As It Happens Imaging reveals 2,000-year-old ice mummy's 'incredibly impressive' tattoos
More than two millennia ago, a woman sat for hours on end in the ancient grasslands of a Siberian mountain range to have her body adorned with elaborate tattoos of creatures both real and mythical.
When she died, her body was preserved under the permafrost for thousands of years, but her tattoos faded and became invisible to the naked eye.
Now researchers have used high-resolution, near-infrared photography to bring those ancient tattoos back to life and worked with modern tattoo artists to shed light on the tools and techniques that made them possible to begin with.
"These tattoos are incredibly impressive," Daniel Riday, a traditional tattoo artist from Les Eyzies, France, who worked on the research, told As It Happens guest host Rebecca Zandbergen. "This kind of research is almost a direct window into the past ... and it's very humbling to really be so close to the roots of this practice."
The findings are published in the journal Antiquity .
'A very technical skill'
Tattooing is a long-standing practice in many cultures around the world, with the oldest known tattoos dating back 5,300 years to Ötzi the Iceman, a prehistoric hunter whose tattoo-clad remains were found preserved in glaciers in the Italian Alps in 1991.
But it's a difficult field to study because preserved tattoos on human flesh, like Ötzi's, are exceedingly rare.
For this study, researchers looked at the remains of a 50-year-old woman from the Pazyryk culture, Iron Age pastoral people who lived in the Altai Mountains of Central and East Asia. She's one of several Pazyryk ice mummies whose remains were found preserved inside the mountain's ice tombs in the 19th century.
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