Siberian Ice Mummies

In this special episode of the Ancients, released just hours after the embargo on new research was lifted, Tristan Hughes discusses the fascinating discovery of ancient Siberian ice mummies and their tattoos with Dr Gino Caspari, the senior author of the study. The Iron Age Pazyryk culture, renowned for their elaborate burials in the Altai Mountains, is explored through their well-preserved remains and artefacts. Dr Caspari shares insights into the significance of the tattoos, the methods used to create them, and what these incredible findings reveal about the Pazyryk society. Access the article here - https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2025.10150 MORE Birth of the Iron Age https://open.spotify.com/episode/6emHXY7Cv8xImTcVAi4mrf Kazakstan's Valley of Kings https://open.spotify.com/episode/1wdwiXUyvSwbghteYA3unK Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan and the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. LIVE SHOW: Buy tickets for The Ancients at the London Podcast Festival here: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/the-ancients-2/ Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 1:50Tristan Hughes?

  Hey, guys. Welcome to the ancients and a breaking news story. We are releasing this episode only hours after the embargo was lifted on this research that we're covering today. Research about ancient ice mummies discovered high up in the Altai Mountains in Siberia.

• 2:10Tristan Hughes?

  Looking at their tattoos. It's an amazing story. I'm so excited we got the scoop on it. My apologies to the subscribers of The Ancients who usually expect these episodes a day early. We couldn't do it today because of the embargo, so you're all going to be listening to us together, but it's worth the wait. Our guest is the senior author of this new research, Dr. Gino Caspari. Let's go.

• 2:47Tristan Hughes?

  2,500 years ago, an Iron Age Scythian people roamed the great steppe of Central Asia. They're known as the Paserics. Today, they're remembered for their love of gold, horses and animal style art, but also for their burials. Throughout the 20th century, archaeologists discovered a number of Paseric tombs on a plateau high up in the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia, buried deep in the permafrost, frozen in time. Within were the extraordinarily well-preserved remains of the deceased, alongside a wealth of grave goods: gold, horses, wood carvings,

• 3:31Tristan Hughes?

  even the oldest surviving rug in the world. Today, these individuals are known as the Siberian Ice Mummies. And now, groundbreaking new research has revealed more about these people and their ancient culture through the amazing art that adorned their bodies: their tattoos. This is a breaking news story and we have it right here on The Ancients with our guest, Dr. Gino Caspari.

• 4:07Tristan Hughes?

  Gino, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  Thank you very much for having me.

• 4:12Tristan Hughes?

  Now, Siberian ice mummies. First off, what an extraordinary type of archaeology to study.

• 4:20Speaker 04

  It is truly, I think, extraordinary and it was to me when I first came across it. Really during my bachelor's degree, I had no idea these things existed. I was studying Mediterranean and Near Eastern archaeology, where you have a bit of a dearth of organic material. And so I still remember one late evening studying in the library, I came across this little corner down at the very bottom of a bookshelf that had the very limited Siberian section, but there is one book by Rodenko, Frozen Tombs of Siberia. And I opened this book and it just kind of, it looks like a fantasy book, like the type of artefacts

• 5:01Speaker 04

  that they have in these burials, it was just mind blowing to me, sort of the, the idea you get from these frozen tombs high up in the mountains, how people lived at the time with all the organics preserved. That means carpets and it means felt items, it means wood carvings, and it also means well-preserved human remains, including the skin. That was just another level of diving back into the past. And I think that's really what drew me towards the steps in the first place.

• 5:36Tristan Hughes?

  It is absolutely incredible and it certainly feels, at least here in the West, that getting into Central Asian and Siberian archaeology, it certainly feels like a very niche field.

• 5:46Speaker 04

  It absolutely is and it is very tricky in terms of jobs. There's no Central Asian Siberian archaeology departments. There are few people here and there that are obviously very interested in the topic, but they all kind of do something else first and then they look at the archaeology of the steps. So it is a niche field, but that also has its beautiful sides to it because it's something where really the, the basis for what we do in archaeology, the amount of data that's out there is still relatively limited, the density of researchers is limited and therefore.

• 6:28Speaker 04

  You've got to address some of the really large questions that feel like you're really making a difference. So that's, that's another benefit to, to working in areas that are not as much touched as maybe archaeology of ancient Rome, right?

• 6:45Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, completely, very different landscapes and we'll delve into that. And you mentioned there, Gino, in passing, the steppes. No such thing is a silly question. What do we mean by the steppes and steppe archaeology?

