This Could Be the World's Oldest Tattooing Kit

Tattooing is a time-honored practice, though it has left behind only fleeting marks in the archaeological record. While mummies like Ötzi the Iceman and the Siberian Ice Maiden showcase ink-adorned skin, such finds are rare. Moreover, archaeologists are only now beginning to tell apart tattooing needles from tools used for other purposes like leatherworking or basket weaving.

Despite these challenges, two researchers believe they may have uncovered the oldest tattooing set ever: a collection of sharp, ink-stained needles carved from wild turkey bones, buried in a Native American grave more than 3600 years ago.

The burial site was discovered west of Nashville, Tennessee, at the Fernvale site, a riverside camp once frequented by prehistoric hunter-gatherers. The site was excavated in 1985 to clear land for a bridge, but the findings weren't thoroughly examined at the time. The bone needles, pigment-filled half-shells, and stone tools were labeled as a general toolkit and stored away for the next 30 years.

"It ended up in a collection and was forgotten," says Aaron Deter-Wolf, an archaeologist from the Tennessee Division of Archaeology and a specialist in ancient tattoos.

Deter-Wolf partnered with Tanya Peres, a zooarchaeologist from Florida State University, to reevaluate the set of artifacts. Initially, they believed the toolkit resembled a medicine bundle—a group of items tied together, serving as a portable shrine in some later Native American cultures. However, upon further examination, they began to suspect it might actually be a tattooing kit.

"By the time the Europeans arrived, tattooing was practiced by nearly every Native American group across the Great Plains and Eastern Woodlands," Deter-Wolf tells Mytour. "Given its widespread nature and significance, we believe tattooing is deeply ingrained in Native American heritage."

Their hypothesis was supported by a study published last year, where Christian Gates St-Pierre, an archaeologist from the University of Montreal, tattooed pig skin using bone tools to analyze the wear patterns that prehistoric tattoo needles would leave behind. His findings showed that bone needles would develop a distinct polish on the first 3 millimeters of their tip when used for tattooing.

Deter-Wolf recently advanced those experiments by replicating one of Ötzi's tattoos on his own skin, using a bone tool and black ink to create 1500 individual punctures on his left wrist—resulting in a permanent tattoo.

Deter-Wolf and Peres noted that two of the needles from the kit displayed the same wear-and-tear patterns observed in Gates' experiments. "At this point, there's no other known activity that would cause such a pattern on bone tools," Deter-Wolf explains.

They also discovered remnants of red and black pigment on the tips of the tools. (They are awaiting the final results from an analysis to determine the chemical composition of this pigment.) They shared their initial findings this week at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Washington, D.C.

The toolkit is believed to be at least 3600 years old, with the possibility that it is even older: Preliminary results from a radiocarbon study of shells found at the same site suggest an age of 5200 years. In any case, these tools predate a set of 3000-year-old tattooing tools made from volcanic glass, which were discovered in 2016 at an archaeological site on an island in the South Pacific.

While scholars have ample knowledge about more recent Native American tattooing traditions thanks to historical records and ethnographic research post-European contact, prehistoric tattooing remains enigmatic. At this point, it's impossible to determine what types of tattoos the Fernvale tools might have been used for, or the significance tattooing held for the people living in the Tennessee river valley during the Archaic period in North America.

"I believe there's still much more to be explored regarding Archaic lifeways before we can begin to understand the deeper significance of tattooing in this era," says Peres. "We're still debating basic things like what they ate and the types of homes they lived in—topics that are more visible in the archaeological record."

Deter-Wolf anticipates that more tattoo kits will be discovered hidden in collections: "What I believe is that once we start examining more of these items, we'll find that tattooing was a remarkably widespread practice."