Researchers discover 2,000-year-old tattoo needle made from cactus spines

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People have been getting tattoos for a really, really long time. 

An ancient tattoo needle unearthed in Utah is about 2,000 years old, making it the oldest tattoo needle ever found by at least 1,000 years. 

It was sitting in a box in storage collecting dust for more than four decades.

Graduate student Andrew Gillreath-Brown was working at Washington State University's Museum of Anthropology doing an inventory of artifacts discovered during a 1972 excavation in southwestern Utah when he came upon the needle.

"I really wasn't sure what it was, but as I took it out of the bag and started to take a closer look at it with my gloves on, I noticed that there was black staining around the tips of the spines," he said.

"That's when my mind immediately went towards tattooing." 

The pen-sized device is made from a skunkbush sumac handle and two tiny cactus spine needles, all bound together with yucca leaves.

Carbon dating shows it's from between AD 79 and 130. The oldest known tattoo needle discovered before this was found in New Mexico's Aztec ruins and dates back to between 1100 and 1280.

"It's very significant," Gillreath-Brown said. "It really adds a lot of information about past southwestern culture that we really could only have speculated before, particularly on whether people then were tattooing."

While art from that period had suggested the possibility of tattoos, Gillreath-Brown said there was some debate about whether the images depicted real tattoos or body paint.

"And so this artifact really gives credibility to that conversation," he said.

'Supression of ... Indigenous culture' 

Tattooing is a longstanding practice in many cultures around the world, with the oldest evidence of it dating back 5,300 years to Otzi the Iceman, a prehistoric hunter whose remains were found preserved in glacier in the Italian Alps in 1991.

Scientists identified 61 individual tattoos on his skin, reports Discover Magazine. 

But little is known about how or why people started tattooing — or what its cultural significance was to pre-colonial Indigenous people in what is now the southwestern United States.

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"It's kind of been a topic that was kind of long suppressed and looked down upon, particularly by post-European contact, because it was seen as a kind of, quote, 'a more primitive' type of thing," Gillreath-Brown said.

"There were a lot of groups that kind of, post-European contact, stopped tattooing, kind of as a result of that kind of suppression of culture, of Indigenous culture."

Stick-and-poke 

Whereas most modern tattoos are drawn with motorized machines that puncture the skin between 50 and 3,000 times per minute, the Utah relic uses more of a stick-and-poke technique. 

"You would've held it like you would have a pen and done a series of hand poking," Gillreath-Brown said.

"I actually did some experimental tattooing with some replicas that I made on pig skin and it actually worked pretty well for creating these kind of simple lines, and it embedded the ink pretty quickly too."

The needle dates back to a time when people in the region would have been going through what's called a "Neolithic demographic transition," Gillreath-Brown said.

"Which really just means that people are kind of moving from being hunter-gatherers to becoming more sedentary, and they are starting to farm more," he said.

It's also a phenomenon that's been associated with an increase in body modification. Archeologists aren't sure why that is, but they do have some theories.

"Populations begin to kind of grow and explode and you get really high population densities, and so you end up with people, different groups, [who] begin to run into one another a lot more," Gillreath-Brown said.

"Tattooing was a way to kind of manage those kind of increasingly complicated cultural landscapes. So you could mark particular members of your group.

"It also allows for different cultural meanings to get signalled within a group. So a particularly different series of lines tattooed on the face could represent a distinguished warrior or a elderly person."

Gillreath-Brown has a full sleeve of tattoos himself, and he's already planning his next one.

"I might actually get a drawing of the artifact tattooed on my arm as well," he said.

Written by Sheena Goodyear. Produced by Richard Raycraft.