• 6:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the steppes are this ecotone that really reaches from Mongolia all the way to Ukraine and the Northern Black Sea region. And this is a relatively arid grassland environment. And for a long time, there's not so much happening in prehistory on, on the steppes. Of course, like we're slowly getting a grasp of that, but like the area really becomes viable. Once you have domesticated animals, that really becomes apparent in the first, late, late second, early first millennium B.C. with the widespread adoption

• 7:34Speaker 04

  of horses on the steppes. And that then immediately shows in interaction networks that are really far reaching, where ideas travel at an incredible speed from east to west, from west to east.

• 7:50Tristan Hughes?

  It is such an extraordinary part of the ancient story of our world, whether it be, you know, the domestication of horses or copper and tinder deposits and these bronze roads before the Silk Roads. Could talk through all of that, but we're going to explore these ice mummies today because it feels like this huge geographic area is full of these lots of different cultures with one of them being the Pasirik culture. Now, Gino, what was the Pasirik culture?

• 8:17Speaker 04

  So really, the entire first millennium B.C. is somewhat dominated by these Skithian type cultures. Now, it's important to acknowledge that Skithian is not really used in an ethnic sense of the word. Strictly speaking, the Skithians are some tribes in the Northern Black Sea region, and the term is derived From Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian. But all the history research this term has come to be associated with a material culture, mostly consisting of the so-called Scythian animal style, which are these sometimes weirdly twisted animals, sometimes fantastic creatures,

• 8:59Speaker 04

  griffins that are often engaged in fighting scenes with deer and moose and other herbivores. Then we have weapons, we have bows and arrows, we have chikons, which are basically war picks.

• 9:14Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  And then the third thing is horse gear that is really widespread. Also, like the interment of horses, the association of horses with burials is very, very frequent. Now, there are regional variations, of course, and the Pazeric culture is one of these variations that we have that dates to the later part of the first millennium B.C. And it's mostly situated in the territory of the Altai Mountains.

• 9:48Tristan Hughes?

  And whereabouts do you mean by the Altai Mountains? Which modern countries should we be thinking of with the Pazerics?

• 9:53Speaker 04

  So the Altai Mountains are really at the intersection between Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China. There's this one spot where these four countries almost join together. There's a little stretch border that is just Chinese-Russian border. But then it, there's sort of this southeastern part that stretches down into Mongolia. And then there is a whole arc of mountains, the Sayan Altai Mountains, that goes into Tuba, southern Siberia. That's where I have been working on, on sort of all those Scythian cultures previously. But this is like the rough distribution area of Pazeric culture, Pazeric animal style.

• 10:39Tristan Hughes?

  And do we know about the Pazerics just through archaeology? Or did they have contacts with either the Persians further west or the ancient dynasties of China further east?

• 10:49Speaker 04

  So there are, of course, connections that we can see through the association with artefacts that have been transported. So for example, some of the carpets seem to be of Persian origins, some of the mirrors seem to be derived from China. So there are kind of tangible evidences, connections there, but direct written sources about these people do not really exist. That is something that comes later with the Xiongnu. That's really something that we have like in the first, second century B.C. But before that, for all intents and purposes, the step has to be considered prehistoric.

• 11:32Tristan Hughes?

  And the Xiongnu, they're almost seen as predecessors of the Huns or the Huns, aren't they, in Mongolia? I know that's another story entirely, but that also helps put the pazarics in their place in the fact that we should be talking the early first millennium B.C., the Iron Age of that time, do you know?

• 11:46Speaker 04

  The early Iron Age, up until the third, second century B.C., yes.

• 11:51Tristan Hughes?

  And so do we know much if they're living in the area around the Altai Mountains, you know, at that crossroads of all those many different modern countries today? Do we get a sense of how the pazarics lived? It seems quite a difficult environment. I'm presuming this is quite a high altitude place.

• 12:07Speaker 04

  It is. And of course, things like driving your animals up into the mountains during summertime and also then led to the construction of many burial up on the high plateaus was an important part of their livelihoods. For the longest time, archaeologists have kind of focused on the tombs themselves because that's where you find the nice stuff. But through recent years, we've made a lot of progress in actually identifying seasonal settlement sites, campsites, summer camps and winter camps, the specific environmental factors in place that you can tease out with geographic information systems. And so there's

• 12:48Speaker 04

  like south exposed slopes and protection from wind and relatively little snow cover so the animals can get through to the grass during winter. So there's ways to... Figure out where people actually lived. And so this whole nomadic narrative that has been promoted throughout much of the last century, scholarship is coming a bit under revision, let's say. It's not a full out attack, but we're slowly changing our image for people to be a bit less just randomly wandering around and carrying everything with them. But there is an intent and a purpose to their migration routes. And very often they're seasonal. So we have a fairly good understanding.

