To See Mummies' Tats, They Turned Skin 'Into a Light Bulb'

For more than 5,000 years, humans have adorned themselves with tattoos. In a new study, researchers used lasers to uncover highly intricate designs of ancient tattoos on mummies from Peru. The preserved skin of the mummies and the black tattoo ink used show a stark contrast—revealing fine details in tattoos dating to around AD1250 that aren't visible to the naked eye, said study co-author Michael Pittman, an archaeologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The researchers examined around 100 mummies from coastal Peru's Chancay culture, a civilization that flourished before the Inca empire and the arrival of Europeans, per the AP.

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 Pittman. Results were published Monday in the journal PNAS. Using lasers that make skin faintly glow, "we basically turn skin into a light bulb," said co-author Tom Kaye of the nonprofit Foundation for Scientific Advancement.

It wasn't clear exactly how the tattoos were created, but they are "of a quality that stands up against the really good electric tattooing of today," said Aaron Deter-Wolf, an expert in pre-Columbian tattoos and an archaeologist at the Tennessee Division of Archaeology who wasn't involved in the research. The findings were "helpful to learn about new nondestructive technologies that can help us study and document sensitive archaeological materials" such as mummies, said Deter-Wolf.

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The oldest known tattoos were found on the remains of a Neolithic man who lived in the Italian Alps around 3,000BC. Many mummies from ancient Egypt also have tattoos, as do remains from cultures around the world. Throughout history, tattoos have been used in many ways—to mark cultural or individual identity, life events or social status, or to "ward off maladies or help enhance relationships with spirits or deities," said Lars Krutak, an archaeologist at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who wasn't involved in the research. (More discoveries stories.)