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Humans like decorating things - Ep 21
471 Plays9 months ago
After chatting with Danny all about the tools and techniques used in ancient tattooing, it’s time to talk about the tattoos themselves! For that, Matilda enlisted the help of professional archaeologist Aaron Deter-Wolf, who specialises in the study of ancient tattoos all around the world. But how exactly can you identify tattoos on badly preserved skin? Why were people tattooing in the past? And how can you juggle independent research with a day job? Tune in to this month’s episode to find out!
Also don’t forget that our APN members will be getting a special bonus episode later this week featuring a discussion with both Danny and Aaron about their collaborative projects! If you’re not a member yet, check out the APN membership page here for details.
Transcripts
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to Tea Break Time Travel, where every month we look at a different archaeological object and take you on a journey into their past.
Meet the Guest: Aaron Dieter-Wolf
00:00:17
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 21 of Tea Break Time Travel. I'm your host Matilda Siebrecht. Today I'm savoring a chai latte. I went a bit lazy on this one and I'm just using the chai latte powder with some milk, but you know what? It tastes delicious, so I don't care. And joining me on my tea break today is professional archaeologist Aaron Dieter-Wolf. And are you also drinking tea, coffee, anything, any hot beverage?
00:00:40
Speaker
I am. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I am going ginger turmeric today. I think it's supposed to help me with stress, and I don't know if it's doing that or not, but every little bit helps, right? Yeah, exactly. Ginger and turmeric are also supposed to be really good for warding off colds and stuff, which at the time of the year is probably a good thing as well. Again, it can't hurt.
00:01:04
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And you generally, so that's sort of more of a, well, I don't even know if that would count as herbal, because herbal to me is always like chamomile, but you're, you're not necessarily a black tea drinker, you go with like, well, the fruity, the fruity. I am all over the place. I don't really have a favorite, honestly. Most days I start out with coffee, and then it sort of depends on how the day is going is different if I make it off of coffee on and on to other things.
00:01:28
Speaker
fair enough. Your coffee is standard black coffee. Is it a fancy chai espresso latte macchiato caramel? I am a latte guy, yep. I enjoy the espresso and the milk, yep. Also always good. Well, thank you very much for joining me today. I appreciate it, especially if it sounds like it's a stressful time at the moment. Hopefully, this takes away some of the stress rather than adding more to it.
Journey into Archaeology
00:01:52
Speaker
So of course you are a professional archaeologist, you work in the sort of archaeological cultural heritage sector and of course you do sort of independent research which we'll get into in a second. But in terms of the kind of archaeology, what actually got you into archaeology in the first place? I always ask my guests this and every single time it's been a completely different answer so I'm very curious how the inspiration hit you.
00:02:15
Speaker
Sure, yeah. So in high school, I guess it was late high school, my family took a trip to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. And I was introduced to the Maya ruins at that time. And that was that would have been in 1991 or 1992. And so it was not quite sort of the tourist mecca that it's become now sort of a much earlier, more sort of rustic
00:02:43
Speaker
I guess experience and that really got me thinking about archaeology and then freshman year of college I took a Maya art and archaeology course and decided that this was a thing I wanted to do. But how come you then didn't sort of continue or did you decide not to continue in Mayan archaeology or did you just get drawn into other topics?
00:03:06
Speaker
So a little bit of both. So the school that I attended my college did not actually have the archaeology degree. They only had classical archaeology as a minor. And so I actually came out of undergrad with an art history degree of all things and then went to graduate school to study my archaeology.
00:03:24
Speaker
and worked for a couple of field seasons and in Belize in Guatemala excavating on Maya sites and eventually realized that there were too few jobs for my archaeologists and too many people who already had PhDs in the profession. And so I sort of changed focus and started working in cultural resource management here in the American Southeast. But the work that you were doing in South America was sort of research focused excavation things rather than the cultural heritage pool.
00:03:53
Speaker
Yeah, it was academic archaeology. So at that stage, because I was still a graduate student, I was working on other people's projects. And so they were projects at specific sites, redevelop or understanding the initial chronologies of some of these sites. You're doing sort of first on the ground excavations, trying to reconstruct when exactly these sites spanned and which communities live there and how they relate to the other communities in the periphery.
00:04:20
Speaker
And in terms of my personal experience in terms of excavation is indeed that kind of excavation, so research excavations, and then also working for, say, a commercial company who, you know, they're building a car park, they find a wall, we're sent in to dig up the wall, and then they build the car park. But in terms of cultural resource management, especially in the US seems to be a really big thing, what would you say are the kind of major differences in that sphere, in that line of work compared to kind of excavation archaeology?
00:04:45
Speaker
Well, I think it's very similar to what you described with the car park, right? So cultural resource management is sort of the shorthand for archaeology as business and compliance. And so I did that work for about seven or eight years after graduate school. And that's going out ahead of projects that are required to do federal or state level compliance or environmental permitting.
00:05:09
Speaker
If a project receives state-level permitting or federal permitting or receives federal money, one of their requirements may be to do environmental studies. That looks at endangered species. It looks at watersheds. It looks at pollution. It looks at archeology. We were out doing exactly that work, walking the path of a future transmission line and digging a hole every 30 meters.
00:05:34
Speaker
Yeah, that's basically what we're doing now in the company. It's like, oh, joy. Oh, another hole. Oh, great. Yeah. Yeah. And so I did that for about seven years or seven to 10 years or so and then was in sort of the right place at the right time when a job opened here at the Tennessee Division of Archaeology, which is the state of Tennessee's archaeology wing.
00:05:56
Speaker
We're part of this big environment and conservation umbrella. That's everything, again, from stream water and species to state parks and recreation. Archaeology is a very small cog in that wheel. Do you still dig, or is it mainly the more administrative side? Well, administrative makes it sound small, but you know what I mean? The policy and that kind of side.
00:06:19
Speaker
Yeah, there's not a lot of room for full-scale excavation anymore. There are, what, 36,000 or so recorded sites in Tennessee. And at this point, I'm the only prehistoric archaeologist with our group. So there's more that could be dug than I could possibly dig. And our focus is much more in a conservation and preservation side of things. Do you miss the digging?
