospital was looking for qualified health workers. So actually her career was on a list of, uh, what was it? Skilled migrant shortage, something like that. So she fulfilled a hospital career and now does, um, ceramics for, for fun and for her career. Excellent. So you had a pretty good.
00:06:38
Speaker
life experience, traveling the globe, running into people from a whole host of different cultures and backgrounds and beliefs. When did you really start looking into like paleolithic and art and like art and archeology in your career or even in your personal life?
00:06:58
Speaker
I don't remember really when it would have started for the Paleolithic fascination. The funny thing is when I wanted to make the switch, so I was trained in machine tattooing by my mentor, but when I wanted to make the switch into hand poke tattooing, I taught myself.
00:07:14
Speaker
And a lot of the times we will just practice tattooing on ourselves because you don't want to just ask somebody else to be a guinea pig. You work on your own leg. And when I was going to try it on myself, I tried to think what's an image I really want to put on there. It has to be something that really speaks to me.
00:07:32
Speaker
And what's an image I want to put on there that really doesn't matter if it looks a little bit shabby, because this is the first attempt at hand poking after machine tattoos. And I chose one of the deer heads from the Lascaux Cave in France, because it doesn't really matter if the lines are a little bit messed up or something. And when I put it on and I had it on my leg and I looked at it, I was like, oh my God.
00:07:59
Speaker
Art from that era really comes to life on a cave wall and on skin much more than it does like if you printed it out on paper and stuck it on the wall. It doesn't have its own kind of sense of life until it's on a cave wall or on a person because there's the form and the flow of the body that kind of mimics the form and flow of cave walls and that's how.
00:08:22
Speaker
the people would select the right part of the cave wall to paint something on. So it would come around one surface and kind of be displayed in one way or another. And for the human body, it's a lot more like that than it would be just printed the same thing on a piece of paper flat and static. So that's awesome, man. What was that impetus for you to go from machine tattooing to hand poke?
00:08:46
Speaker
I think the handpoke was always the greater fascination, but being trained in machine tattooing allowed me to live and work and support my family as a tattoo artist. So like I said, when you have a fascination, you want to know about all of its aspects down to the bones of it. And I feel like the world has quite a few machine tattoo artists. Now it's becoming kind of like a
00:09:11
Speaker
the crowded superhighway rushing down towards the newest, the fanciest, the best. And I wanted to stop rushing and kind of take a slower road to understand how tattoos can be. One of the huge influencing factors of that was that my teacher took me down to volunteer at Indigenous Tattoo, what was it called? World culture.
00:09:37
Speaker
indigenous tattoo festival in Mallorca
Collaborations and Archaeological Insights
00:09:40
Speaker
in Spain. So we spent two weeks down there getting to meet and help out and work for and set up a lot of indigenous tattoo, cultural revivalists, people from Borneo, Japan, a lot of Polynesian islands, including New Zealand, Samoa, North America, all over the place. And then getting to spend two weeks with a lot of these people who are doing all of these important functions for themselves and their communities.
00:10:07
Speaker
This was pretty early on when I was still an apprentice, so it was hugely influential in my career. And so we did two weeks in Mallorca helping out that one. And then I went as well to Tahiti when there was a follow-up event in 2017. And a lot of the same people came to that. So I got to spend another two weeks volunteering and getting to know a lot of the people who are doing indigenous cultural revival more on a
00:10:33
Speaker
a good friendly level. I was helping them out and they knew it and there was a good respect. It was a lovely way to spend days actually speaking and telling stories and getting to know a lot of the people who were doing this important work. When's the next one?
00:10:51
Speaker
Well, COVID, I think, got right in the way and clogged them all up. There was one recently, actually right here in North Island, New Zealand, in Tauranga, just over the hill. But I was actually away in France. I'm not sure if I had even been here, if I would be involved. I'm not sure. I needed volunteers. And I would love to have gone over. I have a lot of friends who are participating.
00:11:16
Speaker
It's something I've been kind of wondering about my place in the world of tattoo revival, if European historical art and tattoo revival counts. And I don't know, I've been struggling to find, yeah, my place in that world or in that community. Gotcha. Is there a indigenous art style that you find that you're particularly more fond of than others, or do you just like all of them?