• 13:33Speaker 04

  But when you go there the first time, like the environment is incredibly beautiful. And I'm from Switzerland. I'm very used to mountain environments. To me, like, it almost feels like home. But they are harsh environments to live in, very, very cold winters. It feels really like a marginal landscape. And then when you compare this to the artefacts that we find in the tombs, you immediately recognise that people were incredibly well adapted to this place. And they weren't merely scraping by, they were absolutely thriving in these environments.

• 14:12Speaker 04

  And they were creating absolutely beautiful artefacts and things that you would really just not expect in such a place from a naive point of view.

• 14:23Tristan Hughes?

  So I'm guessing, because we'll go on to the tombs now, but it's from the tombs, you get more of a sense from the artefacts that have survived there, as we'll explore, more of an understanding of how these groups of pazarics, I mean, how they lived. I mean, the different strands of work in their societies, you know, as they were going from place to place. As you say, not randomly, they knew where to go. So kind of that semi nomadic kind of vibe. The archaeology works hand in hand between the living. And the dead to understand more about the Pasuric culture as a whole.

• 14:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's important to look at all the remaining evidence, of course. But the tombs do provide a very, very rich story. And one of the reasons for that is because they are frozen. So a lot of these mounds have very deep chambers underneath them. They're often lined with a kind of a lock cabin construction underneath. That's also what makes scholars think that lock cabins were actually a thing back in the day as housing. Uh, but lock cabins notoriously do not really leave archaeological traces because you don't have post holes.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  So given how professionally furnished and uh, how well the carpentry work is on these things. It's easy to argue that they knew how to build a lock cabin. Also, during the sort of minus forty minus fifty degrees in winter, it's likely more comfortable in a proper lock cabin than it would be in a yurt. Even though, you know, people endure pretty harsh winters in yurts and they're fantastic constructions. But it seems like lock cabins were a thing. Now, why were these tombs frozen?

• 16:14Tristan Hughes?

  Hmm.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  So on one side, it's the deep chamber that often filled up with rainwater soon after it was constructed. And then froze over and sometimes, interestingly, looters had a hand in that. In that they made a hole for the entrance of rainwater and actually helped with the preservation of things for once. So what we have there is usually discontinuous permafrost. So it's not the entire area that is frozen, but it is really just sometimes an ice lens underneath the tomb that is only there because of the water that entered the tomb.

• 16:55Tristan Hughes?

  And if you were approaching, just to really give us a sense in our minds, Gino, the whole environment of these tombs, because you already mentioned how they're quite large constructions, but if you were approaching the site of one of these tombs today, what would you actually see from the surface? Are they recognisable?

• 17:13Speaker 04

  Yes, in most cases they are, although it does need a bit of training for the eye, but archaeologists see them fairly easily. Essentially, on the surface, they can be quite unremarkable, especially the smaller ones are just basically piles of rocks. Even the larger tombs at Pazirik, they're substantial piles of rocks, but they're still piles of rocks. So you can really identify them very easily in high-resolution satellite imagery. You can identify them through LiDAR, they're slightly elevated. So finding these tombs is actually not a very difficult task.

• 17:56Tristan Hughes?

  And also, do you normally find all of these tombs close together? Are there particular sites where you find a large concentration of Pazirik tombs high up in the Altai Mountains?

• 18:06Speaker 04

  Yes, so some of them, actually many of them are kind of organised in north-south oriented lines. And we've been thinking of them as kind of family burials, where people return to this place and just bury the next person in line. And that still needs to be more thoroughly proven by the use of ancient DNA, that these people are actually related. I think in other areas, we might have more ruler-based elite cemeteries where people are not necessarily related, but this is still something that is ongoing research and needs to be more thoroughly established.

• 18:56Speaker 03

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• 19:33Tristan Hughes?

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• 20:03Tristan Hughes?

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• 20:23Tristan Hughes?

  And I've also got in my notes the word kurgan or kurgan, please forgive my pronunciation if it's wrong. But Gino, is this the word that we call these tombs?

• 20:31Speaker 04

  Yes, so kurgan is basically the word for burial mound.

• 20:35Tristan Hughes?

  And also, you mentioned how they have these deep chambers underground that, you know, very cold environments and they fill with water soon after they're buried. Is it that that has allowed so much to survive from within these tombs, including the people themselves?

