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Ancient Ink with Aaron Deter-Wolf - Ep4
591 Plays7 years ago
If you’ve been following us for a bit, you might notice that archaeology isn’t just pyramids or that ancient aliens bullshit...it’s the study of human behavior. And one world-wide human behavior that you’ve probably all observed, is the practice of tattooing and body modification. Well, that’s not really our niche, but lucky for you, we’re bought one of the world’s leading experts on the archaeology of tattooing to talk with us today. In fact, he co-wrote the book on it!
Tonight’s guest, Aaron Deter-Wolf, is currently the Prehistoric Archaeologist at the Tennessee Division of Archaeology. Aaron is responsible for managing prehistoric sites on State-owned lands, as well as conducting archaeological excavations and publishing research on the results of those studies. Most importantly, Aaron is a prominent advocate for public archaeology, as evidenced by his work with the state of Tennessee, his scholarly publications, and his new Instagram @archaeologyink.
So before the ink dries, let's put a pin in this intro and get to the point of tonight's podcast!
ContactEmail: alifeinruinspodcast@gmail.comInstagram: @alifeinruinspodcastFacebook: @alifeinruinspodcast
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Transcript
Meet the Hosts and Guest
00:00:15
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. We're all just failed my-ness at this point, like, oh, yeah. Welcome to episode four of the Life in Ruins podcast. I'm your host, Carlton Gover, and I'm joined by my co-hosts, Connor Yohannananananananananan, and David Howe.
Tattooing in Archaeology: Why Does It Matter?
00:00:39
Speaker
If you've been following us for a bit, you might notice that archaeology isn't just pyramids or that ancient alien's bullshit. It's the study of human behavior. In one worldwide human behavior that you've probably all observed is the practice of tattooing and body modification. Well, that's not really our niche, but luckily for you, we've brought one of the world's leading experts on the archaeology of tattooing to talk with us today.
Who is Aaron Dieter-Wolf?
00:01:00
Speaker
In fact, he co-wrote the book on it.
00:01:02
Speaker
Tonight's guest, Aaron Dieter-Wolf, is currently the prehistoric archaeologist at the Tennessee Division of Archaeology. Aaron is responsible for managing prehistoric sites on state-owned lands, as well as conducting archaeological excavations and publishing research on the results of those studies. Most importantly, Aaron is a prominent advocate for public archaeology, as evidenced by his work with the state of Tennessee, his scholarly publications, and his new Instagram, at archaeologyink. So before the ink dries, let's put a pin in this intro and get to the point of tonight's podcast.
00:01:39
Speaker
All right, welcome to a Life in Ruins podcast.
Nashville Traffic Tales
00:01:41
Speaker
We're here with Aaron Dieter-Wolf. So Aaron, let me ask you the pertinent question of the day. How's the Nashville traffic?
00:01:50
Speaker
National traffic is lousy, man. Thank you for asking. Yeah. Did you survive today? I survived today. You know, I've got to go like seven miles between home and work and it takes a solid half hour to 45 minutes, depending on the time of day. It's pretty awesome. Yeah. You're walking next to your car. Yeah. Years ago when I had fewer kids in the picture, I was actually with bike commute and that took about half an hour or 45 minutes.
00:02:22
Speaker
Yeah. For those of you who don't know, Nashville is kind of one of those like big booming cities right now. And it used to be like a semi quieter city. And now it's just like, you can't go anywhere without just being like in LA like traffic. It's crazy. Let's get into the, actually the meat of the podcast today.
Aaron's Role in Tennessee Archaeology
00:02:37
Speaker
So Aaron, would you like to tell the audience a little about who you are? We want to have you on here today to talk about anthropology. So if you want to frame who you are in an anthropological sense for the audience, I'll let you take the reins.
00:02:37
Speaker
So now I'm just kind of losing ground, I think.
00:02:49
Speaker
Oh, good. So I appreciate you guys having me. So my name is Aaron, and I am a day job. I am the prehistoric archaeologist for the Tennessee Division of Archaeology. We're part of the Department of Environment and Conservation with the Tennessee state government. So under that big umbrella is everything from us to state parks to stream water management to natural species to
00:03:15
Speaker
crayfish, everything in point. And we are a very small cog in this much bigger state government entity. And I've been with them now coming up on 12 years-ish or so. Landed in Nashville back in 2001. Took a CRM job out of grad school and made the big sell. Got my wife to leave Southern California and come to Nashville.
00:03:42
Speaker
Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. That every February, she reminds me of that. They're like the exact same place, right? There's nothing different. Yeah, it's totally, it's 100% the same. Yeah. Especially in the summertime. Yeah, that's great. Anyway, we've made the big sell and we're sort of in the right place at the right time when a division of archeology opened up.
Duties of State Archaeologists
00:04:05
Speaker
At the time I came on, I was, I think, the first few hire in about 20 years. Since that time, we were sort of reloading as people retire. Since I started, we hired another five or six people. It used to be I thought I was going to be the guy in office space. Eventually, state archaeology would be like me in the bottom of the L&C tower with a filing cabinet. They start locking my door and not letting me in.
00:04:29
Speaker
But no, we're with it, man. We're gearing up for the future. So we're great. You still have your red stapler? Yeah, I still have the stapler.
00:04:43
Speaker
For the public audience here, Aaron, would you mind explaining that? I mean, does every state have an archaeologist? Is that like a common thing? As far as I know, every state does. All states come under the Section 106 National Historic Preservation Act. So at the very least, there's a SHPO.
00:05:01
Speaker
state historic preservation officer and part of the SHPO role is to permit archaeological projects that receive federal funding. Most states then also will have state permitting related to projects that touch on state lands or you know state waterways and things like this. And so our office broadly handles both the federal and state
00:05:26
Speaker
permitting process. And then I actually am not a part of that. I'm part of then the information gathering and disseminating wing, archaeology propaganda. Can we call ourselves that? So working with old collections and doing site inspections, you know, when someone's building a new shopping center in Nashville, and it's prehistoric remains, which is like every Tuesday, I'm the guy that gets called about that.