00:11:43
Speaker
differently for different reasons. Differently for different reasons. I got invited over to Sarawak in Borneo by a man named Jeremy who was kind of a driving force behind their tattoo revival. I had a great time over there. Jeremy was introducing me around and I got to meet a lot of the guys who are doing their, spearheading their tattoo revival. And for the Iban people, when their communities get affected by palm oil plantations and the people need to
00:12:13
Speaker
they get kind of forced into selling their land and then once it's sold it becomes plantations, the people have to go live in the city. He was saying that a lot of the time their population gets a bit homogenized with the greater Malaysian population and that it's just the tattoos that would be the identifying marker for who their people were and to not get lost among all the other ethnicities in the city.
00:12:41
Speaker
It's really important for them to wear their tattoos and he was saying that everyone who wears one helps them not get lost. So I've got my throat done, my shoulders done with their tattoos because they were gifts from the people who want the world to remember that they exist, kind of. So those ones always spoke to me. I had saved these spots specifically in the hopes that it could happen and that now having made friends who are part of that revival and
00:13:11
Speaker
doing really important work, I feel really personally connected. They have an upcoming tattoo convention that I'm trying to really hard and trying to save money for so I can fly back to Sarawak in February and be engaged in that one. That'd be pretty fun. It's a hard question to answer if there's a lot of good art out there. Absolutely. And so, do you strictly just do hand poke now in your shop? How many pokes come to you for tattoos?
00:13:41
Speaker
I work four days a week now. I think I'm doing, yeah, four medium to large tattoos a week. I've been doing a lot of, we would call like, I guess, Norse historical lately. My main interest is Paleolithic art.
00:14:02
Speaker
But I'm having fun just doing big dragons and telling Viking sagas and myths in art. And so I spent now probably three years only handpoke. There was a transitional phase, but I think I've been tattooing for about eight years. When I stopped machine tattooing, I just stopped. I put the machines down and I haven't touched them since. I knew it just was the right move.
00:14:27
Speaker
Okay. And is it, you know, this is, I've never got a hand poke. I still have a sleeve to finish, but, uh, it's, I've been needing to finish it for quite some time now. It makes a little bit difficult when you move across the country away from your artist. Can you do a color tattoos with, with hand poke? Yeah.
00:14:48
Speaker
Where you're still using modern tattoo ink, modern tattoo ink just goes into the skin. It stays there. It's pretty easy. I've tried some ink making. It's one of the things that when I have a little more time, I'll try to really focus on. It's not as easy as it would seem. And I've had mixed results in the few that I've tried on myself with homemade ink.
00:15:12
Speaker
There's some debates going on about ochre being used in ink. There's some Sarmatian toolkits that have ochre pigments that are, I would say, they seem quite definitively tattooing toolkits in the graves they found over in the Sarmatian burial site, Philippovka. And I've never seen any modern tattoos that have been made with color ink from natural pigments.
00:15:38
Speaker
like that. I mean, like really natural pigments in their raw form, but I'm pretty curious about that. So I might start doing some research in that regard as well. Gotcha. All right, man. Well, all right, everyone. We're going to go ahead and take a break. We'll be right back for episode 135 after these messages. And we're back to episode 135, Life in Ruins Podcast. We're still here with Daniel. So Daniel, you have a mutual connection to us at Life in Ruins Podcast. You happen to not only know
00:16:04
Speaker
but work with Dr. Aaron Dieterwold. So how in the hell did you get hooked up with him? So Aaron's Instagram account, Archaeology Inc., which I think when I re-listened to his episode with you guys, David was pushing him to start something like that. Archaeology Inc. is tattooing body modification and archaeology. I think there's not really a reason why any of that wouldn't have been my fault.
00:16:34
Speaker
favorite Instagram account to follow. When I found it, I was instantly hooked on his posts, his content, the insights and interests. It was just exciting. I love his page. So in the beginning, when I found it, I was engaging a little bit with the comments and asking little questions or supporting the work that he'd done to
00:17:01
Speaker
portray that image or speak about it. But when one morning he posted a specific article about his research into Andean mummies and their tattoos, I looked at all the pictures of this tattooed hand, wrist, forearm. I read the whole article that, you know, the post that he had made. I looked at the picture again, I read the whole post again, and I thought, oh, it's a bit strange he didn't mention the
00:17:31
Speaker
the kind of layout of the tattoos because obviously this one came before this one and this is built up off of that and this one is a bit different from that one and even has a greater saturation of ink. A lot of little details that are obvious from a tattooing perspective but maybe they weren't important enough to be mentioned in the in the post he did but I figured I would just kind of reach out and say
00:17:56
Speaker
Hey, it's interesting that that part was done before that part because the rest is built up off of it. And I don't know if that is important to your research, but it's maybe worth noting. And he happened to be online at the time and said, like, well, what do you mean? Well, obviously, if you're going to make this tattoo, you know, you're going to.