00:06:45
Speaker
Sometimes, you know, sometimes I do, sometimes my back is just as happy that I'm not out there doing it anymore. I went out to an excavation site for the first time in ages the other week because I'm mainly doing the documentation and kind of communication side of things at the company, but I went and did some actual digging because I was like, yeah, I have a few hours, why not? And oh my gosh, my knees and my flex and my back the day after, I was like, yep, no, this is why I prefer lab work.
00:07:12
Speaker
Yup. Is that the permanent farmer's tan? Yes, all of it. As well. There's like the tinnitus from all the wind just whipping through the ears all the time. Yeah, basically. And also, so alongside your job as state archaeologist or an archaeologist within the state?
Tattoo Archaeology: A Personal Journey
00:07:29
Speaker
There you go. Yep. The state archaeologist sells so much. He's my boss. That's fine. He might not listen to this podcast.
00:07:40
Speaker
You also have become the kind of world's authority, one might say, on the archaeology of tattooing, which is something that we're going to talk about today. Usually I try and give a bit more of a spoiler, but seeing as we chatted with Daniel last week, and I said we were going to talk to you about tattooing last month, I mean, and we said we were going to talk with you about tattooing this month, I feel it's not really a spoiler. So how did that come about from a background in kind of excavation and Mayan? How did tattooing become a thing?
00:08:08
Speaker
For starters, you're being really generous and I appreciate that. I don't consider myself the expert on anything. I know a few things, but that's the result of having been reading for a decade and having formed some very close friendships with practitioners, with people like Danny and indigenous practitioners and full-time tattooists. It takes a village to do good research. I don't think any of us stand on our own in that regard.
00:08:34
Speaker
But all of that aside, yeah, I got interested in the topic back while I was still doing my archaeology. My first tattoos that I got were in graduate school were of Maya glyphs. And I think a lot of archaeologists get tattoos of the things they're studying, particularly in graduate school. It's like a good little CV. It's an easy way. You just turn up to your interview and say, look, this is what I was doing. Right. Yes. Put it on the front page of your CV, yeah.
00:09:03
Speaker
But, you know, everybody, there's kind of a general awareness that the Maya, you know, engage in a lot of different kinds of body modification. And, you know, while you're working there, you're you're finding tools, you're finding obsidian blades that, you know, or stingray spines, things that, you know, are associated with body modification. And, you know, I thought about it a little bit at the time, just because of myself having those tattoos and, you know, other graduate students and talking about it. But then when I switched focus to working here in the American Southeast,
00:09:33
Speaker
that sort of followed me in the back of my head for a number of years. And I started getting interested in this question of if tattooing was happening in the past, why aren't we finding it archaeologically? And particularly when you look at the first accounts of European and Native American interactions all along the eastern receiver of the United States, starting in, let's say, the 15th, 16th centuries.
00:09:59
Speaker
An incredible number of those accounts describe that the Native Americans who were encountering the Europeans, that the Native Americans were heavily tattooed. The language isn't quite there yet. The word tattoo wasn't part of the European lexicon yet, but you have these accounts where Spanish authors will describe that Native men in Florida had these designs on their skin which were pricked in with thorns and so could never be erased.
00:10:27
Speaker
And you're like, okay, they're talking about tattooing. So, yes, it was pretty clear indeed that they were referring to tattoos of these cultures that they were experiencing and that they were meeting.
00:10:39
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And there's art from the region that suggests tattooing was practiced at least several hundred years prior to the arrival of Europeans. And so, as an archaeologist working in this area, this got me interested in the question of, well, if people were doing this, if people were practicing tattooing, then why weren't we finding the artifacts of that practice? Where was the material culture?
00:11:03
Speaker
And at that time there had been maybe a dozen identifications over two centuries of possible tattooing implements from North America. And this really bugged me, right? I mean the thing about archaeology is we think we're interpreting the past. We think we're understanding people's behaviors and what they did and how they saw themselves in their societies and in their environments and here's this entire
00:11:30
Speaker
behavior, this entire aspect of human culture that we were apparently just blind to. The great thing about doing independent research is that you're not hemmed in then by geographic constraints or institutional constraints. In working on this question for North America, it sort of became clear that this is an issue all over the world.
00:11:54
Speaker
We know the ancient Egyptian tattoo. We don't know what tools they used to do it. And so then how do we solve that problem? And that's sort of been the through line that runs through my research then is this idea of, A, why have we overlooked this? And B, how can we be better about this?
00:12:12
Speaker
Well, we're going to talk more about that in a second, but first of all, of course, one more question I have to ask you, as this is tea break time travel, if you could travel back in time, where would you go and why? You know, I don't think I have a good answer for that. There's so much of the past.
00:12:31
Speaker
It would be amazing to see and so many different places and so many different cultures, you know, for my own research, being able to go back into the mid holocene in the southeastern United States would be amazing, you know, for any reason you could possibly think of going back to see the ancient Maya would be incredible.
00:12:51
Speaker
There's all of these cultures that we as archaeologists, I think, really appreciate, but don't really understand in that first person sort of way. And so getting to see any of them would be a privilege.
00:13:04
Speaker
I mean, there's a slight stereotype, right, for Americans and Australians, tourists coming to Europe, that you do a tour of the whole of Europe, you know, and spend one day in each place. That could be a similar thing for going back in time, right? Like you do a tour of the whole time period. There you go. The worst time travel tourist ever. It all is the highlight. Back on the bus.
00:13:29
Speaker
That sounds, I mean, why not? Let's sell it. If we start, if we ever go into time travel. On to Giza. Exactly. Cool. Well, thank you so much for joining me in my tea break today. So before we talk a little bit more about tattooing and the research surrounding it, we're going to journey back to the Pazarek Valley. I apologize in advance for any butchering that I do of that pronunciation. Aaron can correct me in a moment.
00:13:52
Speaker
In the Altai Mountains of Siberia, somewhere in the middle of the 4th century BC. Its dusk, there's the clicking and purring sounds of insects and other wildlife fills the air above the wide plains. Before us stands a huge pile of freshly dug soil, heaped around the smoothed stones of a tomb.