Aaron's Archaeological Journey
00:05:54
Speaker
uh independent research educating the public all of these sorts of things very cool so um on your early life what kind of got you into anthropology or archaeology yeah so so my dirty secret is i don't actually have a degree in anthropology or archaeology
00:06:11
Speaker
Oh, just kidding. Playing school without the papers. Yeah. No, so I got, I thought I was going to be a Mayanist, you know, along with, along with so many other people. And I got interested in that in high school and took a class my freshman year college on Maya art and archaeology and just kind of fell in love with it.
00:06:36
Speaker
Where i went to undergrad did not have a field approach archaeology program. So they had a cultural anthropology department and then separate from that a biological anthropology department i think it's like evolutionary anthropology is maybe the real title.
00:06:53
Speaker
Anyway, and no archaeology. So archaeology sort of fell under the classical studies departments at my school. And so what that meant is that once I figured out that, hey, maybe I wanted to do archaeology, I kind of had
00:07:07
Speaker
no place to go because I didn't really want to major in Classics. And so I ended up doing art history instead. And the reason for that was because it sort of gave me this venue into looking at, you know, broadly ancient art, ancient artifacts from around the world. And sort of just became this giant choose your art adventure process. I found a field school in Belize after my freshman year of college and went down and did that.
00:07:35
Speaker
then sort of engaged in this process of, so I'm going to date myself a little bit here. The internet was kind of a thing at that point, but not really a thing. And so what I ended up doing was basically cold calling anthropology departments around the country and just being like, Hey, my name's Aaron. And
00:07:59
Speaker
I hear from so and so that you may have a project going this summer. If I can get myself there, can I work with you?
00:08:07
Speaker
And, uh, eventually found a really good bit with, uh, uh, Antonia Foyas, who at the time was up at, I think she's still up at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. She was doing work in Guatemala. And so I started going down there over the summer and working with Antonia on, uh, late classic Maya sites.
Academia vs. CRM: Aaron's Path
00:08:24
Speaker
Anyway. And so this was, this was a point in, I think academia as a whole, where interdisciplinary studies were kind of a hot thing, kind of a hot topic.
00:08:34
Speaker
And so when I applied to grad school, I knew I wanted to do my studies or I thought I wanted to do my studies. And at the time, two of the big sort of leading programs were Tulane University and University of Texas in Austin.
00:08:48
Speaker
And Doreen would have been working with Linda Shealy at Austin, but she had just actually died my senior year. And so I ended up applying to Tulane and getting accepted there and in their Latin American studies program, which at the time was awesome, man. I mean, it was, I got fully funded for an MA program. I got a full semester just writing, fully funded semester to just write my thesis. It didn't have to TA classes or anything like that.
00:09:16
Speaker
And because of the nature of the program, you've got to pull classes out of different grad departments. And because of all the folks that were Tulane, they had a fantastic Latin American history department, fantastic art history department, Elizabeth Boone's down there. She does Aztec codices and Aztec art. A lot of the anthropology classes are cross-listed in art history for that reason. And so I got to sort of pick and choose out of all those different classes and sort of build my own program on the way.
00:09:46
Speaker
Yeah, I thought I was going to be a minus. It turns out there are more minus than there are jobs for minus. That sounds about right. You can't turn around and believe without running into another minus.
00:10:04
Speaker
So midway through my second year of grad school, I sort of looked around the program and was like, man, there's at least a dozen people here who I think serve those jobs before I do. Who have the love and have the knowledge and should be professors. And so I ended up punching out after the MA and going into CRM. And hey, there you go, man. You put a couple of 10 years of CRM under your belt, it turns out a few things about archeology.
00:10:32
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of where we're all at right now. Carlton's in school, but I think a lot of us wanted to be Mayanists because that's like the cool like sexy archaeology on this side of the world.
00:10:45
Speaker
I went into undergrad and you have to take your like gen ed like lab science classes. I took astronomy because I thought that'd be cool to pair with like my in archaeology for whatever reason. And totally should have taken geology because I did not like astronomy because it turned out to just be like astrophysics and like measuring light distance and it was not fun and ended up doing paleoindian archaeology which required no math.
00:11:12
Speaker
I'm on the same boat. I wanted to be an underwater archaeologist in the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico looking at myocytes, and now I work in the Central Plains with no water and no forest.
Evolving Interests: From Maya to Tattoos
00:11:24
Speaker
That was to add a third part to that. I, uh, the inspiration for me getting into archeology was actually visiting, uh, chicken pizza or Chichen Itza down in the Yucatan. So that it's, it's funny how that can inspire us. And then we end up, you know, in Western Colorado doing pipeline worker. Yeah.
00:11:47
Speaker
Yeah, I'm in Central Tennessee. Yeah, sure. Just as far as I used to, I used to get summers used to be bad for me, right? Particularly once social media became a thing, because, you know, every summer I'd see my cohort from grad school, people be posting these like, you know, and here's a temple and here's the steel that we just excavated. And hey, look at the jade workshop we're working on. He's like, Oh, man, I found a plate today. And a couple pieces of white ware. It was awesome. Yeah.
00:12:16
Speaker
But it's gotten better since. But I think that's great. Whatever that process is, and it's spitting people out the other side who still have skills and knowledge to go on and do other things. And I think that's the great thing about
00:12:36
Speaker
I think, being at the MA level, I think that's the great thing about not going down that dissertation rabbit hole, right? Is that you're not so like head into this one particular thing and you've still got this kind of body of knowledge that you can put to different topics. So I end up in CRM and I end up in central Tennessee and a decade or so later I'm talking about tattooing in Egypt, right? I mean, why the hell not?
00:13:07
Speaker
No, absolutely. I think that's an excellent point. A lot of this quote-unquote sexy stuff in archaeology, like you talk about Egyptology, Maya, Aztec, or the Inca, is an initial draw to students coming into college or exploring the field of anthropology.
00:13:23
Speaker
I mean, there's a startling realization when you get there, like those fields are so saturated, but people are able to find something like a niche for themselves that they find interesting somewhere else. And I think that's a pretty big point of our field. And your work is extremely niche. And it's one of those weird things where people
00:13:44
Speaker
look back and say, yeah, no shit, they did that. Why wasn't anyone exploring this before? It's one of those like, yeah, duh type of things. And so what transitioned you into starting to look into ancient tattooing exactly? Yeah, so it actually started on a CRM project years ago, sitting around at lunch on box screens, scratching poison ivy and showing off new tattoos.
