The charcoal tattoos on Oetzi's body were created by piercing the skin with a sharp bone or copper tool, using a technique similar to what modern tattoo artists call 'hand poke'.
This is demonstrated by a study published in the European Journal of Archeology by a team of American researchers in collaboration with a professional tattoo artist who reconstructed the ancient technique by drawing on his own skin the same signs impressed 5,300 years ago by the Similaun man.
A decidedly unusual approach, the one chosen to try to solve the mystery of Iceman's 61 tattoos, located in the lumbar area, on the abdomen, on the left wrist and on the lower limbs of the mummy.
After their discovery, someone had hypothesized that they were the result of engraving and subsequently this theory, although not confirmed, remained well rooted in public opinion.
To clarify the question once and for all, researchers led by Tennessee archaeologist Aaron Deter-Wolf turned to two professional tattoo artists, Danny Riday and Maya Sialuk Jacobsen, to try to reconstruct the ancient technique used by Oetzi.
In particular, the two artists reproduced some drawings on Riday's leg, experimenting with eight types of tools (made of animal bones, obsidian, copper, wild boar tusks and a modern steel needle) and four different tattoo techniques (hand tapping, hand poking, incision and subdermal tattooing).
The researchers, for their part, documented the skin healing process and the results, in order to obtain a sort of database with which to compare ancient tattoos and, in this case, those of Oetzi.
The results demonstrate that Iceman's drawings do not have characteristics compatible with tattoos made by engraving, but are more similar to those made with the hand poking technique, i.e. drawn by pricking the skin with a pointed instrument, a sort of awl made of bone or copper.
Similar tools have been found in the Alpine region where Oetzi's body was recovered, but so far they have never been recognized as useful tools for the practice of tattooing.
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