findThe Arku Cave tools
Cagayan, northern Luzon — hafted tattoo heads from before 1500 BCE
about 1,500 BCE – 1,400 BCE · Dated before 1500 BCE
What it is
Chisel and serrated heads of probable hafted tattooing instruments, excavated in a burial site in northern Luzon.
The long version
They came up alongside adzes, spindle whorls, barkcloth beaters and lingling-o jade ornaments — the standard Austronesian kit — and they closely resemble the comb-type tattoo chisels found across Polynesia three thousand years later.
Inference — a tool type that travelled the whole Pacific is sitting in a cave in Luzon before 1500 BCE. The method on this site with the widest reach is also the oldest one with surviving hardware.
Connected to
- Gisi and pat-ik The tool, still in use.
- Tap The method.
Named here by
- Batok The tools, dug up, older than the Roman Empire by a millennium.
- Gisi and pat-ik Where a set of these was dug up.
Where each claim comes from
| Field | Tier | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| default | cited | Batok — Wikipedia (en) | |
| text_th | inference | written in Thai by this project, not machine-translated |
Sources
- Batok — Wikipedia (en)
cited Cited — a named source, linked · harvested Harvested — fetched from an open dataset, with its licence · tradition Tradition — general knowledge of the tradition, hedged · inference Inference — this project's own reasoning from the above · field Field — someone stood there