Archive Note
Diego de Landa, writing in Yucatan around 1566 in his Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan, recorded that the Maya marked their bodies in a process they called labrarse, to carve the body, which was considered a great torment, and that a person was held braver and more valiant in proportion to the amount of marking borne. He noted social rules around the practice: men were not extensively marked until after marriage, women marked themselves more delicately on the upper body while excluding the breasts, and unmarked people were mocked. The shipwrecked Spanish soldier Gonzalo Guerrero, who had integrated into Maya society at Chetumal, refused to rejoin Cortes's expedition, citing his marked face and pierced ears as signs of his place among the Maya. Direct physical evidence has emerged recently: in 2025 archaeologists reported two Classic-period chert tools from the Actun Uayazba Kab cave in Belize bearing wear and soot-pigment traces consistent with tattooing, and the naturally mummified Camotlan woman from Oaxaca, dated to about 250 CE and associated with the Nuine culture, carries zoomorphic and geometric tattoos on her forearms and abdomen, the oldest direct physical evidence of tattooing in Mexico.