• 20:51Speaker 04

  Exactly. So it is really the ice lens on the some of the tombs that has allowed the organics to be incredibly well-preserved. In some cases where this is not there, then we just have the skeletons, we have the metal items, we have... Occasionally some, well, of course, some of the animal bones, but of course, having this frost preservation gives just a completely different look at these ancient societies.

• 21:19Tristan Hughes?

  And before we really explore the remains themselves and the grave goods, I mean, what does this reveal about how the Pasarecs buried their dead?

• 21:26Speaker 04

  We do have fortunately some sources that we can occasionally use as at least an association. And these are foremost the writings of Herodotus, where he elaborates on the Scythian burial practices and to some extent, the meaning behind it. In how far that directly reflects the kind of cultural values and traditions up in the Altai Mountains or in Tuva remains to be discussed and is sometimes a bit of a stretch. But we have some instances where it's not a coincidence, I would say, that we have the same things

• 22:09Speaker 04

  in Herodotus as we find archaeologically. One such thing is the inclusion of cannabis in some of the burials.

• 22:18Tristan Hughes?

  Oh.

• 22:19Speaker 04

  So Herodotus describes the Scythians throwing cannabis pots on red hot stones in a tent and they then howled for joy. So the guys knew what was going on with that plant. And we actually do have what is often euphemistically referred to as incense burners. Well, clearly they weren't burning incense, but they were burning something else. So we have these things with the stones in them. We do have cannabis seeds in the burials and we do have little sticks that likely were used to construct some sort of tent to contain the smoke.

• 23:04Speaker 04

  The other thing that is super interesting is we have at one point, Herodotus describing a post-burial ritual where young men were sacrificed and horses were sacrificed and they were put up on sticks and put on the back of the horses and thus you had this, what I've called a spectral cavalcade. So dead riders surrounding the tomb of usually an elite person, a king or a prince or something like that. And just last year, we've published a paper in Antiquity as well that actually showed that what we have on the surface of one of the earliest Scythian tombs in the entire Eurasian steppe belt looks fairly

• 23:49Speaker 04

  familiar to this exact ritual practice, which was an absolutely fantastic finding.

• 23:55Tristan Hughes?

  That's an amazing example, even though Herodotus, as you mentioned earlier, is writing about, you know, people who lived around the Black Sea region. So thousands, hundreds, if not thousands of kilometres to the west, to see similarities with these burials in the Altai Mountains is fascinating. And I guess, Gino, it's one of those amazing cases in archaeology where you get the archaeology and the literature combining to tell a remarkable tale about people who lived thousands of years ago.

• 24:19Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And it's also been changing our perception of how this culture spread. Because originally, people had kind of naturally assumed the Eurocentric point of view, right? That it spread from the northern Black Sea region into the steppes. But we know since the latter part of the last century that the earliest burial mounds where we actually have Scythian material culture are situated in Tubal. And that's where I've been excavating since 2017 and actually documenting one of the oldest Scythian burial mounds. And now we know that the flow of ideas regarding this Scythian material culture is actually

• 25:02Speaker 04

  east to west and not the other way around.

• 25:06Tristan Hughes?

  And Tuva, so that's the Tuva Republic, like this, one of the southernmost regions of Russia today on the Altai Mountains area?

• 25:12Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. So it's just underneath the the Sayan Mountains, close to the border of Mongolia.

• 25:18Tristan Hughes?

  Appreciate it. I did have to do a quick Google search there just to confirm that I had it right.

• 25:21Speaker 04

  No problem.

• 25:22Tristan Hughes?

  But it is absolutely fascinating. I must also ask, because mentioned earlier, we said ice mummies. But when someone says mummies, you might immediately think of mummification in ancient Egypt. So when we go into the burying themselves of these figures. Do they prepare the bodies by taking out all of the organs first? Do we know much about that? I mean, how they're laid in these chambers?

• 25:45Speaker 04

  Right. So of course, in most areas without great organic preservation, we have a bit of a problem really understanding if there is mummification in the first place. And that's also something that we'll repeat later on when we talk about the tattoos. The Puzryk mummies, so generally we have to distinguish between natural and artificial mummies. And sometimes there's a certain overlap because in the case of the Puzryk mummies, we do have some degree of preparation of the bodies. So some of the larger muscles were occasionally taken out, some of the intestines were taken out.