00:14:11
Speaker
And I mean, you guys know this, right? Every archaeologist has an archaeology tattoo of some sort, you know, going back and getting everybody's got their their, their Maya glyph or their, you know, Coca-Pellee pictograph or whatever it is, everybody's got them. And since they're talking with people about it at lunch and
00:14:28
Speaker
I can't remember how it came up exactly, but basically started talking about the Theodore DeBrye engravings from colonial Florida, these depictions of the Spanish encountering Native Americans in Florida in the 1500s.
00:14:44
Speaker
And there's a lot of problems with those pictures, right? The guy who did his engravings, Theodore DeBry, he never went to the New World. He borrowed liberally from different sources. He made a lot of stuff up wholesale. But you look at those things and the Native American bodies in those are just covered, just head to toe, covered with tattoos.
00:15:04
Speaker
And so we're talking about this at lunch and we realized that, you know, you juxtapose that with sort of the classic tradition of museum displays, you know, these kind of replica displays where they, you know, build, build dioramas of people, people in their wigwams or, you know, people on the great plains and their TVs or things like this. And you're like, man, like I've never seen a tattoo of any of those dioramas. Like never once has there been a Native American body depicted as being tattooed.
00:15:32
Speaker
And from there, sort of spun out into this, well, you know, so let's assume that what's happening in the 1500s is not new, right? It has been going on for at least let's say a century, probably more than that. Well, then why aren't archaeologists finding tattoo needles?
00:15:50
Speaker
And I sort of sat in the back of my brain and I just kind of chewed it over for, I don't know, 10 years or so. And then in 2009, I actually had the bandwidth to put together a session at the Southeastern Archaeology meeting on tattooing and body modification, sort of starting to get into this same thing. You actually get into this idea. And for me, this is really sort of a material culture thing more than anything else, right? As an archaeologist, why aren't we finding materials?
00:16:19
Speaker
Well, either because they're not there, which is unlikely, or they biodegraded, or maybe we've just not been looking for them all along. The old guard who wasn't tattooed themselves, who didn't look favorably on this practice, had their own hangups about native culture and indigenous peoples, maybe this was not a part of what they were interested in
Uncovering Tattooing Tools
00:16:41
Speaker
looking at.
00:16:41
Speaker
So hey, maybe with new eyes and new technologies, we can step back and go, oh, hey, look, we can find some. And as it turns out, hey, look, you know, we found some things. So it's pretty cool. No, absolutely. And I think that's like a great point because, you know, we don't as archaeologists or even anthropologists aren't always
00:16:57
Speaker
We don't look for everything unless we know it exists, right? So if we don't know that ancient tattooing was taking place, we're not going to look for the signs of it. So maybe there's some bone needles or some cactus spines that are just kind of odd and they get mislabeled and it's just lost. And a lot of that I think has to do with artifact classification. We pull things out of the archaeological record. We call them what we think they are. And we might not be right.
00:17:26
Speaker
I've got a buddy who talks about the idea that a knife, no, I'm sorry, he says a screwdriver is the perfect tool for opening a paint can. But that's not what the people who made the screwdriver intended it for. That's a really cool analogy. Right. If we pull things out of the archaeological record and say, well, obviously to me, this is XYZ. Well, that may have nothing to do with the people who made it. That's all about
00:17:52
Speaker
me and our Western culture and modern interpretations. And so, you know, when you talk about tattooing, then you really get to the root of that. Like, this is a bone all. Okay, fine. Except if it's not, right? It could be a gaming token. It could be a hairpin. It could be a tattoo needle.
00:18:09
Speaker
When we call it a bone-all and throw it to a museum, that's all it's ever going to be, unless we can get back at that somehow. That's been a lot of my stuff, the technology, looking at the wear patterns and technologies and things that we can use to reassess these old identities.
00:18:26
Speaker
Yeah. And real quick, could you explain what a bone all is and what it looks like? Yeah. So bone all is basically a pointy bone piece, right? So it's a, uh, a piece of bone of any type animal, human dish or that is longer than it is wide and has a point on at least one end.
00:18:47
Speaker
And when we call things all, AWL, what we're implying is that it's used for working leather or working hide. It's something that's used to punch a hole in leather or in hide, usually while making clothes or making crafts. So when we call something an all, it's basically shorthand for a pointy bone.
00:19:07
Speaker
Well, we need to go to our first break, but after the break, we will learn all about tattooing a session. Well done. Yeah, I was going to do like a little voice for this, but I had to do the all joke. All right. Well, go cut to break. And we're back to the second segment with our guest, Aaron Dieterwolf. So, Aaron, you started out as a lithics guy, so you studied stone tools and now you're trying to be more holistic. Is that correct?
00:19:36
Speaker
Sure, that's how we'll build it. In graduate school, I actually did my master's thesis looking at this set of late classic Maya figurines from a site I was working at, which is pretty niche stuff. Getting out of grad school and starting work in CRM, I focused mainly on lithic technologies, on stone tool technologies.
00:20:01
Speaker
That was great, but once I started doing more research, getting back into actually trying to do academic work, actually publish things that met something, something more than just your average CRM report.
00:20:18
Speaker
For your listeners who haven't done CRM, these are the worst things in the world. It's the report you write after you do a cultural resource management archaeology project. It's incredibly dry. It involves a lot of boilerplate. It's basically just a catalog of everything you found. If you're lucky, there's a little interpretation in there.
00:20:35
Speaker
And so once I started focusing more on interpretive stuff, I started realizing that the lithics was kind of lousy for that, at least for me. The other thing that happened was I started having a really productive research partnership with my colleague, Tanya Perez, who is down at Florida State, and she's a Zoarch.
00:20:56
Speaker
And so, you know, once you start working with somebody who knows animal bones, right, it totally, it opens your eyes to this entirely new world of possibilities for interpretation. And it sort of took me out of that lithic silo and sort of got me thinking more about, you know, great. So there's stone tools or there's animal bones or there's, you know, this or that. Well, what does that actually mean?
