The UMMAA Brown Bag Lecture Series is pleased to present a lecture by Mar Pereira Gómez, visiting graduate student in History of Art, University of Santiago de Compostela. Her lecture, "Marked bodies in the past: The Pazyryk culture case," will be held on Friday, November 14, 12-1 p.m. in Room 1322 in the School of Education Building.
In the past century, excavations of the Pazyryk culture kurgans in the Altai Mountains revealed one of the most remarkable discoveries in archaeology: exceptionally well-preserved mummies with complex zoomorphic tattoo motifs. These findings provided a unique window into ritual practices, identity construction, and cultural networks of the Iron Age steppe. The doctoral project of Mar Pereira Gómez examines body modification among steppe nomads from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining archaeology, anthropology, and iconographic studies. Through an operational chain analysis of tattooing and comparison with tattoo traditions in North America, this research seeks to understand the technical and symbolic processes that gave meaning to these bodily marks. This work offers a renewed synthesis of the role of tattooing in the past, exploring its value as a social, ritual, and cosmological marker within the broader framework of Eurasian protohistory.
The Museum's Brown Bag Lecture Series is free and open to the public.