00:18:17
Speaker
sit with that person's wrist in your lap, you're gonna tattoo the wristband part first, and then this kind of stair-step pattern that we see in these mummies, which I think also is part of their textile history. The stair-step pattern would be built off of the wristband. That way the stair-step pattern ends on a straight line that just, you know, when the arm is hanging down by your side. It just makes more sense to tattoo that way. You wouldn't start at the top and work your way down and hopefully end it on the right angle. You start from the bottom and build up.
00:18:45
Speaker
And he said, wow, yeah, actually we never really thought about that. Okay. And, uh, let's look at those wristbands because the mummy has, I don't have the picture in front of me. I think two wristbands, maybe three. The lowest one is strikingly different from the other tattoos on the arm in that the wristband itself was tattooed.
00:19:07
Speaker
Now that we've researched this a bit further, I think we can safely say it's tattooed with an entirely different tool set from the rest of the arm because the lines there are short dashes, little lines that form a technique we're calling line stacking. And it just had never been noticed before because maybe people were observing different aspects of the art, different things about the mummy, but it just had never really been analyzed from a tattoo perspective before.
00:19:37
Speaker
And over the course of, I don't know, two hours when I was just chatting with him that morning, we really not only observed this separate tattooing style, but then found a way to identify it as separate from the other. And after two hours, he said, okay, hang on a second. And he got back to me
Cultural Appropriation and Tattoo Projects
00:20:00
Speaker
and he said, okay, as sad as it is,
00:20:03
Speaker
I think that was the first written conversation in any of the notes that he had regarding tattooing tools and techniques used on these mummies. It just had never really been discussed in detail before. The tattoos had been discussed, but not really how they had been made, if the tattoos varied at all, anything like that. And so he said it was a little depressing that it had happened on Instagram.
00:20:28
Speaker
with somebody who was not an archaeologist and over breakfast. It was like a funny little insight. So from there, Aaron brought me on as sort of an outside consultant on some of his research. So I got to see the kind of visual data archive from the Oxford University Museum for the Peruvian and Andean mummy remains and analyze a lot of those images and see if we notice anything.
00:20:59
Speaker
that stands out. But what we keep seeing now that we know what to look for is this line stacking technique separate from the majority of the tattoos being hand poked probably by cactus thorn needles. We don't know quite yet. We're also finally, after about a year of emails, I think getting permission to go observe some Indian mummy remains in a museum in Berlin as well. So I need to get back over there and try to do that.
00:21:28
Speaker
So just a random conversation you had on Instagram was able to like fundamentally shift Aaron's thinking towards his practice. And that's, I mean, that's like phenomenal, right? Cause like archeologists,
00:21:44
Speaker
you know, a lot of the things that we study were not necessarily experts in the production of, you know, some of these ancient practices, you know, not all of us who study ceramics or potters ourselves. Like that's, I think that's fundamentally a big, you know, truth or, you know, Aaron is not a tattoo artist and has made a really cool niche in archaeology, looking at the archaeology of tattoos and like so on and so forth.
00:22:11
Speaker
And it really goes to show having someone who's knowledgeable in the craft is critical in understanding how it's done in the past. Like it reminds me of, it's like this story of these Italian archeologists found this cube shaped artifact in Northern Italy near the mountains. And they had no idea what it was. And just one of them happened to show it to his grandmother
00:22:39
Speaker
and his grandmother took it and knew exactly that it's a device used to help make mittens, to knit mittens, you know, just like she's a knitter and like knew exactly what that was and it matches the place and time that like, yeah, of course you'd find something to,
00:22:54
Speaker
to help you make knit mittens. So that's just, yeah, that's, I mean, that's just such a phenomenally cool story and just also goes to show how important it is for archaeologists to engage with the public, you know, especially on social media and Aaron's like killing it on social media too.
00:23:14
Speaker
And I really have enjoyed my time with Aaron and when I participated when he gave a talk at the tattoo convention in Denver, you know, just how enthralled the tattoo artists were and how they came back the next day with practice stick poke or hand poke tattoos from cactus needles that they went out and it was just like, holy hell, man.
