Description

Body art and modification holds deep cultural significance in many Indigenous communities; further, practices like tattooing have endured despite forced assimilation. Iconographic evidence suggests body art and modification (e.g. tattooing) may date to as early as the Archaic period in the southwestern United States. However, no direct prehistoric evidence for tattooing has been identified in the archaeological record to date. Historically, ethnographers recorded tattooing among many Indigenous groups across the southwestern United States. For some southwestern Indigenous groups, women would get tattoos to mark adulthood. Tattoos also had many other uses, ranging from medicinal to mourning rites. The Bears Ears National Monument and surrounding area in southeastern Utah contains many important places and spaces with well-preserved materials and art, such as the Big Kachina petroglyph in Butler Wash. The earliest evidence of tattooing is a unique perishable tattoo tool from the Turkey Pen site dating to the Basketmaker II period (500 B.C.–A.D. 500), which firmly places tattooing in the region at least by the first century A.D. Here, Dr. Gillreath-Brown discusses the history of tattooing in the U.S. Southwest and the 2,000-year-old tattoo tool from the Turkey Pen site. He examines how the tool was identified and what these findings can tell us about early Ancestral Pueblo life.