• 26:23Speaker 04

  There were plants put into the body cavities, possibly to counteract the awful smell in the still relatively warm Siberian summers. And amazingly also through the state of the flowers inside of these plant remains that we have as as kind of stuffing for for the bodies, we can pinpoint the exact month when the person was buried.

• 26:51Tristan Hughes?

  So interesting.

• 26:52Speaker 04

  So that's a a little interesting chronological detail that you don't have in most other places. Because some of these flowers have a very short flowering period high up in the mountains. And so we know exactly when they were put into the soil.

• 27:06Tristan Hughes?

  With these burials also in the Pasirik culture, did the goods that they were buried with, did they differ depending on whether it's a woman being buried or a man?

• 27:16Speaker 04

  That is still a bit an ongoing discussion. I think feminist scholarship has one or two words to say on how traditionally some of the biological sex has been assigned to people buried, very often in kind of older Soviet scholarship. If it has a knife, it's a man. If it has a mirror, it's a woman. That's not quite as clear cut. We definitely do have instances where we have women buried with weapons. That kind of plays into the Amazon theme. We also have tied back to heroditus, that usually is dated a bit to a later date and more to a more western

• 28:01Speaker 04

  region, but we do have similar phenomena in the Altai Mountains.

• 28:07Tristan Hughes?

  And the types of goods that they are buried with, you mentioned earlier, which seems absolutely extraordinary, these carpets. So can you kind of explore what are some of the main types of artefacts that you usually find alongside the mummies themselves?

• 28:20Speaker 04

  So of course, first and foremost and most famously for the Pasirik sites, we have a really finely knotted carpet that seems to be of Persian origin, where you have these deer bordering the entire thing that have surprisingly accurate anatomical depiction of livers and lung and heart, things that maybe a hunter would aim at. And then we also have felt carpets that seem to be more of local production really, with people up on horses and fantastic moustaches.

• 28:57Speaker 04

  And then we also have some imported textiles, we have some silk. So it's a really kind of rich accumulation of different materials. But one of maybe my most famous artefacts in all of archaeology, these little felt swans. And they look like little push figurines that we would have no idea whatsoever that they would have ever existed if not for these preservation conditions.

• 29:31Tristan Hughes?

  I've just got a couple of images on the screen now, including that moustache man on his horse with the spotted cape kind of flowing in the winds behind them. I can't believe that these are more than 2000 years old. And just to think, that's just a symbol of the amazing preservation that you have in these tombs. And I guess also a symbol of like the richness of these pazaric burials as well. Do you know what, what an amazing culture to work on and to know that you have items like that. You know, you don't just have the mummies, which we're about to get to. You also have these amazing insights into their culture with things like these carpets. And I'm guessing other amazingly well-preserved objects too.

• 30:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, in terms of late prehistoric archaeology, this is one of the most fantastic contexts you could ever work on in terms of the richness of information that you're getting.

• 30:20Tristan Hughes?

  And so otherwise, do we have food surviving, textiles, gold, horses? Is that what we're thinking?

• 30:26Speaker 04

  Yes. Also, wood carvings is an important one to mention. So we have little tables that if you're moving around a lot, you can take the legs off. So they're all very transportable. They were master wood carvers as well, so really beautiful griffins that sometimes are eating a deer head or something like that. So it's, yeah, it's, it's quite a sight.

• 30:51Tristan Hughes?

  And do you know, the last thing I've got before we go on to the mummies themselves is kind of going back to women and men at these burials. Time and time again, if you're looking at Siberia and the pazarics and the Iron Age time, you get the name Siberian ice maiden come up as like the most famous example. But I'm guessing that particular example, as you've highlighted already, she's just one of many mummies found, many mummies now studied in that area of the world.

• 31:17Speaker 04

  Well, it is kind of the most famous slash infamous one that's out there. There are not that many mummies, like it is still a relatively rare kind of find. And of course, climate change is making the permafrost border move upwards. And it is destroying a lot in the process that we don't even know exists, right? So there might be tombs that have been frozen fifty, sixty, seventy years ago. And that have, in the meantime, kind of silently decayed, including all the fantastic items that were preserved in them. Still, like the Ukok Poto, kind of the highest part of the Altai Mountains is still relatively safe.

• 32:02Speaker 04

  But it might be affecting the lower areas.

• 32:06Tristan Hughes?

  I just wanted to mention that name there because it feels like that particular discovery, the Siberian Ice Maiden, is worthy of a podcast in its own right. So we won't talk anymore about that particular discovery, but I'm just glad to have mentioned it. So let's go on to these mummies themselves. Getting towards your research now, Gino, I mean, what can we therefore see on these incredible mummies that have survived?