00:21:20
Speaker
Right, so what does this actually tell us about the people who made them and use them so if we can step back out of counting flakes, or talking about even the by face manufacturing sequence right how many primary secondary tertiary flakes there are, and instead look at
00:21:36
Speaker
what that could mean in a human scale, both site-wide and in terms of the individual person making those artifacts. I think we learned a lot more about the people in the past. And so over the years, then that's sort of become this sort of bigger thing in my research. A lot of the sites that I work with just by default have been archaic period. So forager societies, let's say circa
00:22:01
Speaker
3,000 to 8,000 years BC-ish, 10,000 maybe BC, depending on where you go.
00:22:08
Speaker
And, you know, we sort of have this traditional idea of forager societies of hunter gatherers is kind of, you know, living, living in peace with the landscape, not making a big dent on their environment, you know, not being being very complicated socially, you know, perhaps not having what we recognize as religion or ritual, and all that crap, right? You know, that's all just unadulterated horseshit. And
00:22:35
Speaker
you know, a big part of doing good archaeology is, you know, realizing that you can, you can call bullshit on those things, right? You can go back into these traditional ideas of who people were in the past and be like, No, you know, that's fine. Yeah, they're foraging. But man, they were, they were really like,
00:22:53
Speaker
really altering the environment in which they live. They're domesticating plants and animals. They're practicing animist religion and ritual. They are not living at peace with one another. There's a lot of violence in the skeletal sample and interpersonal conflicts. And we learn a lot more about who these people really were. And so that I think is sort of this idea of being more holistic in our interpretation of the past is trying to be more true to
00:23:20
Speaker
the people that lived it, right? To their lived experience. I don't know what we call this. Is it, you know, neo-post-percessualism? Is it, you know, touchy feely hippy post-percessualism? I have no idea, right? It's something. I really love the progression because I did the exact same progression. You're starting out as like a Mayanist and you're like, okay, let's get into lithics because that's what you find on these projects that are really interesting and cool and give you these dates. And then you've kind of
00:23:46
Speaker
either you stay in that lithic silo like you were saying, or you kind of go down different avenues. And for me, that was using GIS to do spatial analyses. I just think it's awesome that that's kind of how you ran your life. And I don't know how normal that is, but it feels pretty normal to me. It's like, oh, these sexy points. I found them at field school. I want to study these for the rest of my life.
00:24:10
Speaker
And then, I don't know, it just kind of sometimes doesn't pan out like that. Yeah. Right. And I think a lot of that's deal with like what you work with. It's the right tools for the job and the right theory for the job. You know, if you're talking about like Paleo Indian archaeologists, I mean, there's only so much they can use and it's campsites, kill sites and stone tools. They don't have pottery yet. They don't have some of these other things and, you know, things deteriorate in the archaeological record.
00:24:36
Speaker
And if you're dealing with a site that's 10,000 years ago, what's really going to remain? And so what can you surmise theoretically for some of these things? We mentioned religion or some of these other lived experiences. Those don't always remain. Those rarely remain in the archaeological record because that's a lived experience that doesn't get absorbed into the ground.
00:25:00
Speaker
Well, and I think partnerships are important for that too. Like I said, I've had this really incredibly productive partnership with Tanya Perras over the last decade now. And part of that is this natural progression of when you get people together. And I think that's really the best thing that happens at conferences, right? As we all sit down,
00:25:19
Speaker
we have a couple of three beers and then someone says something like, but how do we know that Otzi's tools were hafted in this way? And, you know, and that leads to this two hour discussion. And then, you know, three days later, everybody's like, you know, I think we said something about Otzi's stone tools a couple of nights ago. Let's, uh, let's work on that. Yeah. And, uh, you know, it sort of builds these collaborations then going forward. And I think that's, you know, that's the best thing for all of us, right? Is knowing,
00:25:49
Speaker
knowing who we can talk to. Because I think it's that idea of silos, right? We all know a lot about very specific topics.
00:26:02
Speaker
We gotta be willing to add people into our research, right? Add second and third, 12th co-authors to what it is that we're doing. Bring the best minds and the best topics to bear and also then be willing to share our knowledge with other people. You know, try to lift each other up, right? It's that the rising tide floats all boats idea.
00:26:22
Speaker
Yeah, fair enough. And just a real quick, just to recap, Utsi is a 5,300 year old individual that was found, he's a mummy, he's basically freeze dried, that was found in the Alps, bordering Italy and Austria.
Otzi the Iceman: Tattoos Decoded
00:26:42
Speaker
And he had 61 tattoos on his body and was found completely preserved. And you can even see the wound that killed him. It was an amazing forensics cold case that dates over 5,000 years ago. And he's in archaeology especially.
00:27:02
Speaker
Yeah, straight up cold case on so many different levels. I mean, like he is just huge in archaeology because we have a freeze dried person with all of his clothes. We have the pollen that's in his stomach from the food that he ate. We can track his movements throughout the Alps within the period that he died. We can see how he died. I'm pretty sure it was a projectile point that went through his back and into his
00:27:24
Speaker
It's severed an artery in his shoulder and that's and he just bled out and was left there. And it's one of those things like why did he die? And then more specifically, like his tattoos are extremely interesting and are talked about like what their function was. And would you be able to like elaborate on your thoughts on the tattoos on Otzi Aron?
00:27:44
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. So 1992 or 1993, I think they found this guy melting out of the ice on the Italian side of the Alps and their
00:27:58
Speaker
were marks on his body that were visible when he was first pulled out of the ice. And in some of the very early news coverage of The Find, you find a couple places where people surmise that because he had these tattoos, surely he was a highwayman or someone of ill repute that must have been turned on by his gang and left to die on the ice, right? So it's this fantastic example of the sort of biases that can shape this work. But
00:28:27
Speaker
we know now that there were at least 61 tattoos on his body. And, and most of his epidermis is gone, right? Most of his epidermis disappeared because of exposure to the glacier. And tattoos sit basically the juncture between your dermis and your epidermis. So you know, think about that in terms not only of the chances that this guy is going to survive under a glacier, but that just enough of his skin disappeared, but not too much.
