Tattooing is not a Polynesian invention, but it clearly
developed into a fine art in the Pacific Islands.
Ötzi, the fellow who died in the ice in the Italian Alps 5,300
years ago had dozens of tattoos. And his death predates the development of Polynesian
culture. Ötzi's 61 tattoos were generally geometric forms. Crosses and stripes
and rows of lines. Early Egyption mummies had tattoos as well.
But tattooing certainly developed dramatically during the
Polynesian period. A new paper on Polynesian tattooing reviews the way the
tattooing art progressed. 
(Image: Australian archaeologist Geoffrey Clark of The
Australian National University holds a 2,700-year-old tattoo comb from Tonga. Credit:
Jack Fox/ANU)
It is "Ancient Tattooing in Polynesia," published in the Journal of Island and CoastalArchaeology by Australian researchers Geoffrey Clark of the Australian
National University at Canberra and Michelle Langley of Griffith University at
Langley.
Tattooing is the art of inserting pigment under the skin to create
a permanent mark. In its finest form, the skin is used as a canvas for broad patterns.
In Polynesia most of those patterns were geometric, but they often represented
organic organisms—like sharks or birds.
Much Polynesian tattooing was done with bone "combs,"
thin planks of bone with a series of sharp points carved into one end. The bone
used to make the tattooing combs was sometimes human, but more often bird or pig,
and even flying foxes and fish. The sharp bone tips would be dipped in pigment,
placed against the skin and tapped repeatedly with a mallet to inject the dye.
One of the interesting things about the history of Pacific
tattooing is that tattoo tools don't show up in the earliest archaeological
sites, the authors say. It is also clear that while tattoo tools were found
through much of the Pacific and Asia, "the most elaborate bone tattoo
tools restricted to Polynesia," they write.
People in other parts of the Pacific used other tools—like bits
of sharp obsidian—for tattooing, but the Polynesian tattooing comb first
appears in archaeological sites dating to about 2,700 years ago in Tonga.
The many similar tattoo tools in Eastern Polynesia,
including Hawai`i, date much younger.
"Bone combs are relatively common in the archaeological
record of East Polynesia which was colonized 1,000–700 years ago," they
write.
The materials are so common that it suggests tattooing
itself, while it did not exist 3000 years ago, became a regular part of growing
up in Polynesia, particularly in what is now French Polynesia. Joseph Banks,
who was Captain Cook's botanist in the Pacific during the 1760s, wrote:
"It [tattooing] was done between the ages of 14 and 18
and so essential it is that I have never seen one single person of years of
maturity without it."
In the 1800,s Tongan men who failed to be tattooed were
subject to ridicule.
Polynesian tattooing became such a social force, the authors
say, that the techniques spread to other parts of Oceania. And although some
tattooing was clearly done earlier in Europe—Ötzi being the best example—European
whalers and explorers brought back an interest in the tattoo from Polynesia to Europe
in the 1700s and 1800s.
"Interest in 'native' tattooing continued during, and
after, the voyages of Cook and others to the Pacific during the Enlightenment,"
Clark and Langley write.
© Jan TenBruggencate 2019