00:14:08
Speaker
In front of the mound, a crowd of people are gathered, some holding flaming torches, others bearing wreaths of woven hair and grass. They watch in silence as a procession approaches, several figures holding aloft a stretcher on which lies a muscled, middle-aged man. Although he's wrapped in expensive cloths, one arm lies uncovered along his side, revealing several elaborate swirling tattoos in the form of different animals. They seem to dance in the flickering firelight, but then the procession moves into the tomb and the animals fall still.
00:14:37
Speaker
I may have been slightly inspired when I was looking at the pictures. So how do you pronounce that correctly, Aaron? Do you know? I do not know. Okay, good. That makes me feel better. You have to ask Gino. Okay, perfect. I'll ask Gino and he can comment on this podcast when it's released and go, ugh, you guys, you don't know anything. So yeah, so these are, of course, the famous mummies, Pazoruk, mummies that were found in the caves in Siberia.
00:15:00
Speaker
And so we're going to talk today about tattoos. And we already spoke a bit with Danny last week about tattooing materials and the kind of tools and the methods and the techniques that are used. But we have Aaron here today to tell us a little bit more about the tattoos themselves and the research that goes into them. So we'll get a bit more into the details into the next section. But first, of course, we always have to look at the most asked questions on the internet, which, as I said to Danny, there was surprisingly little about tattooing, actually, when you did a sort of Google autofill search thing.
00:15:30
Speaker
There's very little. It's about especially ancient tattooing, which just, I think, proves your point that you said you were not interested enough in past tattooing, apparently. Of course, the main questions were all about origins. For example, when did the tattooing start and who did the first tattoos? Can you enlighten us at all about this? Trevor Burrus Boy, wouldn't it be great to be able to answer those?
00:16:00
Speaker
We'll start with the really small ones, right?
00:16:04
Speaker
We don't know. There just are not enough data points yet. We know tattooing as a practice goes back at least 5,000 years. That's the earliest direct evidence so far. If it goes back 5,000 years, it goes back further. We just don't have the archeological or historical evidence to talk about it in those terms yet. And as for who is doing it, again, I don't think we know enough to really say we can take
00:16:30
Speaker
We can take historical cultures and, you know, based on what we know about them, project into the past. And that's, you know, that's one way of looking at how people behave in the past, but it also comes with some dangers, right? You're projecting these things over time and space. And the further you go from the cultures you're using, the more error you're incurring. But doing that, I think we would intuit that the people doing the tattooing
00:16:59
Speaker
were not just every dude around the campfire, right? These were practices that were probably done by healers, by shaman, by ritual practitioners because of all of the things that were tied in with them, because of the sacred symbols, because of the letting of blood, that it
Interpreting Tattoo Evidence with Technology
00:17:17
Speaker
was not just a casual thing that was done.
00:17:21
Speaker
So it's assumed that it was sort of part of some kind of, I hate to use the word ritual, but you know what I mean. I'm in terms of the rituals. Look, we're archeologists. If we don't understand it, we call it ritual. You know how this works. I do. I do.
00:17:36
Speaker
I'd just like to pretend I don't do it, but who knows? It would likely have occurred, I suppose, around the same time that maybe ornamentation or that we see evidence for other forms of decoration starting, would you say? Or do you think that it could have even been?
00:17:52
Speaker
Right. I mean, boy, that would be cool, right? I mean, you know, the body decoration is one of the, what do they call it? The behavioral bees is one of those traits that makes allegedly makes biologically modern humans different from our cousins. You know, it's what makes us supposedly stand out from, you know, Homo erectus and all these other, all these other individuals who are roaming around the landscape before us.
00:18:20
Speaker
And, you know, as soon as humans become human, we start decorating stuff. We start making beads. We start, you know, processing ochres for pigments. Like, it's really deeply embedded in who we are as a creature. And, you know, sure, right? I mean, what's it take to get that first accidental tattoo? You know, when you are around a campfire and get, you know, poked by the piece of wood with charcoal on it, that mark never goes away.
00:18:48
Speaker
This was actually a really interesting point that Daniel raised last month in that one theory that he had from his mentor was that it was during the butchering process because you're covered in all this sort of fat and then that gets mixed up with the soot of the fire as you're processing and then you have these sharp obsidian blades so you just automatically get little cuts and nicks everywhere and then somehow that turns into tattoos which I really like that theory.
00:19:11
Speaker
Right. Well, I mean, obviously, people are going to be aware of the possibility of human skin holding pigment because of accidents like that. And then at the point at which people then have complex symbolism, if you're painting something on cave walls and it's semi-permanent, or if you're painting it on bodies and it's semi-permanent, how much better and more important is it to put those same designs on skin in a way that they don't go away, in a way that's
00:19:38
Speaker
there until the person dies. And so I think it's a quick step to the side to reach this idea of scarification or tattooing. But indeed, but the short answer is we don't know when tattooing started or who did the first one. Good, good. Well, we've covered that. Let's have a very quick break and we will be back soon.
00:20:00
Speaker
Welcome back, everyone. We don't actually know any more about tattoos. We just know how much we don't know about tattoos. Maybe we can discuss even more than we don't know about tattoos. Let's start with something that we do know. For example, how many examples, and this might be a bit too specific a question, so feel free to interpret it as you wish, but how many examples of actual ancient tattoos do we have that we can surely say, that is a tattoo?
00:20:28
Speaker
More than you would think. So one of my side projects is the tattoo human mummy database. And so this is a thing where it's an open source database where I just keep track of all of the published examples of tattoos from the ancient past. So these are things that are preserved on human skin deliberately or accidentally mummified human skin.
00:20:50
Speaker
And I think at last count, we're up to about 50 or so archaeological sites on five or so continents. Wow, and that's sites even, not even necessarily individuals. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's actual identifiable sites. And then beyond that, there's sort of this indefinite
00:21:10
Speaker
body of preserved tattoos that come from things like historical sources where, you know, maybe a British, a British writer traveling in Sudan just, you know, in the 1800s writes this offhand thing about, and in the cemetery near such and such, all of the mummies had tattoos. You're like, okay, well, we don't know what site that is. And we don't know what all of the mummy or is this being one? Does it be 500? So, you know, there's that there's that kind of error in there. But
00:21:39
Speaker
That number is increasing constantly and there have been more identifications that preserved tattoos in the past decade than there were in the century before that. In terms of the kind of technology that's used to identify tattoos, because I believe Danny mentioned something about using kind of infrared and that could then show you tattoos that hadn't been
00:22:02
Speaker
seen before? What is the process of tattoos being hidden that we can now get to? Or are there some processes that we haven't worked out how to interpret yet?