• 32:29Speaker 04

  So something that came clear already in the 1940s, when the first ice mummies were excavated by Rudenko, was that some of them indeed had tattoos. And they were mostly visible on the preserved skin of a chieftain that is still visible in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg today. It's been displayed and you can go and look at it. But a lot of the other mummies, when they came up, they were kind of dark. The skin was oxidized and therefore it was not possible to see any of the tattoos. It's only possible with near infrared light.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  And that's something, a method that has come up in the past 20 years or so, that we can actually reveal some of the tattoos on the other mummies.

• 33:24Tristan Hughes?

  And of the tattoos that were visible from the beginning, what types of designs did they show?

• 33:32Speaker 04

  So the tattoos of the ice mummies very much mirror the general art style of the wood carvings. And so it is a kind of consistent stylistic entourage that we're being in. And so, yeah, it's really nice to see that. So we do have animal fighting scenes again. We do have these animals with twisted hind legs. We do have kind of griffon designs, angulates with raptor heads and the like.

• 34:06Tristan Hughes?

  And is it normally the case on the mummies that have been discovered? Do they all have tattoos on them? And do they all have quite a few on them as well?

• 34:13Speaker 04

  Yes, so the interesting thing is that early on, this was kind of treated as, okay, this might be a sign of elite status. But really, ultimately, all the Pasirik mummies that we've found so far do have tattoos. And that is, sometimes they're not so well preserved. Sometimes there's only like small pieces of human skin that remain. But we were able to show that basically any Pasirik mummy that's survived so far does have tattoos. And so it seems to have been this really widespread practice.

• 34:51Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's really delve into this research then, Gino. So what was the aim of this research at the beginning? What were you thinking in your head as you went into this project?

• 35:00Speaker 04

  So first of all, the tattoos have been really important in kind of defining the art style of the Pasirik culture. And what we've been working with for the last decade, basically, are these relatively limited, almost frugal, black and white depictions. And they do not really offer the kind of richness that you have with the data that we can create nowadays. And so going back in, red documenting some of the mummies with near infrared photography,

• 35:39Speaker 04

  really for the first time, gave us a possibility to look at these tattoos in detail and figure out how they were actually made.

• 35:49Tristan Hughes?

  And did you, for this project, did you then decide with this new technology to focus just on one particular mummy and to kind of put all that research, all that technology to bear on one particular, I don't want to use the word specimen, but I guess you can use the word specimen here.

• 36:05Speaker 04

  Individual.

• 36:06Tristan Hughes?

  Individual, there we go. Thank you. That's better. That's a better word.

• 36:08Speaker 04

  Yes, so they're not particularly easy to get access to. That's why we first tried out these methods with one individual, with actually great success. So we figured out how these tattoos were made. And we figured out a whole bunch of more little details we didn't know we would discover before.

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• 38:05Tristan Hughes?

  And so talk me through this particular mummy and your work on this particular mummy with this, you know, really high resolution, digital infrared photography. What did it reveal about the nature of the tattoos on that particular mummy? And then how it related to larger Pazeric culture?

• 38:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, so first of all, it was not entirely clear whether these tattoos were actually made through little puncture wounds or they were made through incisions or even subdermal tattooings. For this, we have to understand what kind of like the general framework of pre-electric tattooing is. So the most widespread method is through puncture tattooing. And so this is mostly hand poking. That's the most prevalent one where you have essentially a needle and some ink and you are piercing the skin with that needle.

• 39:04Speaker 04

  We have a variation of that that's mostly prevalent in the Pacific realm, which is called hand tapping, where you have a tool at an angle where you hit on top of it. Then we have incision tattoos where you use usually some sort of obsidian blade or a metal blade and you make very fine cuts into the skin and then you take the ink and rub it into these wounds. And then the third version is something that is mostly practised in the Arctic, which is subdermal tattooing, which honestly doesn't really sound particularly convenient to me, but that's where you actually have a thread.

• 39:47Speaker 04

  You pinch the skin, you put the pigment into the thread and you... Put the needle through the pinched skin and through like pulling the thread or the sinew through the skin, the pigment then remains in the skin. And so for the pazeric mummies, it was first and foremost a debate whether it was hand poking or subdermal tattooing. And what we figured out was that it was very clearly hand poking.

• 40:15Tristan Hughes?

  Hmm.