00:23:35
Speaker
Dude, that is just, that's awesome. And I do have to ask, so you're talking about how like you'll practice on yourself. Do you have like a dedicated leg of just tattoo doodles that you got going on? I think most tattoo artists do. Yeah. You need both hands, right? You need one hand for tattooing, one hand for stretching. So the only place you can do it practice on yourself is on your legs. So yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot, there's a lot of practice that do because I also do so much experimentation now.
00:24:05
Speaker
You know, I needed to do experimenting with obsidian blades because now that's a part of my practice and I was not going to test it on somebody else. And, uh, you know, practice hand poking, practice hand poking with bird bones, practice hand poking. I've got cactus needles, I've got lemon tree thorns, I've got all sorts. There's a lot of questions to answer. Oh, I can imagine. It was like, can you not just use like pig skin? It's been a common,
00:24:33
Speaker
theme in testing so many things for science. Even Aaron himself did a research portion of identifying the microwear patterns in potential tattooing needles so that they could be analyzed. If you find, let's say, what might have been classified as a hairpin at an archaeological site, but you look at the very tip of it and the last two millimeters has this particular microwear
Resources and Future Endeavors
00:25:00
Speaker
pattern,
00:25:01
Speaker
He did that in pigskin. He tattooed the pigskin with these needles and human skin with the needles and analyzed it. But what the difference is in the skin of a living human versus the skin of a dead pig is that the tattoo won't go through any
00:25:16
Speaker
healing process. And the healing process is huge. It's about half the battle really. And so you're with the pigskin, you're probably going to get like a false positive, the ink will go in, it will stay in, nothing will happen to it. Whereas when you tattoo a person, I think you get different results. So when Aaron and I outlined an idea, put together a project, we we knew it had to be tested on human skin, because this particular project
00:25:46
Speaker
was revolved around the idea of identifying tool signatures and how each different kind of tool, tool shape, needle arrangement leaves a particular mark in human skin. And the tattoos I did during this experiment on my leg had to be monitored for six months after the tattooing was finished so that we could watch how they heal, what the differences are, if any of it falls out. And so we
00:26:16
Speaker
We spent about a year putting the project together, just over email and Instagram. We collaborated with indigenous tattoo artists, Maya Seluk Jacobson, who is an Inuit tattoo revivalist and I think also anthropologist. And she was brought on to help advise. We wanted to be really thorough, so the outline of the project was to do
00:26:44
Speaker
eight identical tattoos with eight different tools and then compare the results so that when we find a mummy from this place or that place, this culture, that culture, we can rule out certain materials as having been used for tattooing because let's say it matches one style but not another style. So now we have all this comparison data.
00:27:06
Speaker
to have a look at those mummy tattoos in greater detail. So when we wanted to think of the eight different styles we wanted to include, Aaron suggested, including skin stitching. And I thought, well, this is subdermal tattooing. It's a practice of passing a needle and thread where the thread has been dipped in tattoo ink and passed through your skin and pulled out the other side and the thread leaves tattoo ink under that stitch. So skin stitch tattooing is
00:27:35
Speaker
a tattooing practice of the Arctic Circle and I was very hesitant to include it because I know that it's a very closely guarded practice and I didn't want to step on any toes or make anybody feel like I was treading on their tattoo revival. So I was a little reluctant to include that part until Erin convinced me that bringing Maya on board and making sure that she knew that this was the only time I'd be doing this technique and I wasn't going to just steal it and make it a part of my practice.
00:28:03
Speaker
So we had then another six months of communication with her where she coached me through a bit of how to do the technical side of that tattooing style, which is so difficult for the women who practice that style. I think you'd have to spend a lifetime at it. It's really incredible. So I was under her guidance, did a little bit of practice on my leg with that and then had to make a bunch of
00:28:29
Speaker
very small bone sewing needles, find the right kind of bone to use, spend a bunch of time figuring out how to make sewing needles out of bone, small enough to pass through the skin.