00:22:17
Speaker
are the big ones, are the big tools in that kit. Even if you can't see the tattoo visibly, the human epidermis, depending on the preservation conditions, skin might darken, it might twist, it might lay over itself. Parts of it may degrade more than others. It may be covered with body paint or with clothing or other things.
00:22:42
Speaker
There are certainly examples of preserved human remains that have not been identified as being tattooed, but that might be. The way the multispectral imaging or the infrared imaging works basically relies on the fact that tattoo pigment absorbs and reflects light in these spectra, in these different spectra differently than untattooed skin does.
00:23:06
Speaker
And so even if the surface of the skin is, say, you know, a dark brown, a rich mahogany brown from being exposed to the desert for centuries, right? When you look at it in the near infrared spectrum, that light will absorb and reflect differently on the tattooed skin and the non-tattooed skin, and so you can see those marks.
00:23:27
Speaker
Even after all those years. There were examples when Danny and I were working in that collection of Andean remains where we would point the camera at an arm or a body part that had no visible sign and all of a sudden you're looking at not just like single dots but complex compositions of tattoos encircling the whole arm that would otherwise never had been noticed. How did you get any actual work done? I would have just been squealing the whole time.
00:23:57
Speaker
There's a lot of that. It's like any archeological project. It starts out with giddiness and you're ready to go. You're going to do all these things and by day four, you're on the death march. You're like, oh my God, we've got 200 more to go. We're never going to get through this. Another tattoo.
00:24:15
Speaker
great. Let's document this one, I guess. We've run out of recording sheets. I mean, amazing, amazing. I assume this is, by the way, being written up and will be published some point soon.
00:24:31
Speaker
Hopefully sooner than later. Actually, there's a German colleague who is working on the question of Andean remains in European Museum collections for his dissertation. We've been collaborating and publication of a lot of this may wait until after his dissertation is out so as not to interrupt that process.
00:24:53
Speaker
Fair enough, fair enough. Are we allowed to know who it is in case people want to look at it? Sure, yeah. Robin Gerst. G-E-R-S-T is his name. Yeah, he's in Germany and he's actually presented at the World Mummy Congress and he and I coauthored a paper at the recent European Archaeological Association or European Society of Archaeology. I never can remember what the EAA meeting. The European Association. There you go. Yeah, well, I should know it. I was there in the last one as well.
00:25:21
Speaker
But yeah, fantastic. Oh, so you've got your own tattooing apprentice now. No, no, no. Collaborator. Collaborator. Oh, that's very good. Yeah. And in terms of when you're interpreting these tattoos then, because as you said, the skin's all twisted or it's dark or it's how much kind of imagination is needed. I think I saw at some point recently you posted on your social media about kind of some alpha and omega sign that had been identified and you were saying, that's a bit of a stretch of the imagination. I mean, how much
00:25:49
Speaker
How much bias is there, would you say, in the interpretation of that? Or how can you avoid that, I guess? It's hard, right? I think it's like any sort of art history or any sort of working with ancient symbolism, especially on artifacts. There's all different levels of preservation. The best cases
00:26:09
Speaker
You can just look at these things and see them with the naked eye and they're incredible and you can draw them out by hand very easily. And in the worst cases, skin is degraded or pieces are missing or the marks themselves have interruptions in them from curation processes or from preservation processes. And yeah, a lot of it can be sort of art rather than science, honestly.
00:26:36
Speaker
And did you find, for example, when you were looking at this sort of big collection of different mummies, that you would sort of see some symbols on one and go, I'm not sure what that is. OK, maybe it's kind of this and then maybe you'd see the same symbols on another one. Or was it all quite varied? No, absolutely. So again, it sort of works like any form of ancient art. You know, you look at after you look at a couple thousand of the thing, you can squiggly snake. Yeah, exactly. You had a pretty good, pretty good ability to sort of pick out
00:27:04
Speaker
Based on the outlines, based on the shared sizes and ephemeral shapes, you can more closely, I think, push things into buckets. This one's probably a fish based on these other 500 fish we've seen.
00:27:22
Speaker
And in terms of, we've kind of spoken a little bit about how, like, why these tattoos would have come about and how they would have come about, but they, like you say, they're sort of, they're art. Do you think that people tattoo just simply as a form of decoration or would there be other kind of reasons, I suppose, for painting themselves with these different symbols or, you know, pictures, I guess?
00:27:44
Speaker
My bet is that it was rarely a personal form of decoration. Now, of course, once tattoos on your body, it becomes part of your identity, regardless of how it was, what the cultural processes were that got it there. But again, based on what we know about historical pre-Western tattooing and projecting into the past,
00:28:06
Speaker
Our expectation is that these are things that were not necessarily selected by the individual, but were given to them by value of who they were in the society, by honors they had earned, by who their parents were, by what their lineage was, by the individual who was doing the tattooing. That's sort of what we expect, is that there wasn't the same idea of people just picking things out and getting them.
00:28:34
Speaker
That's pretty. I want the butterfly. Now, having said that, for example, I've seen so many tattoos from the Andes now that have such a wide variety, such a huge variation, and no two of them are the same. And we'll see the same motifs, but blocked into completely different, within completely different sleeves, right? Compositions that run all the way from the knuckles up to the fore, up to the elbow. And so I don't quite know how to explain that.
00:29:03
Speaker
A year ago, I would have said, oh yeah, no, everybody's just getting what they're given, but then you see that much variation in the sample and you say, well, maybe not, right? Maybe this is the exception that proves the rule. I guess I'm trying to think of other forms of decoration, I suppose it's similar in that you have the same kind of, I'm trying to think of like this, I can't remember now which culture it is.
00:29:25
Speaker
In Africa, there's a culture which I remember have different beaded necklaces, and the necklace said whether you were married, whether you had children, depending on how many you had. Obviously, the more necklaces you had, the higher your social status was, because it showed that you had all these different tasks completed in that way.