00:28:57
Speaker
You know, who knows, another hundred years, none of those marks may have survived. They all might have been, that carbon may have been sucked out into the surrounding ice. So it's just, it's this incredible happenstance that, that this body was ever preserved to begin with. And there's been a lot of these talk about his tattoos that they,
00:29:15
Speaker
are groups of lines. There's a couple of cross shapes. They tend to be on his joints and they tend to align to the long aspect of his body. They run up and down his arms or up and down his spine.
00:29:31
Speaker
And over the years people have pointed out that some of these tattoos correspond to areas on his body where he suffered from arthritis or possibly from other ailments of course we know this from a skeleton underneath and so there's been this idea that.
00:29:46
Speaker
His tattoos might be medicinal or might be therapeutic, that they were marks that were applied to treat his arthritis. And cross-culturally, there are examples of tattooing being used to treat ailments, everything from spiritual possession to headaches.
00:30:01
Speaker
And that's a really interesting idea. Now, at the same time, I will fight you about this because just because we don't understand what three lines in a row meant to him didn't mean that those marks aren't symbolic, right? You know, we don't understand his art or his symbols and
00:30:24
Speaker
So looking at these marks and saying, well, they are not symbolic. They don't have meaning. I just don't think we can do that. I think that's a step too far.
00:30:35
Speaker
Right. And because of his tattoos, people originally thought he was some sort of medicine man or a shaman because of all the marks on him. And it wasn't until they started doing some of that skeletal analysis that she mentioned where they started aligning some of those tattoos with, you know, arthritis underneath at his joints that some of those interpretations started to change. And I know that many movies about him too, which are interesting.
00:30:57
Speaker
So he started out as like a biker gang guy and then transitioned into like a shaman. And now he's just a normal person who might've been expressing his culture through tattoos. Yeah, before he was murdered, shot in the back and left to die on a glacier. Yeah, it's been run.
00:31:15
Speaker
I remember reading when I was doing a research paper on like zoonotic diseases that Utsi had one of the earliest cases of Lyme disease. And I believe he also had like a severe dairy and gluten intolerance too. I know it was dairy, I think also gluten, but he had like one of those genes for that. So the dude was just probably like just walking in pain constantly. And then he had whip worms in his colon.
00:31:40
Speaker
Right? He had low grade arsenic poisoning, as I recall. His hair follicles showed low grade arsenic poisoning.
00:31:50
Speaker
He's living with Oscar more than Leo does for the remnants. Yeah, and something kind of like roping it back in is that in order to see tattoos in the archaeological record, you need skin.
Tattooed Mummies: A Global Phenomenon
00:32:02
Speaker
And that rarely happens. If you talk to an archaeologist, they show bones. Unless you're a forensic anthropologist and see skin in organs all the time, you really need mummies.
00:32:12
Speaker
It's the oldest one that we have, and there's some that show up in Peru with the mocha, and then also in the Philippines, the Ebola culture. I probably butchered that, but those are all AD mummies.
00:32:27
Speaker
Well, and it's all over the world, man, honestly. So, you know, one of my side projects is the tattooed mummy database, which is just sort of this running list of every tattooed mummy that I can run down. And they are, you know, starting with, let's see, let's, let's call him the oldest, the, the predynastic ones out of Egypt that were found what a year or two ago now are pretty much contemporaneous with let's see. But, you know, from there, they basically cover like all four corners of the earth, except for Australia, all the way through.
00:32:57
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, in Antarctica, all the way up through the late centuries AD. So yeah, it's a global thing. Yeah, and I was going to say, you'll find a lot of, you'll see a lot of skin at archaeological excavations. It just won't be prehistoric, at least in the past, you know? It's a lot of red upper asses. Right. Sweaty sun damage. Yeah, yep.
00:33:25
Speaker
Um, I meant to ask you here to kind of get back to like the, I guess the, the point of the, we're kind of off track here, but I'm loving the conversation. Um, with all this like side projects and stuff that you have going on, like, does your job allow you to do this? Cause I, my job has been really great in letting me just like gallivant around the world the past year. So like, are they treating you well there?
00:33:50
Speaker
Oh, they're fantastic. Yeah. I managed to get the independent research in depending on what it is in the topic. I have some leeway if it can be tied into my local archaeology, for example. So looking at tools from here in Tennessee or looking at Native American questions, I have leeway to do that to a greater or lesser extent. When I start looking at things like Egyptian mummies or things like that, that's a little more on the old vacation time there.
00:34:18
Speaker
Okay, you were teaching at MTSU at some point too, right? And was it on tattooing?
00:34:24
Speaker
Yeah, so I've been I've been adjuncting in class down there for them since 2009 or so, just about every semester, I'll teach there, or teach a section of intro to world prehistory, which is just a, you know, non major gen ed course. And then starting in 2013, they they let me develop a upper level anthropology tattooing class. And so I'll teach that about about every two years now, I just taught it last fall. So it'll probably be next fall in the year after before I teach again.
00:34:54
Speaker
Sure. Well, that's cool. Did you do enjoy being an adjunct effort varying?
00:34:59
Speaker
degrees of enjoyment, uh, as being an adjunct. Yes. I really enjoy being an adjunct, but that's because I have a real job. Um, you know, I, I have a full time job in healthcare and a wife who's a lawyer and, um, supports my archeology habits. And so what that means is that, you know, I, I have the freedom to, to pick up a class.
00:35:26
Speaker
and not have to worry about the money, right? The most valuable part of doing the adjunct thing for me has been getting university library access because that's not actually something we have through the state. So getting access to JSTOR, man, that is, you know, that's worth its weight in gold right there.
00:35:44
Speaker
Absolutely. Absolutely. It's like the academic Netflix subscription. Like you have to have someone that has one to like get it. When mine finally expired last year, I was like, Oh, what the hell do I do now? And like, I couldn't lock anything up. But yeah, yeah. So at this point, we're going to lead into our second break. We'll be back and we'll talk about how tattoos form on bog bodies and how legit they are. Unless Aaron leaves this conversation right now.
00:36:12
Speaker
And we're back to our third segment here with Aaron Dieter-Wolf. So Aaron, David has informed us of...
00:36:21
Speaker
a particular aspect of archaeology that you thoroughly enjoy, and that is bog bodies and the possibility of tattoos on those bodies.
