From Bears Ears in Utah, a 2,000-year-old tattooing tool is rediscovered

In the same week that Democrats announce they'll hold hearings to probe why Trump's Interior Department shrank Bears Ears National Monument by 85%, the internet is abuzz with this image. Archaeologists have identified this artifact as a 2000-year-old tattooing instrument, unearthed from Bears Ears in Utah.

New findings this week show that this tool, found at the ancient Native American site, is a tattoo needle fashioned from cactus spines that was created between years 137215CE.

The findings reveal new information about how body adornment and tattooing were practiced among indigenous people in this region.

From , from archaeologist Andrew Gillreath-Brown and colleagues and published on February 28:

We report the earliest evidence of tattooing technology in western North America through recent work on a legacy collection from the Turkey Pen site, located in southeastern Utah within the Greater Bears Ears Landscape, and curated at the Washington State University (WSU) Museum of Anthropology for 40years. Based on morphological attributes, we identify this implement as a hafted cactus spine tattoo tool. The artifact was extracted from Layer C-4 of a well-stratified midden.

(...) A date of 183331 RCYBP (calibrated to 176CE [137215CE]) was returned on a human coprolite from the layer containing the tattoo tool. We describe rigorous and comprehensive analysis of the Turkey Pen tattoo tool, including scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis, portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), and experimental tattooing.