00:28:41
Speaker
We also brought on another traditional tattoo artist named Moko Nuiarani Smith. He's a hand tapping tattoo artist based up in Auckland. So he came down to do two of the tattoos that day because I couldn't reach that part of my leg very well and his hand tapping experience is at the very highest level. He's a really remarkable artist as well. And so he came down to do the two tattoos. I did the six other tattoos on my leg that day, including skin stitching,
00:29:11
Speaker
obsidian blade cuts and then ink rubbed in, obsidian shard poking, so hand poking with an obsidian spike, deer bone tattoo needle, copper tattoo needle, modern tattoo needle, the skin stitch with bird bone and hand tapped with a comb style needle and hand tapped with a single needle. So we have a pretty broad range of tools and
00:29:37
Speaker
and needles and material types to get a fair idea of the different marks they leave and how to identify those marks at a microscopic level because everything we did was documented under the
00:29:53
Speaker
you know, under higher magnification, even the healing process, every couple weeks another set of pictures was taken, so now a lot of that data is available in the article that Aaron published for the EXARC Journal, Experimental Archaeology. We had been given a generous grant from them to pursue this research and then only just a couple months ago the article came out where you can read Aaron's findings and it's written up by somebody who
00:30:22
Speaker
has the backing of a archeology degree. And I, I'm really honored to have been a part of that. It was really fun. I mean, the list of different techniques you just list, you know, just talked about cutting yourself with obsidian blade and then rubbing ink in it, like how that must be like conceptually difficult. How do you do that properly without cutting too, too deep?
00:30:50
Speaker
That's actually the main risk. I had done one or two little test trials like that on my leg before. It comes down to how you break the obsidian and how that edge is at a microscopic level. After this project and after analyzing those obsidian flakes under magnification, we see as well
00:31:13
Speaker
that sometimes tiny fragments break off the cutting edge. Those can get lost or even embedded in the skin, making those tattoos a little slower to heal sometimes, but it depends what the shape of the blade was. How do I get into it? I don't know. I have questions that need answers, and I don't care what the consequences are. Tattooing with obsidian is a huge part of my practice now. I just got back from a tattoo convention. I think I did four.
00:31:43
Speaker
obsidian tattoos there, another one just yesterday, I'm finding it immensely interesting. And so the obsidian, I source it, I break the flakes off, I clean and then sterilize them in a medical autoclave. And so they're ready to be used safely as tattooing tools, as long as I don't cut too deeply. Yeah, it hasn't happened yet. I kind of want one now. That sounds like, that sounds awesome. Use a holiday man, just come down here, it's summer.
00:32:12
Speaker
And yeah, that's true. Although the flight tickets, I imagine are like what, two grand just to get down there. Yeah, probably. Yeah. Just a little bit, but maybe, yeah, we'll talk in the interim. Yeah. We'll be right back with episode one 35. I got questions and we're back still here with Daniel for episode one 35. So just kind of starting off something that I'm sure you've noticed and I've, and I've seen like, there's that
00:32:37
Speaker
There's a really great Russell Peters. I know he's an older comedian at this point, but there's a bit where he talks about, he sees this like white dude in the audience with this like Japanese style dragon tattoo sleeve. And he starts ragging on the guys like, wait, are you from Japan? And the guy's like, no. And he's like, well, why do you have that tattoo? So in the world of art and tattooing art, like
00:33:00
Speaker
What is that discourse like? Because you've mentioned in the first part that you do like a lot of like European style tattoos now specifically like Scandinavian influenced on I imagine the New Zealanders with European descent. So how do you navigate that space of like where art is such this ubiquitous thing where people can appreciate and admire from all backgrounds of life and want to have it displayed on their bodies?
00:33:28
Speaker
even though they might not be from the culture in which those art forms are produced. It's a big question. The tattoo world is really, in a lot of ways, on the front line of battles surrounding cultural appropriation. And unfortunately, it's become so easy to become a tattoo artist that without a teacher to kind of guide you through
00:33:59
Speaker
This means this. This is the history behind that. This comes from here. And answering a lot of those kinds of questions, a lot of people just kind of jump into drawing and tattooing without understanding. And it leads to a lot of problems. Cultural appropriation is a huge issue in the tattoo world. And there's been some instances where really just
00:34:25
Speaker
good people I know didn't realize that maybe they shouldn't have been doing something with their art and then reminding them that like hey maybe have another think about that and they go oh yeah actually yeah good point I didn't think about it and I think it a lot of the time it just comes down to the fact that they're trying to do art to support them it's their it's their life that's how they pay the bills you know and taking the time to kind of
00:34:53
Speaker
dive in and learn everything, everything, everything is time consuming when you're just trying to, you know, get to work. It's probably how it always persists. I think we live in a world now where with the amount of access to information we have, we should be able to do our homework, not start stepping on people's toes, not involve ourselves in business that we shouldn't be doing.
