MURFREESBORO,
Tenn. — MTSU adjunct professor and
state prehistoric
archaeologist Aaron Deter-Wolf will
discuss his research on ancient tattoo practices Saturday, June 24, as the
special guest of the Rutherford County
Archaeological Society.
The free public discussion of “Tattooing in Antiquity” will begin at noon June 24 at the Heritage
Center of Murfreesboro, located just off the Public Square at 225 W. College
St.
An internationally recognized authority on ancient
tattoos, Deter-Wolf works for the Tennessee Division of Archaeology in the state Department
of Environment and Conservation and has taught courses since 2009 in MTSU’s
Department of Sociology and Anthropology in the College of Liberal Arts. His June
24 presentation will cover recent discoveries in tattoo archaeology, including
his research into ancient Native American tools.
He’s currently working on “Ancient Ink: The
Archaeology of Tattooing,” the first book devoted to studying the practice via
archaeology, and was senior editor for the 2013 book “Drawing with Great
Needles: Ancient Tattoo Traditions of North America.”
Deter-Wolf shared his expertise on the oldest known
human tattoos in existence on a 2016 episode of PBS’s “NOVA” program, “Iceman
Reborn,” when he explained his discovery disproving the conventional wisdom
that a mummy from the Chinchorro culture found in 1983 in Chile had the oldest
tattoos on record. The true record-holder is a 5,300-year-old mummy nicknamed
“Ötzi the Iceman,” discovered in the Ötzal Alps mountain range along the
Austria-Italy border in 1991.
His current research also includes shell-bearing
Archaic sites in Tennessee’s Middle Cumberland River Valley and foodways
archaeology in the Southeastern United States. Along with his lengthy
membership in the Tennessee Council for
Professional Archaeology, Deter-Wolf is a board member of the international Center
for Tattoo History and Culture.
The Rutherford County Archaeological Society meets
monthly at the Heritage Center and welcomes guest speakers, the community and
professional archaeolog zzy avsts
to discuss the county's past and how to document and learn from it.
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