The Arku Cave tools
Chisel and serrated heads of probable hafted tattooing instruments, excavated in a burial site in northern Luzon.
Timeline
Bodies, instruments and paper, on one axis with a break in it. Everything before year zero is drawn at a different rate, and the break is drawn too.
EvidenceEpisodesTraditions
The timeline holds three kinds of date and keeps them apart. Bodies: Ötzi, the Gebelein mummies, the Chinchorro man, the Ukok woman, the Cordilleran mummies, the Qilakitsoq women — each with the range its laboratory gave. Instruments: the Arku Cave tools. Paper: bans, acts, patents and the revivals.
Inference — the visible gap between the ancient bodies and the nineteenth-century paper is not a gap in the practice. It is a gap in what survives: skin needs ice, salt, sand or bog, and paper needs an administration. Between them, four thousand years of ordinary tattooing left neither.
Stopped, and started again
The years between the last ordinary practice and the revival, where both ends are datable. Where a tradition has not come back, the second number is this year and the bar is a gap, not a recovery.
Fiji: one tattooist left by 1908; an artists' collective takes it up again in the 2010s. Inuit: missionaries and the schools; a revitalisation project from 2016. Māori: the 1907 Act; the resurgence from 1990. Okinawa: the 1899 prohibition; hands being marked again now.
The gaps run to roughly a century each. Inference — what carries a practice across a hundred years is not a book. In every case on this list the bridge is a person: the elders Hovak Johnston learned the stitch from, the seventy women Michael King interviewed in the 1970s, the museum objects the Veiqia Project worked from, and the grandmothers.
A practice with no living bearer left is a different problem, and the Lanna leg tattoo is in that category.
The evidence
Chinchorro Mo-1 T28 C22
A mummified man from the Chilean coast with a dotted line tattooed above his upper lip — the oldest tattoo yet found in the Americas.
The Cordilleran mummies
Mummified Cordilleran people in cave and hanging-coffin burials, tattooed, with the designs also carved on the coffins.
The Gebelein mummies
Six naturally mummified bodies from Upper Egypt, dug out of sand graves in 1896, two of them tattooed.
The Ukok woman
A Pazyryk woman buried on the Ukok Plateau, preserved in ice for about 2,400 years, with animal designs on her skin.
Ötzi
The Alpine body with sixty-one tattoos — nineteen groups of black lines, and the greatest concentration on the legs.
The Qilakitsoq women
Mummified Inuit women from north-west Greenland, five centuries old, with facial tattoos visible under infrared.