Archive Note
In January 2025 a team led by Thomas Kaye, Judyta Bak, Henry Marcelo, and Michael Pittman published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences using laser-stimulated fluorescence to reveal fine-line tattoos on more than a hundred mummified remains of the Chancay culture, who lived on the central Peruvian coast roughly 900 to 1470 CE. The imaging exposed tattoo lines about 0.1 to 0.2 millimeters wide, finer than the same culture's pottery and textiles, and the team read them as puncture work made with a single cactus needle or sharpened bone. The finding is real but contested: in March 2025 Aaron Deter-Wolf, Benoit Robitaille, and Lars Krutak published a critical comment in the same journal questioning the method, the comparison image, and the puncture interpretation, and the original authors replied. House framing therefore says the lines were revealed by laser imaging and notes the dispute.