Sub-millimeter near-infrared imaging was used by researchers at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg to map every tattoo on a 2,300-year-old Siberian ice mummy, as detailed in a study in the journal Antiquity.
The roughly 50-year-old woman belonged to the horse-riding Pazyryk culture that once roamed the steppe between China and Europe. Discovered decades ago in a frozen kurgan in the Altai Mountains, her skin held only faint ink traces until the new scans revealed crisp depictions of leopards, a stag, a rooster, and a half-lion, half-eagle creature.
Overlapping lines showed where the artist paused and resumed work. The right forearm, bearing three leopards surrounding a deer’s head, displayed finer craftsmanship than the left, leading researchers to conclude that two sessions or artists contributed. “These tattoos bring the person directly closer to the artist behind the art,” said lead author Gino Caspari of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, according to BBC News.
Tattooist and collaborator Daniel Riday estimated that the lower half of the right arm alone required about four and a half hours. “Imagine sitting on the ground in the steppe where there’s wind blowing all that time,” Riday said, according to BBC News.
The imaging also revealed marks left by a previously unknown hand-poking tool. “We envision the multi-point tool as being a tightly clustered bundle of tines, probably bound together with thread or sinew,” said Aaron Deter-Wolf of the Tennessee Division of Archaeology, according to BBC News. Burnt plant material or soot likely provided the pigment.
Because many tattoos were cut during embalming, the team suggested that the Pazyryk did not believe the markings carried meaning into the afterlife. “It’s possible that cutting through the tattoos during embalming held some ritual significance,” Deter-Wolf added, according to BBC News.
Pazyryk elites were interred in timber-lined, stone-capped mounds dug into permafrost, which preserved skin, clothing, and even stomach contents. Earlier infrared studies had recorded other Pazyryk designs, yet the new images showed that every line on the woman’s hands maintained equal width—a demanding feat for artists using bone, thorn, or copper needles. “Back in the day it was already a really professional practice where people put a lot of time and effort into creating these images and they’re extremely sophisticated,” Riday said, according to BBC News.
“These methods render tattoos indexes of individual lives as well as cultural belief systems,” said art historian Matt Lodder of the University of Essex in an interview with Live Science.
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