For the first time, archeologists have gotten a detailed look at the intricate tattoos on a 2,000-year-old ice mummy, found buried deep within the permafrost-covered mountains of Siberia.
These tattoos would be challenging to produce even today, the researchers say, suggesting that ancient tattoo artists possessed a considerable degree of skill.
With help from modern tattoo artists, an international team of researchers examined the mummy’s tattoos in unprecedented detail and identified the tools and techniques that ancient societies may have used to create body art. The findings were published in the journal Antiquity.
Like it is now, getting inked up was a common practice in prehistoric societies. Studying the practice is tough, however, because skin is rarely preserved in archaeological remains.
The “ice-mummies” of the Altai mountains, in Siberia, are a notable exception—they were buried in chambers now encased in permafrost, sometimes preserving the skin of those within.
The Pazyryk people were horse-riding nomads who lived between China and Europe. “The tattoos of the Pazyryk culture—Iron Age pastoralists of the Altai Mountains—have long intrigued archaeologists due to their elaborate figural designs”, Gino Caspar, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Bern, said in an emailed statement.
Scientists haven’t been able to study these tattoos in great detail, due to limitations in imaging techniques. Many of these tattoos are invisible to the naked eye, meaning scientists didn’t know they were there when the mummies were initially excavated in the 1940s.
Researchers need infrared imaging to visualize ancient tattoos because skin degrades over time, and the colors of the tattoos fade and bleed into the surrounding skin, making them faint or invisible to the naked eye. Infrared light, with its longer wavelengths compared to visible light, penetrates deeper into the skin and reveals what lies beneath the surface. So, until now, most studies were based on drawings of the tattoos, rather than direct images.
But advances in imaging technology have finally allowed researchers to take high-resolution images of the mummies and their tattoos. The researchers used high-resolution digital near-infrared photography to create a 3D scan of the tattoos on a 50-year-old woman from the Iron Age age, whose preserved remains are housed at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Artistic renderings of the newly discovered tattoos reveal detailed tattoos of leopards, stags, roosters, and a mythical half-lion, half-eagle creature.
The researchers found that, like with many modern-day humans, the tattoos on the mummy’s right arm are much more detailed and technical than those on the left. This suggests that the two different ancient tattooers, or the same tattooer after they beefed up their skills, were responsible. The scans also suggest that the artists used several tools—with one or multiple points—and that the tattoos were completed over multiple sessions.
This suggests that tattooing was not just a form of decoration in Pazyryk culture but a skilled craft that required building skills and technical ability. Many other individuals were buried at the same site, indicating that tattooing was likely a common practice.
“The study offers a new way to recognize personal agency in prehistoric body modification practices,” Caspari said in a statement. “Tattooing emerges not merely as symbolic decoration but as a specialized craft—one that demanded technical skill, aesthetic sensitivity, and formal training or apprenticeship.”