Are Bog Bodies Tattooed?
00:36:30
Speaker
Now, real quick, bogs are important archaeology because if you find something in a bog, bogs are anaerobic, meaning that there's no oxygen that deteriorates these things, so they're highly pristine. David, do you want to elaborate on this enjoyment that Aaron has for bog bodies?
00:36:45
Speaker
Um, yeah, I mean, it's one of the oldest atlatls they found comes from bogs and I think Bo is too. So it's just like bogs literally hold the secrets to everything. So there needs to be an investigation to just bogs around the world. But anyway, yeah. So a lot of people were saying that these bog bodies that they found, I believe somewhere in Europe had tattoos like all over them. But then I also understand that you don't feel that way.
00:37:10
Speaker
Yeah, so don't shoot the messenger on this one, man. So for starters, I should put this back on you, because this is kind of your fault. So David had this idea that I should do this Instagram. And he's actually the reason that we started this new Instagram project, this archaeology ink, fascinating shit about ancient body modification, right?
00:37:37
Speaker
You know, as, as you guys probably know from Instagram, you're, you're limited in what you can post, right? So you gotta, you gotta sort of weigh that like number of words you want to bore your audience with versus the picture involved. And anyway, so this, this project is, I think it's a great project. It was, you know,
00:37:56
Speaker
After David suggested it, I sort of soul searched about it a lot because I wasn't sure that this was something I wanted to do. It's a little bit, I don't know, that's a little bit new social media for me. I'm more comfortable on the Facebook. Yes, it's going well. People are interested in it, right? But again, this is the silos idea. There's a lot of people out there that are no way too much if we can draw this information out. Well, anyway, so one of the posts that we put up was about blog bodies. And
00:38:22
Speaker
The short answer here is that you know there are these bodies is preserved human skeletons and skins that have been found throughout northern europe over the last century or two and you think well okay we have preserved skin will these are ancient people will then maybe they were tattooed and there was this one researcher i can't even come up with his name right now who
00:38:47
Speaker
you know, in the early 20th century, I believe, published a series of articles in German, talking about how hundreds of these bodies were tattooed, had tattoos on them. And that's sort of it's one of these things that sort of entered into the conventional wisdom, particularly of the tattoo community, you know, there's obviously very strong
00:39:10
Speaker
European tattoo scene right now and a lot of these sort of traditional designs you know you know you know Viking style designs all of this kind of thing are very popular and so there's this. Appeal to the idea that.
00:39:30
Speaker
This is following a tradition that is several hundred or several thousand years old. People like the idea that what they're doing has these roots. But the fact of the matter is that none of the existing bog bodies that have been reexamined in the last decade or two have tattoos on them.
00:39:48
Speaker
And this is even using infrared imaging and alternative light sources and things like this. They're just not tattooed. And some other researchers dug back into this earlier publication that said all of this about the bog bodies. And it's just rife with errors, right? They figured, I think, less than 3% of the bodies that this guy talked about, they could actually corroborate that they even existed. Sources that he cited just didn't exist.
00:40:15
Speaker
Um, people that he said he'd interviewed didn't exist. Um, you know, all these kinds of problems. So it basically just comes down to this, like, it seems to basically be this one guy's fantasy. It may have been rooted in the fact that he published this around the same time that the, the Pazarak bodies in Siberia were found, which is, you know, these very famous iron age, uh, horse rider culture with these, you know, these fantastic animal designs all over them there that were recognized as being tattoos.
00:40:45
Speaker
And so maybe he was interested in getting that same kind of attention. We just don't know. He's not alive anymore. But no, the short answer is that bug buddies are not tattooed at least that we can confirm. Okay.
00:40:58
Speaker
And someone on your Instagram had kind of poked, or had brought that up, right? Is that, yeah. Cause that's something I wanted to talk about with this new frontier, as it were, that you and I are venturing into with the social media archeology. I've gotten some weird comments on things too, and it's like, not only do we make ourselves the spokespeople for our various niches, but then we also have to
00:41:24
Speaker
police that cause, you know, it's like, you're like, yeah. How do you break someone's heart, right? It's like breaking up with someone. Yeah. You gotta be like, you know, you know, it's not, it's not you. It's the bog bodies. We can still be friends. Yeah. And like, like you were just want to keep up like the,
00:41:43
Speaker
the good science but then I'll get some like weird like comments in there about like someone once said like I doubt that wolves and dogs are the same thing because like I think fennec foxes look just like chihuahuas and I was like well like fennec foxes are foxes and not done so like I just like didn't know Alice to like say it without like I don't know I'll get into something different
00:42:04
Speaker
No, but it's true. That's constantly an issue with public outreach in archaeology, right? I'm sure you guys have been in these situations where you give public presentations or you're talking to elementary school. I mean, the perfect example is I go talk to my son's elementary school. And the first thing you say is, hey, archaeologists, don't dig up dinosaurs, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And then you finish and you ask for questions. And 13 hands go up, and every one of them wants to tell you about the Tyrannosaurus skull they found.
00:42:31
Speaker
Right. It's you know, anytime you talk to the public, you know, there's that question of what what gets through and what meets up against the episode of ancient aliens that they saw last night. And so, yeah, you know, you're going to field questions about about giants and about aliens and about, you know, the lost tribes of Israel and the scarab gold scarab beetle that was buried on lookout mountain in Chattanooga. And, you know, take your pick. Right. And part of it's learning to
00:43:01
Speaker
deal with those things as they come up in public settings where you want to be appreciative of the fact that people are interested in this topic and you want to.
00:43:15
Speaker
tell them the truth or the archaeological truth as we best understand it, but you also don't want to tell them they're idiots because that's not doing anybody any good. Yeah, that's kind of what I was getting at. Yeah. And so you got to find that middle ground. Yeah, it's how much time and energy do you want to put into
00:43:32
Speaker
correcting people at some junctures. I mean, being in the social media world and talking about things, you often come, it's like, how much time do you actually want to put into it? And especially if you have like a thousand followers or something, you know, like, yeah, that's a lot of time to put into it. Yeah, absolutely. And I was just at a recent family event. My niece graduated and, you know, it was my American Indian family and they were asking me about giants and giants in the archaeological record.
