Archive Note
The Chimu of Chan Chan flourished from about 1100 to 1470 CE on the arid north coast of Peru, and the tattoo anthropologist Lars Krutak describes them as among the most heavily tattooed of pre-Columbian Peru, extending the Moche marine tattoo vocabulary across a large population. They worked with tools made from materials such as cactus thorn, fishbone, parrot quill, and spiny shell, and their bodies were preserved by the hyper-arid coastal climate, the same conditions that preserved tattooed mummies across coastal Peru and Chile from cultures including the Chinchorro, Moche, and Chiribaya. Prevalence figures are uncertain: an often-cited claim that about 43 percent of adults at one settlement were tattooed rests on a single older survey from 1981, so it is best treated as an estimate rather than a settled figure.