00:35:23
Speaker
And I think it's up to each artist to decide where the line is, what they want to be drawing and portraying. I'm going to be moving, hopefully. We always need the clients to support us as we move forward because we can't just have a career tattooing ourselves or paper. So we need clients to support us as we move forward. And I'm going to try to make real steps where
00:35:52
Speaker
The only art I'm going to be tattooing on people is art based in European roots, so Paleolithic art, also some Norse revival art as well, I find pretty interesting. With my interest in the art of the mid to upper Paleolithic, I can't pull myself away from that fascination and it pulled me back even if I tried to step away from it.
00:36:19
Speaker
And if your question is how do we identify cultural appropriation in tattooing art and how do we find ways to navigate better courses of action for tattoo artists, it would have to just come down to the one artist at a time. Probably if you're getting a tattoo, ask questions. If you're not satisfied with that person's answers, maybe go somewhere else. And if you feel like it, let them know that
00:36:47
Speaker
Their approach is not appropriate. I live here in New Zealand. I have a lot of friends who are Tamoko Maori tattoo artists. I don't touch that art style. It's just not for me to participate in. I can admire it. I can have friends who practice it. You know, if they make a t-shirt or wear it, I'll come support them. I'm going to be working with my good friend Julius, who's a Tamoko artist at the Next Tattoo Convention. We're going to have a good time, but that art style is
00:37:16
Speaker
off limits for me. And I think that that's a healthy division to, to make. I just couldn't give to it what they give to it anyway. Even if it came from a place of love, it was just not, not for my hands to perform. Gotcha. Totally understand that. And absolutely.
00:37:36
Speaker
respect what you have to say as well. Because here in the States, you see a lot of guys with like Maori tattoos, like, you know, and they're gorgeous. I've always admired that art style too. But I know like that art style is like very particular to the artist and to the people that it came from. And it has meaning behind it. It's not just like this random amalgamation of lines and designs. It's like, I don't, I don't want to cross those, cross those lines, but
00:37:58
Speaker
So what else do you have coming up? Are you still working with Aaron or are there other archaeologists that you've been able to get in contact with and collaborate on projects with? Yeah, so my next project, which I feel like I'm a little behind on already. I've just come back from Europe and it was a busy time.
00:38:17
Speaker
We're going to look into tool material types with Ann Austin, who's a PhD Egyptologist. She's been documenting a lot of Egyptian mummies under infrared light and finding that a greater number of them have been tattooed than was previously expected. So she and I will start a project where I'm going to do another set of tattoos on myself with traditional materials, analyze those results so that maybe we can have a better idea of
00:38:48
Speaker
were the Egyptians tattooed with ostrich bone, spikes from sharp plants like acacia thorns, maybe gold tattoo needles, maybe animal horn. So we'll test a few different materials and needle setups. I'm also going to do a follow-up with that in regards to the Pazuric mummies, the Siberian mummies that I found in the Altai Mountains. I talked a little bit once with Geno Kaspari about that.
00:39:17
Speaker
And I think he would be interested in being a kind of voice of authority on what the Scythians and Scythian-like people around that time would have had access to in regards to what type of metal they might have been using and how finely that kind of metal can be worked. So I'll need to then do some metalworking, make some tools and needle arrangements with maybe bronze, copper, gold, if I can get my hands on it.
00:39:44
Speaker
and test out what the tools might have been for performing those tattoos. The interesting thing is, in Aaron's book, Archaeology Inc., he talks a bit about, I'm not sure if that part was written by him or his co-author Lars Kritak, but they talk about a Sarmatian tattooing kit. These kinds of tattooing kits have been found in grave sites from the Sarmatian Empire.
00:40:10
Speaker
But no mummies have ever been found preserved with tattoos, which those kids would have made. They find mummies from the Scythian Empire, but no tools that could have made those tattoos. So we kind of have two questions into it, you know, two sets of questions, two sets of answers, but nobody really has a good guess so far as to what the tools look like that make the poseuric tattoos.
