Lasers help archaeologists uncover ancient tattoos on Peruvian mummies

For more than 5,000 years, humans have adorned themselves with tattoos, leaving a legacy of ink that spans millennia.

Now, modern technology is peeling back the layers of history – literally – by revealing intricate tattoos on the mummified remains of people who lived in Peru centuries ago.

In a groundbreaking study, researchers used laser imaging to reveal intricate tattoos on the preserved skin of mummified individuals from Peru, dating back to around 1250 A.D. These designs, invisible to the naked eye, offer an extraordinary glimpse into the artistry and cultural traditions of the past.

The researchers examined around 100 mummies from coastal Peru’s Chancay culture – a civilisation that flourished before the Inca empire and the arrival of Europeans.

All the individuals had some form of tattoos on the back of their hands, knuckles, forearms or other body parts. The study focused on four individuals with “exceptional tattoos” – designs of geometric shapes such as triangles and diamonds, said study co-author Michael Pittman, an archaeologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

“The method we use is called laser-stimulated fluorescence and it’s basically in the name. So you’re using a laser to stimulate your object to fluoresce,” explained Michael Pittman, an archaeologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a co-author of the study. “What the laser seems to have done is to illuminate a deeper part of the skin where you can still see the pristine original image.”

The results were published on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Without the laser, you see this kind of cruddy thing that doesn’t seem like it’s very sophisticated, but we’re able to see past that bleed and see what the tattoo would have looked like when it was freshly made. And it turns out they were much more sophisticated than we would ever have thought,” Pittman added.

The oldest known tattoos were found on remains of a Neolithic man who lived in the Italian Alps around 3,000 BC. Many mummies from ancient Egypt also have tattoos, as do remains from cultures around the world.