00:29:44
Speaker
But still, the necklaces were all different, but they were still the beaded necklaces, if that makes sense. Right. Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, and with clothing or any other form of body decoration, you know, in some cases, it is socially mandated. You know, the headdresses look the same and only certain people get them. But in other cases, there's a lot of variation and a lot more individuality agency in those choices.
00:30:08
Speaker
Yeah, or even to something, I'm thinking something even more modern, like, you know, a tie. It's like, yes, you have to wear a tie to work, but everyone. No one said it couldn't have cats on it. So, you know, no, you have to get this type of tattoo. Well, no one said it had to be that because it's older and a little bit.
00:30:27
Speaker
And would you say then that all cultures, because like you say, more and more examples of ancient tattoos are sort of coming to light every day, and we have all these historic and ethnographic references which state that a lot of these cultures in the past and present, I suppose, had tattoos. Would you say that all cultures had some form of tattooing tradition or other kind of body modification? Boy, that's a limb to go out on, isn't it? Right? All culture.
00:30:54
Speaker
Or would you say a large percentage likely had it, I guess? Because it's one of those things that I suppose you don't really think about, like you say, unless you are forced to think about it, you know? Right. Well, so one of the projects that my buddy Ben Robitaille and I have been working on over the years is mapping out tool forms.
00:31:13
Speaker
accounts of tattooing technologies on this global scale. When you look at that map, it is really inching towards every piece of habitable land to where we have these accounts from. I increasingly think that, like you said, more cultures than not.
00:31:31
Speaker
had some form of tattooing. Now, it wasn't always positive, right? I mean, empires seem to hate tattooing. And that's sort of an interesting thread in the histories as well, is that these large empires, whether it's the Western colonialism or Han China or the Inca, those are groups that may use tattooing, but they use it for negative reasons.
00:31:55
Speaker
Right. Whereas the groups on their periphery use tattooing as marks of inclusion, of being a part of the culture. And so, you know, there's always that tension of like, you know, some groups, once it's on the skin of a person or a group, it becomes a mark of belonging. But the people next door to them, those same marks are a mark of
00:32:16
Speaker
of the outsider, of the other. Belonging with it in a bad way. Yes, yeah. And so particularly I think then when you have these political structures that are trying to suppress individuality and sort of bring in these regional cultures under the umbrella of the one big culture, capital C, one of the things they do is they suppress individual, they suppress language, they suppress traditional dress, they suppress traditional religion and body decoration of all forms.
00:32:46
Speaker
because I guess it shows an individuality or a part of something that shouldn't be its own individuality anymore. It should be part of the bigger thing. In that sense, do you then see, if we imagine that a lot of different cultures had these tattoos, but in terms of what you've seen so far with your research or in terms of what you've read, are there
00:33:10
Speaker
regional or temporal trends? I imagine there must be. I guess it's like anything. It's like stone tools. They just appeared everywhere all over the world. They just appeared everywhere. There's a lot of similarities that you see. Do you see a lot of differences in the symbolism? How does it vary, I suppose, over place and time?
00:33:32
Speaker
I think you think about stone tools is exactly right. There are ceramics, there are stone tools everywhere, but the specifics of that are going to vary depending on the group in question, their relationship with groups outside of themselves, how isolated or connected they are to networks, to trade networks, what material culture they have in their local environment to work with.
00:33:57
Speaker
And, you know, again, you can sort of envision this in terms of art styles, too, right? The art of certain cultures is going to be similar, although not exact. Whereas then, if you compare that to a culture on the other side of the world, well, you know, maybe they use two straight lines to symbolize a path. Right. Or, you know, vertical lines mean rain. But otherwise, there's going to be an entirely different set of symbols attached to it.
00:34:22
Speaker
And in terms of comparing it with the art, do you find that in those cases where you have access to examples of both other forms of art and the tattoos, do you see similarities? Are they tattooing themselves with what they're also painting the walls with or carving into their stone or something like that?
00:34:40
Speaker
Not necessarily with the same tools, but definitely with the same motifs, right? There's a couple of papers that talk about this in terms of like scarification in Africa and how the decorations on people's bodies are reflected on pots, on ceramic vessels.
00:34:59
Speaker
And the locations are very similar. We sort of anthropomorphize ceramic vessels. They have shoulders, they have mouths, they have waist. And so the decorations tend to match up for where they are on pots and where they are on people's bodies. I heard someone once talk about the idea that things that are marked onto the earth
00:35:21
Speaker
So petroglyphs, cave art, things like this, that those oftentimes appear then also as tattoos in the culture. And the idea that this, I can't remember who this was, I apologize, but the idea that they were floating was sort of this idea of like, you know, again, we anthropomorphize the earth, right? It is the earth mother, it's the earth being. And so the things that you are marking onto the earth, you are also then marking onto the body of people.
00:35:43
Speaker
He's like, I mean, it could almost be like a little, not CV, what is it, portfolio, you know, as well. Like, oh, it's all these redesigns. It's like the original studio. You go, that's what the caves were. Well, I was going to say, Danny, a year from now, we'll hang up this flash in a French cave.
00:35:58
Speaker
Yeah, Danny's designs were being used. He's now being inspired again. That would be hilarious if the different caves Lascaux and everything. We're actually just sitting there going, yeah, well, these are my options. Oh, you want to find some? Yeah, sure. I mostly do rhinoceroses and burns. That guy does the lines. You want to go to that cave?
00:36:23
Speaker
I mean, I like that idea. I'm sort of practicing it first on the earth. Or vice versa, I suppose it could have been vice versa, let me practice on my own body first before I you know, carve it into Mother Nature. And you've already mentioned it a little bit, but I thought it would be interesting to talk a bit more about
00:36:41
Speaker
who does the tattooing? Because I remember I had you and Maya Cialok on the Exarch show, another podcast that I do, and we've talked about tattooing. And she was talking about, of course, the Inuit tradition of tattooing, which is mainly done by women, for example.
