Tattoos as Clovis/Folsom-age Portable “Rock Art”

By: Ray Urbaniak
Originally published in Pleistocene Community News, July/August 2019, page 13

In a June 12, 2019 film clip on Facebook, Iranian archaeologist, Dr. Mohamed Naserifard, PhD, posted an interesting photo of the arm of a Lorastan Nomad (Fig. 1). It shows an ibex image in the form of a tattoo the man would carry with him.

As those familiar with my articles in PCN know, the ibex is portrayed in standard rock art form as found throughout the world, including in the Americas. Upon seeing the image, I instantly recalled the idea presented in several of my earlier PCN articles that images of extinct animals depicted in southwest U.S. rock art or of animals that were not extinct but not known from the American fossil record yet appear to be represented in the rock of the American southwest. Harkening back to one suggestion as to why rock art, apart from such as known from Hueyatlaco carved into mastodon bone when it was fresh is purportedly not known from Clovis-age or earlier sites is due to the nomadic nature of those ancient peoples (i.e. always on the move) or that rock surfaces inclined to preserve such artwork for millennia—as is common in say France and Spain— was lacking in the U.S. is that... It is possible that the Clovis/ Folsom people—who were generally Nomadic—carried their animal artwork on their bodies in the form of tattoos. This definitely would have helped carry down the oral traditions of extinct animals if the artwork was also carried down on their bodies (see mammoth image I superimposed over a public domain image of a Native American man, Fig. 2).