An artifact found in Utah’s Bears Ears region is adding about a thousand years to what science believed about the history of tattooing among western North America’s indigenous people.
A paper published last week in the online Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports describes the discovery of a tattoo needle — a three-inch stick of skunkbush wood with two cactus spines attached by yucca leaves — that dates back to the second or third centuries.
“When I first saw it, I thought, ‘That’s really interesting.’ I had never seen anything like it,” said Andrew Gillreath-Brown, an archaeology doctoral candidate at Washington State University, the lead writer of the paper.