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Aboriginal tattoos reflect art, culture

Indigenous Australian body art, such as tattoos and intentional scarring may help to unravel mysteries about where certain groups traveled in the past, what their values and rituals were, and how they related to other cultures, according to an Australian researcher.

The study by Liam Brady of Monash University's Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies appears in the current issue of the journal Antiquity.

"Distinctive design conventions can be considered markers of social interaction so, in a way (they are) a cultural signature of sorts that archaeologists can use to understand ways people were interacting in the past," says Brady.

For the study, Brady documented rock art drawings, including images found on early turtle shell, stone and wood objects, and images that were etched onto the human body through a process called scarification.

"In a way, a scarred design could be interpreted as a tattoo," Brady says. "It was definitely a distinctive form of body ornamentation and it was permanent since the design was cut into the skin."

"Evidence for scarification is primarily via (19th century) anthropologists - mainly A C Haddon - who took black and white photographs of some designs, as well as drawing others into his notebooks in the late 1800's," he says.

Both Haddon and Brady focused their attention on the Torres Strait - a collection of islands between Australia and Papua New Guinea.

Although people were living in the Torres Strait as early as 9000 years ago, when sea levels were lower and a land bridge connected Australia with New Guinea, archaeological exploration of the area only really began with Haddon's 19th century work.

Since body art, rock art, wooden objects and other tangible items have a relatively short shelf life, Haddon's collections and data represent some of the earliest confirmed findings for the region.

Common motifs

Brady determined that within the body art, rock art and objects, four primary motifs often repeated - a fish headdress, a snake, a four-pointed star, and triangle variants.

The fish headdress, usually made of a turtle shell decorated with feathers and rattles, was worn during ceremonies and has, in at least one instance, been linked to a "cult of the dead."

The triangular designs, on the other hand, were often scarred onto women's skin and likely indicated these individuals were in mourning.

Analysis of the materials found that two basic groups - horticulturalists and hunter-gatherers - inhabited the Torres Strait during its early history.

Aboriginal people at Cape York Peninsula had "a different artistic system in operation, which did not incorporate many designs from Papua New Guinea," Brady says.

Based on land locations where the body art and object imagery were found, as well as the nature of the designs, Brady concludes that the Cape York residents were the hunter-gatherers, while groups in the Torres Strait appear to have been horticulturalists.

Since imagery mixed and matched more among the early farmers, Brady concludes they enjoyed kinship links, and engaged in extensive trade, with Papua New Guinea groups.

In the future, similar studies could help to identify cultural groups in other regions, while also revealing their social interactions. Such studies could prove particularly useful for other parts of Australia and New Zealand, where tattooing and body art, as well as totems - protection entities often depicted with colorful imagery - were common.

Maori repatriation

Recently, for example, the Field Museum in Chicago returned the human remains of 14 Maori native New Zealanders back to their country of origin. The remains are now at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa.

Included in the collection of mandibles, crania and other bones is "one preserved head with facial tattoos," according to the Museum.

In an act of repatriation, nine tattooed Maori heads were also recently gifted to Te Papa by Scotland's Aberdeen Museum.

Te Taru White, a Maori specialist at Te Papa, said the "ancestors" made "the long journey home to New Zealand and to their people."

The heads are now in a consecrated, sacred space within the New Zealand museum, where they may be studied and researched further. In Brady's case, his work was undertaken as part of collaborative research projects initiated by certain Torres Strait and Aboriginal communities.