In Indigenous Tattoo Traditions: Humanity through Skin and Ink, Lars Krutak introduces readers to ethnography, archaeology, and contemporary practices around the world. With vivid photographs on each page, this lavishly illustrated book is a most recent gem among over 20 others Krutak has written about tattooing, which he characterizes as a visual language of the skin. He covers the expanse of Indigenous tattooing practices in the past and present, including examples of visual imagery related to identity, life transitions, creative expression, symbols of rank, and life achievements.
With case studies from Africa, the Middle East, Oceania, the Americas, the Arctic, Japan, Southeast Asia, and Siberia, Krutak shows that the meanings of tattooing, with linkages to textuality, are apparent in many Indigenous languages. They vary by region and culture, with Omaha women’s tattooing in the North American Great Plains serving as a literal act of writing, or “Marks of Honor” (p. 11). Many tattooing terms, derived from tau and kau in Polynesian languages, refer to “write,” “mark,” and “strike.”
Gender-specific tattooing practices are common, and for many African traditions discussed in the book, women have served in sacred and technical roles as tattoo artists, who are highly sought after within their communities. African tattooists have often served as traditional healers. Krutak describes medicinal plants charred and rubbed into tattoo wounds on certain body parts to heal ailments such as arthritis, eye problems, headaches, and respiratory problems. Among the Yoruba, women and female Yoruba elders in Nigeria traditionally were the primary tattoo recipients. Tattoos among the Yoruba were often representative of physical and inner strength, given that only the brave could endure the skin markings. Patterns were applied to women at important life transitions, including marriage and before childbirth, to instill courage and to honor Ogun, the patron god of body artists and the god of iron.
Along with tattoos on people, Krutak discusses tattooing implements and tattooed mummies, as well as figurines, masks, and material objects with tattoo designs. Krutak describes tattooing tools, which included “bundles” (p. 62) and were thought to be embodied with supernatural or ancestral power. Tattooing implements made of turkey bones from the Fernvale site in Tennessee date to 1570 BC and are the oldest-known tattooing tools in the world. The oldest archaeological evidence of tattoo designs in North America are tattoo designs carved onto the human face depicted in an ivory maskette from an ancestral Inuit site on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, dating to 3,500 years ago. For Inuit peoples of the Arctic, tattoos are associated with women and have traditionally symbolized clan membership, life stages, and accomplishments. Tattoos have had medicinal properties and purposes, and they have helped the body be transported safely to the afterlife.
In northwestern North America, Krutak describes guardian tattoos that depict personal and protective spirits. These tattoos were most often associated with male warriors and shamans. Guardian spirits could also be found as ivory figurines, as in examples from the Bering Strait region of Alaska and Siberia, where there are beliefs that women must be tattooed to enter the realm of ancestors, reflecting the significance of tattoo art to the cosmology and worldviews of these peoples.
Krutak describes how tattoo art has diminished or disappeared in some areas due to colonial suppression, but he also discusses revitalization of tattooing as part of the reclamation of Indigenous identity and resistance to the efforts of colonial systems to divide, control, erase, and replace Indigenous peoples. Tattoo artists aiming to revitalize traditional practices have studied visual archaeological materials from the past, such as rock art, carvings, basketry, and textiles. An example of revitalization efforts relates to the tā moko tattoo art of the Māori of Aotearoa (New Zealand). Designs are deeply etched, rather than placed just on the skin surface, so as to connect people to their roots, to carry stories about ancestors with dignity, and to form reconnections across those ties severed by colonization. Krutak also discusses issues of cultural appropriation; traditions are meant for Indigenous peoples through sacred and ancestral connections.
Indigenous Tattoo Traditions is an impressive, comprehensive, and visually enticing book that admirably documents the richness of tattooing practices and knowledge among Indigenous peoples from around the world, both past and present. Archaeologists will find it of interest for its broad overview of tattoo designs and meanings, its consideration of how gender and other aspects of identity are affirmed and reaffirmed through tattooing, and its discussion of how this visual language of the skin was thought to protect and carry the body to the afterlife.