00:40:35
Speaker
So we're going to look into a bit of that. I think Aaron will probably be involved in both the Egyptian and Pesach projects as well. He's incredibly knowledgeable and insightful and it's a good combination. I think it was inevitable when I re listened to his episode on your podcast, I think episode four, he was saying that when he was producing all of this science communication content, trying to engage the public, he was looking for
00:41:01
Speaker
insightful comments and discussions and collaboration. I think the quote was, a rising tide raises all ships. It doesn't really matter who you find to work with as long as it's a person who's looking to help answer your questions with you.
00:41:20
Speaker
I think since Aaron is a tattoo focused archeologist and I'm an archeologically fascinated tattoo artist, between him and I, we fill a lot of gaps. It's just a really good combination and I can't believe somebody else didn't beat me to this relationship where I get to tattoo in the name of science. It's a high point of my career. Yeah, that's awesome. It's really cool to see
00:41:48
Speaker
how you've gotten into this line of research in such a meaningful way and it, and coming off of, you know, just simply an Instagram DM that has opened up all these different lines of thought and research questions. And like, I just think that is one of the beauties of science and why science, like I said, in the last segment, why science communication is just so necessary for this field to connect people with, to connect researchers
00:42:18
Speaker
with modern day people who are engaging in the practices that we study the material remains of right so Do that's that's just I'm really excited to see what you guys come up with with next tattoos are one of those modern day cultural phenomenon is not the right word, but
00:42:40
Speaker
people like tattoos. And I think, and this has come from the layman, like we've seen more and more people get tattoos. It's become way more common practice, especially in like American culture and like how David is so successful. People love dogs and they're fascinated with dogs. And he talks about, you know, it's just like, it's one of those, one of those shared interests across the globe that people can relate to and get involved in and, and,
00:43:04
Speaker
contribute to in meaningful ways. I just think what you're doing is absolutely amazing in that it's just part of your work and you get to do it. I've said meaningful so many times before, but you're going to do it in a real way with Aaron and others. That's awesome, dude.
00:43:25
Speaker
As it goes, before we end the show, Daniel, what are a couple sources? These could be books, articles, or videos that you would recommend for anyone interested in tattooing or ancient artistic practices. I recently received Aaron and Lars' book, Archaeology, Inc., which really covers it well. It's a really academic but really interesting book. So I think for academics or laypersons, it's a good read.
00:43:54
Speaker
God, Gino Kaspari's book, The Book of Mummies, which is also really good. He invited me to be a chat, a contributor to that book. And I had to, I originally said yes, but I had to turn them down because I was like, dude, I don't know if I can talk about these ritual mortuary practices in the plains quite yet. And that's like a whole different line of stuff. I'm just not prepared to. This was like a couple of years ago in the throes of COVID. And I was like, dude, I just,
00:44:19
Speaker
want to survive and play civilization. I don't want to work on something as hard as looking at trying to get around NAGPRA and stuff like that. I got to check out that book though. That's awesome. You can also find our EXARC journal entry, which is Aaron's published version of our project we did comparing the tattoo tools.
00:44:42
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. And we'll have, uh, that, all those in the episode description, wherever you listen to your podcast and where can our listeners find you on social media, Daniel? So my Instagram is called totemic tattoo, T O T E M I C underscore tattoo. And I have a new website for my studio, which is the dash temple dash tattoo.com. Sweet. And, uh, an email address totemic tattoo at gmail.com.
00:45:12
Speaker
Perfect. And we'll have all those links as well in the episode description. So thank you for joining us today, Daniel. If given a chance again, would you still choose to, uh, to live a life tattooing modern day people on practices and designs that come from people and ruins? Yeah, absolutely. I would have even gotten an earlier start.
00:45:35
Speaker
Dude, absolutely. It's been phenomenal having you on. We'll definitely have to have you back. So everyone, we just interviewed Daniel Radei. You can find him on Instagram at totemic underscore tattoo, his email address totemic tattoo at gmail.com and his new website, the temple tattoo.com. Once again, all those will be in the episode description below.
00:45:55
Speaker
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00:46:14
Speaker
We have a couple listeners that like to provide us with reviews of all of our episodes, and we apparently are episode on the archaeology of Middle Earth, deeply upset. One of our followers, archaeodunadain, we're really sorry for our transgression on Middle Earth archaeology, we'll have to
00:46:31
Speaker
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00:46:53
Speaker
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00:47:22
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archeologists in from the cold and feed them beer.
00:47:50
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.