• 40:17Speaker 04

  And we also saw that we actually have a variety of different tools that were used. Because for some of the tattoos on the forearms, we have a very consistent line thickness. And that is usually something that you generate through a multi-point tool. So a couple of needles very close together. You do not get that if you're purely hand poking with a single needle. Then we have some of the finer details that seem to have been created with a single point tool.

• 40:55Tristan Hughes?

  Wow, okay. So you learn the nitty gritty of how they made the tattoos for this particular person. But could you also tell whether all the tattoos were added at the same time to this individual? Or whether they keep coming back to add more and more to their body? What do we know about that?

• 41:13Speaker 04

  So what was really fantastic is to work with an actual tattooer who uses these pre-electric methods day in, day out, and who really understands the placement on the body. And what we were able to figure out jointly with Danny Riddick was that there were actually multi-session tattoos. So one of the forearm tattoos where you have some felines fighting with some herbivores, you had first the lower part and then you had a kind of blank spot that was then filled in. So the two are separable. And so that hints at a multi-session tattoo.

• 41:57Speaker 04

  What we also were able to identify through the high resolution. Red photography that my colleague Michael Wabullin has mostly worked on is that there are specific instances where they take off the tool, they get new ink and they start again. And that leads to like a slight shift in the line that you could really not see on the previous documentation of these tattoos, but it's just a fascinating little detail. And when you really look at these things very meticulously, that you see the whole work process unfolding.

• 42:34Tristan Hughes?

  That's amazing. So to repeat what you just said, thanks to the new technology, you can really now delve into the quality of these particular artistic designs created by someone thousands of years ago for these Pazirikhs that have endured on the skin of these mummies today. What an amazing line of research.

• 42:56Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I mean, this is just, this was a surprise to me and it really gets you so close to the research subject. I mean, harking back to me being in the library, you know, more than 10 years ago and looking at these pictures now doing this research myself was it was a special treat for me for sure.

• 43:16Tristan Hughes?

  And so what did these discoveries, what do you think they revealed about the importance of tattooing? You know, and this kind of skin pricking tattooing method, how important it was to this ancient culture, to the Pazirikhs?

• 43:32Speaker 04

  It was extremely important, of course, and it was done by professionals. So there is a very clear learning curve also like on the same body. We do have tattoos that are of a different artistic and sort of methodological quality. So we see that, for example, this tattoo with the hunting felines, they are depicted in a very complicated pattern. They are front facing, which is something that is rather unusual in Pazirik arts and kind of denotes a break with convention. So this is a rather advanced.

• 44:11Speaker 04

  Tattoo, whereas the other four and tattoo where we have a griffin hunting a herd of all is really conforming more to the general style of Pasuric art. So we are able to distinguish basically different artist hands, or at least also different stages in the development of a single artist. Of course, that's all speculation, whether that was one person or or someone else. But what is clear is there were learning curves to ancient tattooers in Pasuric society. And they would increase their skills.

• 44:51Speaker 04

  And it was definitely something that needed a lot of practice to get to a point where you could create these tattoos.

• 44:58Tristan Hughes?

  So we must think then that in these ancient Pasuric societies, there were people who were, I guess, the equivalent today of professional tattooists, you know, who people would go to to get these art styles beautifully depicted on parts of their body.

• 45:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't know if it can go as far as that we have a division of labour that

• 45:20Speaker 04

  allows for purely people just making a living, so to speak, with creating tattoos. But it was certainly specialists that were really well trained and had a lot of practice in creating these tattoos.

• 45:35Tristan Hughes?

  And do we have any more of a sense now about the meaning of these tattoos in Pasuric culture, why they decided to have them on their body? Was it a marker of their identity or their beliefs? Any ideas around that?

• 45:52Speaker 04

  Well, of course, it was a part of their identity. I think this far we can go with the interpretive approach. But given it is a prehistoric culture, I think a lot of the meaning will remain hidden, or at least will never really approach the sort of richness and nuance of the meaning that these images originally had.

• 46:15Speaker 04

  Often they are kind of interpreted as apotropic images, so it's a meaning that fending of evil. But I mean, that is a very kind of general interpretation that we do have occasionally in other cultures as well. In how far that actually is true or not, it's really all speculation and will remain at that stage because we will not find written sources that explain us exactly what these images meant. That being said, I think really diving into the details of how these things were created does add a lot of nuance and

• 46:57Speaker 04

  richness to the image already that we don't necessarily need to go as far and say like, okay, this is what they meant.

• 47:05Tristan Hughes?

  Do you know, it is such fascinating research. Is there anything else about this new research that you'd like to highlight before we start wrapping up the episode?