Cultural Contexts of Tattooing
00:36:56
Speaker
And it's sort of one of these things, a bit like you were saying earlier, that you have to you have to kind of earn it from the
00:37:01
Speaker
from the community, it wasn't necessarily something that you kind of selfishly got to do yourself, if that makes sense. And you mentioned earlier that you think it might have been more the maybe the shamans or the sort of ceremonial figures, I guess, in the community who would have been doing it rather than just everyone. Is there kind of a reason for your thinking about that or what ideas do you have about that?
00:37:23
Speaker
Well, I think that is largely based on historical analogy. That is the thing that we see throughout the pre-modern world where we have reliable historical accounts is that the people doing the tattooing held a special status. That wasn't always, quote unquote, ritual status. They might have been itinerant tattooists traveling from village to village, but it was not just something that was done by your mom or by anybody, by your buddies in the basement.
00:37:52
Speaker
It was something that there was this whole framework around. It's really hard to talk about ritual in the past because some of it may be related to cosmology or to how you view the world or how you see spirits, but some of it may be just related to health concerns.
00:38:13
Speaker
Tattooing involves the piercing of the skin, the letting of blood. It is a process in which you are open to infection. It is a high risk sort of behavior. I think that part of why it tends to be done by specialists is because these are people who are versed in the taboos and the traditions.
00:38:34
Speaker
And some of those tattoos may be purely social, right? You don't eat this animal while you're giving the tattoos, but others of them about what happens afterwards and how the tattoos are treated and this kind of thing relate to health and to healing and to these ideas of helping a person get through this process.
00:38:54
Speaker
which relates to a lot of other folklore and things in different parts of the world and in different time periods as well. A lot of the superstitions and all of the myths and legends and everything are actually, indeed, just related to be like, yes, and after you have done this, you have to drink the water of a moon, because it's like three liters every day, because it is sort of like, well, yeah, you need to hydrate, basically.
00:39:19
Speaker
Yeah. In my mind too, this is why I think that a lot of tattooing traditions historically are connected to rites of passage. If you were just kind of wave your hand across the globe, many, many, many, maybe most traditions are related to ideas like coming of age or becoming an adult or transitioning from the uninitiated to the initiated.
00:39:43
Speaker
It's this liminal process where you come out the other side and you've got marks on your body that show the world that you are now this other thing. I guess remind yourself as well that you are. Right. That may be that you're an adult. It can be simple as like, oh, they're an adult. Or it may be, oh, they're a marked warrior. They have access to these other things, whatever. But these rites of passage, which again,
00:40:10
Speaker
There's a lot of issues surrounding those sorts of events that they're supposed to be painful, they're supposed to be difficult, but you're also supposed to live through them. The people that are administering them are healers, are wise women, wise people that are familiar with these processes and can help usher you through it.
00:40:33
Speaker
Oh, very reasonable, I would say. Sounds good to me. You convinced me. So we're going to take another quick break now so that those listening can have an opportunity to top up their tea, but we will be back soon.
The Tattoo Archaeology Community
00:40:47
Speaker
Welcome back everyone. Hopefully the teacups are now a little bit fuller again. Make sure to call down a bit, don't scold yourself. So Aaron, we did already introduce you in the first section of this episode, and we talked a little bit about kind of how you got into this topic, but maybe we can go into a bit more detail. So, I mean, you've mentioned a couple of different collaborators that you work with, but how big is the kind of archaeological tattoo community, I guess?
00:41:10
Speaker
It is still pretty niche. There's a core group of us that have been working on these questions for the past decade and then some people for much longer than that. We all know each other. It makes it very hard to do anonymous peer review. Because you're like, oh, that's both peers. Right. That's obviously Matt's paper. Yes.
00:41:34
Speaker
So there are a very small number of people that are working full-time professionally in this. And I get called constantly, or inquiries from students, and they say, how can I go into tattoo archaeology? And I'm like, well, honestly, you can't.
00:41:49
Speaker
You know, like I have the freedom to do tattoo archaeology because it is completely independent, because it's not part of my job. It doesn't have requirements on it. And so, you know, if someone wants to study this thing, the best advice I can give them is, you know, you need to pick a type of object or type of art and a region and then go into it through that route, because modern academia doesn't just doesn't support the idea of like, I'm going to be a generalist.
00:42:19
Speaker
Yeah. No, no, no. No, no, no. Bone tools from this one site in this one place.
00:42:30
Speaker
I have a lot of people ask me because I went the other route, I guess I specialised in a method, which is similar, like it's a very specific, microwave analysis, a very specific method, right? And it's very specific materials that I look at as well. But then it does allow me to look at different regions, which is quite nice. So people are, archaeologists are indeed always confused when they're like, but what's your cultural specialism? And I'm going, I don't really have one. But indeed, I'm still specialised in a method, which fits.
00:42:57
Speaker
And that's the thing, right? I mean, it's how the Academy is built. I mean, you can be an archeologist of households, but when you actually then cut through that, you're going to have looked at, you're going to have spent years knowing way too much about the households of this one particular region during this one particular period. And, you know, there's information that translates when you start looking at the bigger picture, but you can't just go into it broadly. And so that I think is where I've been really, really fortunate is to sort of be able to do that independently.
00:43:27
Speaker
which in which case in case people are listening in and you know are thinking no but that sounds good I want to do that. Do you have any kind of suggestions for maybe gaps in the current research in terms of specific tools in terms of specific regions or things that maybe someone might be able to pick for a dissertation topic or something like that?
00:43:44
Speaker
Right. Well, I mean, there is still a lot of work waiting to be done. I think the problem for when you start talking about dissertations is, can you make a dissertation out of it? And so, you know, there are a lot of, you know, we've run across a lot of people who for, you know, undergraduates,
00:44:01
Speaker
thesis or undergraduate summative papers are doing things like tattooing in Egypt. And that's great. That's, again, this sort of broad spectrum, broad look at behavior within a region. But once they get to graduate school, if they want to pursue that specifically, how many tools might there actually be? How many collections can you actually get access to? These are the sorts of questions that are going to sort of haunt you if you're trying to make these pieces of
00:44:31
Speaker
We're living the dream! I know that feeling as well. I had a similar experience when I was going, yeah, the Scottish Carpet of Moors! I went and looked at them, and then Alison Sheridan, the lovely curator at the National Museum of Scotland, basically said to me, but how many years do you have? How many lifetimes do you have to look at this topic?
