A 2,000-year-old tattoo needle still has ink on the tip

Enlarge / Tattoo ArtifactAndrew Gillreath-Brown (credit: Bub Hubner/WSU)

It's a simple object about the size of a modern pen: two parallel cactus spines, stained black at the tips and lashed with split yucca leaves to an 89mm (3.5-inch) handle of skunkbrush sumac. But its simplicity hides its significance. Sometime around the start of the Common Era, an Ancestral Pueblo person living in what is now southeastern Utah got a tattoo in black ink. 2,000 years later, archaeologists unearthed the needle, and about 40 years after that, Andrew Gillreath-Brown found it in a box in museum storage, with the ink still staining the tips of the cactus-spine needles.

Gillreath-Brown studied the black pigment under a scanning electron microscope to get a better look at its crystalline structure, and he analyzed its chemical composition with x-ray fluorescence. It turned out to be high in carbon, which is still true of many body paints and tattoo inks in use today. At 2,000 years old, the tool is the oldest tattooing implement ever discovered in western North America, and it's a clue to a part of prehistoric North American culture that archaeologists still know very little about.

Tattoos have played an important role in many cultures around the world, but anthropologists don't understand as much as they'd like about the origins of the art form. That's in part because so little evidence remains, and what little we can see is sometimes just as enigmatic as a stranger's tattoos can be today.

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