00:43:56
Speaker
I'm just like, I'm like, I'm sorry, they don't exist. And then my cousin was just like, well, I know this high school social studies teacher who says he's found giants and he knows they exist. And I'm like, congratulations. I don't know what to tell you if they don't, they're not around. And with, I can imagine with you, David, without no sinology, the stuff that you get and even like now that we're branching out. Warm is my heart.
00:44:20
Speaker
Yeah, okay. I'm glad. I don't know what to tell you. Just some of these other things, it's just like with other public outreach events, you get comments from people. I did a YouTube interview where I was talking about human sacrifice. The amount of comments I got from that, it was just like, I don't have time for this. I don't have time to address every single ridiculous question or comment that I've gotten from this. I have a PhD student.
00:44:45
Speaker
Anyways, so like what, what kind of, from your archaeology, and I absolutely love that Instagram, by the way, like that's just phenomenal. What are some of the more interesting comments or questions that you've received from this public outreach venture?
00:45:01
Speaker
I had actually not received a lot of comments yet. At the beginning, there was some pretty good dialogue going between a couple of us that are contributing it to it and a couple of our friends. So, you know, this is this, you know, this sort of social media interaction that had been happening sort of out of the public eye, right? University of Facebook that had been going on for a long time. And some of those discussions then started taking place in the comments sections of the Instagram. And I think those are great.
00:45:29
Speaker
And, you know, they sort of balance between like, you know, people who are very hard and fast, like, you know, science and science and, you know, everything else is bunk. And people who then, you know, because of subject matter, may lean more towards, you know, certain new age mentalities and ideas. New age spirituality is related to tattooing and body modification. And, you know, there's a lot of common ground there.
00:45:54
Speaker
But, you know, if it swings too far, either way, people are gonna, someone's gonna call someone an asshole and ostracize other people, right? And so keeping it, keeping it civil is, I think, really, really important.
Engaging the Public: Tattoos and Archaeology
00:46:08
Speaker
So far, you
00:46:09
Speaker
I've gotten some really nice comments along the way, but there's not actually a lot of discussion that's happened. Honestly, I'm not sure why that is. Some of it may be that when I'm talking about these South American mummies, maybe there's just not enough people that know enough about them to kick into that. I'm not sure what the reason for that is at this point. Maybe that just comes with more followers. I've often wondered that too.
00:46:36
Speaker
Like just either that or like, or like sexy, the sexiness of the. All I have to do is drop something about evolution and the absolute vitriol that will occur is just amazing. I don't know if you have this guy named archeology gains his Instagram. Yes. Yes. I absolutely love watching his posts and then how, cause he'll comment people and he'll roast them and it makes my day. Cause I'm just like,
00:47:04
Speaker
Yeah, this is our Instagram warrior right here, and I'm pretty sure he's a follower of this podcast. So if Archeology Gains is listening, dude, you have my full 100% support.
00:47:14
Speaker
I had a really interesting experience with a co-author recently. This guy, Andrew Gilworth Brown, who's out at the University of Washington, he brought me on. I wrote a shotgun with him on this paper identifying this 2,000-year-old cactus spine tattoo tool from Utah. I don't know what happened. I think their university did a really good job putting it out on Eureka Alert, and it hit one of these weird media moments where it just blew up.
00:47:39
Speaker
And so, you know, different media outlets are covering this story, you know, stealing text from one another and copying and pasting without editing and, you know, writing their own things about it without talking to the authors and all of this. But of course, you know, the comment sections on those stories are just a hot mess, man.
00:47:59
Speaker
I mean, I mean, internet comment forums are just terrible to begin with. And when you get into a topic like tattooing, it's just like, it's just freaking awful. But so in a lot of these stories, people were just kind of off the wall theorizing and Andrew did a fantastic job of actually like taking the time to track all of the coverage and actually going into the comment sections using his real name.
00:48:22
Speaker
you know, not being like archaeologists for 20, but actually like, you know, like using his real name as a handle, just to pick one. I don't know. I don't know that guy. I'm sure he's out there. But, you know, using his real name as a handle and actually then answering people's questions and not just answering them and saying, you know, oh, hey, you know, actually, I'm the first author on this. And here's the answer to your question. And it was really well received. Now, people really, really seem to respond to that.
00:48:49
Speaker
So it was like that direct engagement was like a more efficient way of kind of doing this as opposed to just kind of publishing and having that data stay in academia and having it exist there. Well, I mean, I don't know if it's efficient, right? I mean, it takes a hell of a lot of his time to do it. Oh, for sure. For sure. But, but at least, you know, individual people are then getting their queries answered instead of just throwing them into the void.
00:49:14
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's really interesting. And I do want to mention that tattoo, that needle thing, you were quoted and talked about in an article from National Geographic about that 2000-year-old needle tattoo. Yeah. Yeah, that was a nice little piece of coverage. We reached out to them ahead of time and gave them first crack at it before it came out. So the author of that piece had the time to actually talk to each of us individually and build a story around it, which was pretty great.
00:49:44
Speaker
No, it's absolutely phenomenal. For any of our followers, that's at National Geographic. The title is 2000 year old tattoo needle identified by archaeologists by Christa Langlois. So please give that a read because it's a really short and phenomenal piece. Carlton was asking me about this earlier today. And I know, Aaron, you're probably one of the foremost authorities on this, but like,
00:50:06
Speaker
uh, Carlton's very, that was an air quotes. Sure. Sure. True. You at least know more about it than I do. We'll say that he would love to get a hand poked tattoo. And are you able to talk about that in any like capacity? I know you might, you have one, right?
00:50:23
Speaker
Yeah, sure. You know, I mean, handpoke tattooing is a thing, right? And a surprising number of my Instagram followers are handpoke tattoo artists. Go figure. Really? Okay. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, here in the States, people tend to do mainly, you know, electric work.
00:50:41
Speaker
And a lot of that has to do with, you know, individual health codes, depending on where you go. You know, tattoo is not regulated at a national level, it's more sort of at the municipal level. But if you go to, for example, tattoo conventions in Europe, there are whole rooms of people who will be doing hand poke tattoos or will be doing, you know, Polynesian hand tap style stuff.