00:44:53
Speaker
Yeah. That's what we're then seeing is that new voices in this niche field are getting into it as related to their broader research. They're finding things while they are working on other questions.
00:45:08
Speaker
And I think that's really the important thing. And that is sort of the, my goal having gotten into this was sort of to lift this veil a little bit and be like, well, again, why weren't people doing it in the past? Well, how can we change it? Well, one of the ways we can change it is by having people look for it.
00:45:24
Speaker
And in terms of that kind of idea that it's becoming a little bit more of a bigger topic, I mean how is the study of tattoos or body modification in general or other related topics or themes, is that sort of becoming less of a, I don't want to say taboo subject, because I wouldn't say it was necessarily taboo, but more of a popular subject or more respected, I guess, as a subject in the academic archaeological community?
Changing Perceptions in Tattoo Archaeology
00:45:48
Speaker
I think so. My anecdote that I tell, right, is that when I first got into this, over a decade ago now, I had reached out to one of the very sort of senior scholars on southeastern archaeology, Southeast United States archaeology, and said, I want to look at this with tattoos. And he kind of like, he harrumphed at me and said something like, there are more graduate students with tattoos of ancient art than there were tattooed people in the ancient world.
00:46:16
Speaker
And that, by the way, is example one for why we are not finding it. Yeah, because it's assumed that they would. Right, because there's an assumption that it's just not there or that it's, you know, whatever, right? Tattooing is for criminals and prostitutes and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:46:36
Speaker
So, there's definitely a bias at work there. Anecdotally, the people that seem to be really interested in this are the younger generation, or people that are even younger than me. I somehow have crossed that line where I'm not part of that generation anymore of other scholars, which kind of stinks. I'm going, wait, watch your house? I thought you would. No, no, no, no, no.
00:47:03
Speaker
And, you know, as far as reception wise, I mean, you know, when I give papers at conferences, I definitely from time to time feel this whole like, oh, here's Aaron talking about tattooing again. But also like the hell with you, right? Like, you know, I'm actually publishing on this. What are you doing?
00:47:20
Speaker
Exactly. It's peer reviewed. It's valid research. It sounds like there's some exciting things coming about as well. You mentioned that there's more graduate students with tattoos than age tattoos. Do you think that in order to kind of... And like you say, you've already said that you don't necessarily approach it from the topic of
00:47:36
Speaker
studying tattoos, you approach it from different ways. But would you say that in order to understand, I guess, the kind of older methods and techniques and experiences around tattooing, you have to either have tattoos yourself or have tattooed yourself? Or do you think that someone with no tattoos could also come in and do it?
00:47:53
Speaker
Well, if we can't study it by doing it, then anthropology is out the window. If we have to be a part of the culture to understand it, then we might as well just give up. That is what anthropology does. We're outside observers. We should be able to make this happen. But in practice, not having that bias certainly helps.
00:48:18
Speaker
looking back, that is a big change from the previous generation to my generation of scholars was not necessarily having been tattooed, but being in a generation where tattooing was more commonplace. And so being able to look at
00:48:36
Speaker
you know, look more sort of, I don't know, open, be more open in looking at these ideas and considering the past. And getting, you know, there was a lot of scholarship on tattoos in the anthropological community in the, in the, you know, the 1990s, but so much of it was, you know, modern primitives, this and, you know, social rejects that and, you know, like all these kinds of things. And you're sitting like a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a
00:49:05
Speaker
Yeah, no, I mean, you know, it's all the sociological studies about how, you know, if you have tattoos, then you're going to do drugs and die in a fire, right? Like there's a high statistical correlation.
00:49:17
Speaker
But I think getting past those ideas was really important. So I don't think you yourself have to be tattooed, but I think you need to be open to these ideas. And I also think that people just need to do their reading. That's the biggest thing when you look back at the 18th and 19th and even early 20th centuries with people talking about or looking at tattoos
00:49:37
Speaker
in the past is they're just very limited in their ideas of how the process was done, what the techniques were, what the tools were. They want everything to look like Samoa, right? That was, quote unquote, ancient tattooing as they knew it. And so they wanted everything to be hand tapped. And they wanted it to be done for reasons. There's those great accounts of the Amunet and the women from Dhirabahari, I believe it is, and Thebes that were found in the 1900s.
00:50:07
Speaker
High state is women in the tomb, in the complex, funerary complex of a pharaoh, and are found to be tattooed. This is around the turn of the century, I think. The first discussion of these women is that, well, clearly, they were concubines.
00:50:24
Speaker
because they were tattooed. They were in service to the pharaoh. So being able to step away from those things is really, really important to understanding it. Which I mean, hopefully, if you've gotten that far in an archaeology or anthropology degree, I would hope that you already have learned a little bit about removing yourself from the bias of modern life anyway.
00:50:50
Speaker
But indeed, sort of- Yeah, although again, the generation matters. People 40 years ago were learning a much different vision of the past than we learn today. But it's good to hear that it's getting a bit more open and a bit more accepted, a bit more generally kind of talked about, I suppose, as well. I imagine you get a lot of people coming to you and saying, oh, I have this idea or something. Yeah, I hope so, right? I mean, I hope I'm not just shouting into the void here.
00:51:20
Speaker
Increasingly, again, this is where I'm really privileged to be able to do this as independent research, is increasingly I'm sort of moving away from that academic discourse and instead trying to talk more to the tattoo community, to people who actually do this as their profession. Because tattooists are really interested in the history of their discipline, of their practice.
00:51:41
Speaker
Very few of them have access to journals that are behind paywalls. I think it's really maybe even more important than sharing it with the academy is sharing what we know with people that are actually doing this and living this today.
00:51:57
Speaker
I'm very, very much a pro at that one. You mentioned that you're doing, obviously, independent research. Obviously, this isn't your day job, shall we say. It's the extra work that you do when you have the time and funding, I presume. How do you manage to balance that kind of doing independent research with actually having a daily job?