• 47:15Speaker 04

  Well, of course, something I would like to do is now go back in and document the rest of the

• 47:23Tristan Hughes?

  What's next? Of course, you've just done one.

• 47:25Speaker 04

  Such mummies, right? There's also a whole bunch of tattooed mummies in Xinjiang, where I've originally done my research, not necessarily belonging to the Pasuric culture, but occasionally to a similar timeframe. And so they have not been studied and we're currently working on getting access to some of these. So that might be the next step that we're all looking forward to if access is permitted.

• 47:57Tristan Hughes?

  Those mummies in Xinjiang, are those the Tarim mummies, the ones, you know, a couple of them have this kind of clad on that some say is almost like tartan?

• 48:04Speaker 04

  Yes, so there's a whole range of mummies and they date to different time periods. They're from different material cultures. So

• 48:14Speaker 04

  It's just generally through the very dry circumstances in the Torrem Basin, we have this incredible organic preservation. So there's basically ice and desert that allows for organic preservation and that allows for studying tattoos in the end. And there's a bunch of them, not just the ones from Xiaohuo that you're referring to, which are not confirmed to have tattoos yet.

• 48:41Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 48:41Speaker 04

  But it might also be something that maybe comes to light with using near infrared.

• 48:47Tristan Hughes?

  Or Gino, do you also hope that this research, it shines more light on Central Asian Siberian archaeology here in the West, where, as we mentioned right at the start, there is naturally a tendency towards the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. But new research like this and the amazing techniques available to people like yourself should garner a lot more fascination with Central Asia and the people like the Pazarics who lived there thousands of years ago.

• 49:15Speaker 04

  Honestly, I think Central Asia is incredibly important, not just as this sort of in-between space between ancient Rome and ancient China that it's sometimes treated as, but the steppe itself is a major hub of innovation and idea transfer and transfer of languages and genes. And very, very important to understand to also draw parallels to later historical developments. Unfortunately, I think the geopolitics of the place are not particularly rosy at the moment. And so I don't foresee an intensification of research in the coming years.

• 49:56Speaker 04

  It's become very, very difficult to collaborate with researchers, especially from Russia, of course. But of course, there are other countries in Central Asia that are quite easily accessible. There's a lot of exciting research coming out of Mongolia at the moment. And I have since pivoted to Azerbaijan, which is not exactly Central Asia, but through this route, through the Caucasus, it's also kind of tied to steppe archaeology, at least the stuff that I'm pursuing, which might be something for a next podcast.

• 50:31Tristan Hughes?

  I think so, Gino. I think we've done all our questions for today. I mean, last but certainly not least, your new paper is now out, all about your work on these tattoos. Where can people find it?

• 50:42Speaker 04

  The new paper is out in Antiquity and you can just type the title into Google. It's called "New High-Resolution Near-Infrared Data Reveal Pazeric Tattooing Methods" and it should come up for you. Otherwise, you can also follow me on Instagram at @GinoCaspari. If you want to keep updated with my research, I usually post links to all my published papers there as well and occasionally give little interviews or have colleagues on and we probably have an upcoming interview with my co-author and we'll go more into depth of ancient tattooing methods.

• 51:24Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, Gino, I noticed you've got quite a sizable Instagram following, so that's a great way that people can can follow your work. And of course, we will put a link to the article in the description of this episode, which also, I believe, Gino, has all the, it's got lots of the images from your research as well. So people can see the tattoos that we've been talking about today.

• 51:43Speaker 04

  Absolutely, yes. Danny has made some fantastic illustrations, starting off with a very detailed, just-the-facts type of illustration, and then step by step going into more an artistically rendered version of them, where you can really see what the initial intention behind the tattoo was.

• 52:03Tristan Hughes?

  Well, Gino, extraordinary research. We're so happy to have got the scoop. And it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

• 52:10Speaker 04

  It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.

• 52:16Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Dr. Gino Caspari talking you through this extraordinary new research into the Siberian ice mummies through the tattoos that have survived on their bodies. And in particular, for this research on one particular individual. And it's really exciting to see what more research will be done on these figures in the future. I hope you enjoyed the episode. It was such a privilege on the ancients to have the scoop on this story that has just been released. The paper has just been published, which all of you can go and read and see the pictures and so much more if you fancy. We'll put a link to the paper in the description in the show notes below. Thank you for listening to this special episode of The Ancients.

• 52:59Tristan Hughes?

  Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a huge favour. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating too, well we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's all from me, see you in the next episode.