00:51:04
Speaker
you know, these artists, I mean, they're all over the world, man, there's a, you know, there's a strong tradition of this. And you can, you can do hand poke or hand tap tattoos, and meet the necessary health codes, even here in the States, it just takes jumping through some hoops and, you know, thinking a little creatively to do it. You know, of course, you know, hand poke tattooing gets gets a bad rap, because it's it's stick and poke, right? It's what everybody does in their basement with their buddies. And, you know, that is that is dangerous. Bloodborne pathogens are a thing.
00:51:33
Speaker
You should only get a tattoo by someone who's been trained. That's enough in these traits. Right. Exactly. Trained in dealing with bloodborne pathogens in the setting of a tattoo shop. Now, having said that, a lot of people don't. I have one. I have
00:51:50
Speaker
friends and colleagues who have several at this point and this is the fault of science i'm gonna say because you know so i started on this research track of like you know how do you tell when an artifact has been used to tattoo and start looking at the idea of microscopic use where right the idea that when you use a tool for something it leaves a distinctive microscopic pattern behind.
00:52:13
Speaker
And so when we started doing this work, we were doing it with pigskin, right? Pigskin is a pretty good forensic proxy for human skin. But once you start making a bunch of artifact replica possible tattoo tools and have them laying around, it's just a matter of time before some genius sits up and puts their beer on their forehead and says, I've got an idea.
00:52:36
Speaker
You know, how do we know deer on their deer on their forehead? You guys don't have the beer up to your forehead when you want to talk. Now, maybe. Okay. Sorry. It's a thing. Put your deer on your forehead. I was like, Oh, that could be a thing. Right. I thought it was like a light bulb, but instead of light bulb, it's a deer. It's exactly right. Anyway, it's our new logo. How do we know that dead pig skin leaves the same wear signature as live human skin?
00:53:04
Speaker
And well, we don't, no one's tested that. So let's go get the bone needles.
00:53:15
Speaker
And, you know, this is where it takes a turn, right? You know, this is the, the joke is right, experimental archaeology turns into experiential archaeology. So not just the act of making, but the act of receiving as well. And, you know, this is this is an interesting process. And, you know, it's certainly it certainly has taught me a lot about, you know, both how much it hurts to be tattooed by a cactus spine, but also, you know, the logistics involved in
00:53:40
Speaker
Crafting a tool that you can do that with and using it and cleaning it and storing it and all of these other things so it becomes a part of the dialogue and a part of how we understand these possible tattoos in the artifact record.
00:53:54
Speaker
So that'll lead me to my next question. For the audience who's not used to anthropology or might not be anthropologists, where do you feel that tattooing sits in the realm of anthropology?
Tattooing's Cultural Significance
00:54:06
Speaker
What does tattooing mean for humanity in an anthropological sense? Oh. Wow. Well.
00:54:16
Speaker
I should have asked that like a little more like dumber, but- No, no, no, no. I mean, it's, you know, I think, I think at this point in our, you know, at this point in our collective history, let's go ahead and say that like 50% of people under age 30 have at least one tattoo. I think we all know that. Yeah. You know, the, the, the, the statistics are shifting. I think the last, the last Pew research poll was a couple, three, four years ago now, but you know, particularly among the millennial generation. So, you know, this thing is not,
00:54:44
Speaker
It's not unusual. And I think that that gives us a chance to look at it with with fresh eyes. And when you do that, you start to realize that it's that it's global. I mean, honestly, I would put it on the scale. Now, OK, from a very pro tattoo standpoint, I would put it on a scale of something like ceramics or fire. Right. It seems to be so deeply rooted in our human condition.
00:55:10
Speaker
that all these groups throughout human history all over the world have done this thing. And we can't parse out yet whether they all invented it on their own or whether maybe it's one of these things that's as old as Homo sapiens, right? That our ancient ancestors carried out of Africa with us. We can't figure that out yet. I'd love to, but we're not there yet. But you're looking at this practice that's this global, that's ancient and that
00:55:38
Speaker
is very different depending on where you go and that yet shares a lot of similarities in the reasons that it's done and what it means to the cultures that did it. And it's one of these things that
00:55:52
Speaker
were losing until very recently has been vanishing very rapidly. This was one of the many things that colonialism and introduced diseases and Christian missionization did a really thorough job of stomping out all around the world was these indigenous tattoo traditions.
00:56:11
Speaker
And we sort of are at this critical moment where over the last two or three generations, the last tattooed elders have died or the last tattooed elders are now alive. And so in some cases, there's been a rupture in those traditions.
00:56:27
Speaker
People may never be able to reclaim them for what they were. In other cases, there's still a chance to save that knowledge, to get back those things that were taken from indigenous cultures all around the globe. And so that, I think, is the most valuable and most important thing is this idea that it's part of individual identity.
00:56:48
Speaker
And it's part of both on the global scale and on the individual cultural scale. And that if people can re-find that, it helps us all sort of find a center, find a place in this global culture while also manifesting the things that are good about our individual cultures, about those individualities, about that uniqueness that different cultures have.
00:57:12
Speaker
Well, on that point, I think this is a good place to stop. And thank you for that just fantastic answer. We really appreciate it. And thank you for being on the podcast. Because this is called A Life in Ruins, we always have to ask at the end, if you have your choice, would you do it again? Would you be an archaeologist?
00:57:31
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. No doubt about it. I have landed in a great place. I think I'm really lucky compared to some of my peers as far as the job that I have and the structure that I have to work in and the research that I've been doing, but I wouldn't trade it for the world. It's what I want to do and it's what I really love doing.
00:57:51
Speaker
So thanks, Aaron. And we're going to shout out his Instagram at archaeologyinc. And yeah, we just interviewed Aaron Dieter Wolf, an archaeologist who studies tattooing in the past and who works for the state of Tennessee's division of archaeology. So we'll see you next time.
00:58:14
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 archaeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. So I've never understood this before. Why is it so hard to find evidence of tattooing in the archaeological record?
00:58:35
Speaker
Jesus Christ, I don't know why. I mean, you could describe it as finding a needle in a clay stack, but not always clay. Some gravel stacks or stand stacks. You're off, you're fired.
00:59:02
Speaker
This show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.