00:52:24
Speaker
So, you know, I think it kind of works like an ADHD thing with me, right? Like, you know, where like I get ideas in my head, and they kind of just percolate there. And there's almost kind of a narrative that's running, you know, kind of running in the background on a low hum. And, you know, things will sit back there for a while. And then, you know, I'll even I'll even find myself like writing when I'm asleep, or, you know, I'll wake up and be like, Oh, this is what that section of the paper should look like.
00:52:51
Speaker
And then so if I can find the time to then bang that out, then it's great. The reality of it is that my wife is very forgiving. And support me on this. Same. Everybody says, how do you manage to do all your different things? I'm like, because my husband is also. Because I have a great support network. That is the answer. Yeah.
00:53:15
Speaker
No, but I can imagine there's so many people I know who have their projects and they're so passionate about it and they're so interested in it, but they just can't get the funding or they just can't actually get an academic position. So they go into a different job and then just don't have the time or the energy to do it. So I'm always curious to hear people who are managing to balance it and to combine it.
00:53:38
Speaker
how it works or it doesn't work. I think it's become my hobby and that is how I view it and that's how then when I'm doing these unfunded research trips to Germany to look at mommies in a museum. I don't get reimbursement for this. This is done on vacation time. There is no university funding. It's out of pocket, but it is my hobby. That's what I spend money on. Some people spend money on miniatures for Wargaming. Some people spend them on...
00:54:07
Speaker
Bottles of whiskey. Some people spend them on tattooed mummies. It's just, it's what you're into. I can just imagine your wife going, Oh, where are we going on the holiday this year? Oh, well, we're going to this. Where are the mummies? No, darling, we're definitely going on holiday this time. Those are days where I peel off and we do the things that we are separately interested in.
00:54:34
Speaker
That works, that works. She can go and look at her, I don't know, her Viking horned helmet or something. Her hobby. I think that it sounds like an excellent way to have a hobby and a really nice hobby in that respect. And in terms of kind of, I mean, we've already touched a little bit on the different kind of the approach, the how it is viewed and all of that kind of thing, but are there any kind of other issues or are there any other, what you would see it as advantages of kind of
00:55:04
Speaker
this more of a niche topic within academic research? Well, I guess the big advantage is that it doesn't seem like the well will ever run dry.
Future of Tattoo Archaeology
00:55:14
Speaker
I really thought, in 2013, my first book, Drawing with Great Needles, which is about tattooing in ancient Eastern North America, came out as an edited volume. But at that time, I was like, well, I've done that. And then stuff just kept coming up.
00:55:29
Speaker
And so I think that's, you know, just having continued to try to keep a curious mind has done that. And yeah, there's definitely this kind of outsider status that in some ways benefits you, where, you know, on one hand, I don't have a PhD, I don't have a university affiliation. On the other hand, I'm just some guy that's going to keep politely asking until they let me do the thing I want to do.
00:55:52
Speaker
Well, and I would say, I mean, you were very modest at the start, but I would say, indeed, you have made a name for yourself now as the tattoo guy. Well, I appreciate that. So it's working. You're asking enough questions. And on that note, do you have any kind of exciting plans or projects that are coming up? I believe this episode will be released end of February or mid to end of February.
00:56:14
Speaker
Is there anything you're allowed to talk about by that point? By the time this comes out, hopefully Danny and some others and I will have an article in the European Journal of Archaeology about everyone's favorite tattooed ice man. Hopefully that will be out in print.
00:56:31
Speaker
Okay, in which case I'll share it in the show notes. That's right. Take the show notes and then you'll be able to see if it came to fruition. No, I'm excited about that one. That's one of those things that sort of ran around my head starting back during the pandemic and eventually just got the right team of people together to work on it. And so we're reassessing the sort of conventional wisdom as to how his tattoos may have been created.
00:56:56
Speaker
Yeah, so that's coming out and there's another paper too that Danny and I are both working on related to similar topics to this idea coming out of our experimental archaeological study of can we look at preserved tattoos and talk about how they were actually made and sort of take the guesswork out of that process, make informed hypotheses.
00:57:18
Speaker
The Oxford Handbook on the Archaeology of Body Modification will be coming out, is coming out already. It's sort of coming out online as chapters are finished, but it's going to be in print late next year. And that's going to be a huge book that will have everything from genital mutilation to Andean tattooing. Wow, amazing. Oh, very cool. Joining the list of handbooks.
00:57:48
Speaker
Yes, yeah. And so for various colleagues, and I have a couple of chapters in that, and it'll be good for those to see the light of day too. Yeah. Perfect. Okay. Well, I'll make sure to share them as well. So yes, if anyone's interested, do keep checking the things. Any other final, final chance for any other plugs or, I don't know, declarations of passion for tattoos?
00:58:12
Speaker
No, I guess not. Follow me on the Instagram. Which is also in the show. Right. Great. But seriously, this is one of the big fulfillments and enjoyments I get out of doing this research is talking with people about it and sharing the information. And that's sort of why that Instagram account was created. And reach out. Ask me questions. Folks should feel free any time. There are no stupid questions. We're all learning together. So yeah, reach out any time.
00:58:42
Speaker
Well, thank you so much for coming to chat to me today. I very much appreciate it. That marks the end of our tea break. It sounds like you've got a lot to get on with. You've got a whole topic to do. Thank you very much for joining me and chatting to me about tattoos today. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate your time.
00:58:59
Speaker
And if anyone else indeed wants to find out more about Aaron's work, history of tattoos, anything else we've talked about today, do check the show notes and there'll be Aaron's contact information there as well, so you can start bombarding him with all your questions about tattooing. And do not forget that for our APN members, there's also a special bonus episode coming out next week with Aaron and Danny together, who was the professional tattoo artist and guest from my last month's episode, to talk more about one of their recent collaborative projects.
00:59:27
Speaker
Hope that you enjoyed our journey today. If you want to help support this show and all of the other amazing series that form the Archaeology Podcast Network, you can become a member. You get access to extra bonus content such as this special bonus episode. You also get exclusive early access to ad-free episodes, and you also just help us to create even more amazing content. For more information, check out the homepage at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com. See you next month!
00:59:51
Speaker
I hope that you enjoyed our journey today. If you did, make sure to like, follow, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and I'll see you next month for another episode of Tea Break Time Travel.
01:00:03
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. 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 chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.