The following is a brief excerpt from Tattoo History: A Source Book, by Stephen G. Gilbert now available in print.

Tattoo History Source Book: Tattooed Mummies

Ancient History

In October, 1991, a five thousand year old tattooed man made the headlines of newspapers all over the world when his frozen body was discovered on a mountain between Austria and Italy. He had apparently been hunting and was caught in a snowstorm as he tried to return home. Together with the body were clothing, a bow and arrows, a bronze ax and flint for making fire.

"I don't like superlatives," said Professor Konrad Spindler of Innsbruck University, but this is the only body of a Bronze Age man found in a glacier, and certainly the best preserved corpse of that period ever found." The skin is of great interest because it bears several tattoos: a cross on the inside of the left knee, six straight lines 15 centimeters long above the kidneys and numerous parallel lines on the ankles. Spindler stated that the position of the tattoo marks suggests that they were probably applied for therapeutic reasons.

Instruments that were probably used for tattooing during the Upper Paleolithic (10,000 BC to 38,000 BC) have been discovered at several archaelogical sits in Europe. Typically these instruments consist of a disk made of clay and red ochre together with sharp bone needles that are inserted into holes in the top of the disk. The disk served as a reservoir and source of pigment, and the needles were used to pierce the skin. Clay and stone figures with engraved designs which probably represent tattooing have been found together with such instruments.