Hi everybody, from Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History.

So if you spend enough time working on the past, whether you're focused on stuff that

happened just a few years back or 10,000 years ago, you're going to have to get used

to the idea that you can't know everything.

They're going to be gaps in missing pieces.

Maybe the person who wrote down the only existing account of a conflict was lying about it

for reasons that are lost to us.

Maybe an ancient society exposed its dead to the elements rather than bearing them for

us to conveniently find.

The body is one of those things that can be really hard for us to understand and appreciate

in the past and our skin most of all.

But just because it almost never survives does not mean it didn't matter, very much the

opposite.

New work is helping us understand just how important a role the body and our skin played

in our past, especially through the practice of tattooing.

That is why I'm so stoked to talk to our guests today.

His work is cutting edge and super cool and it's opening up whole new windows onto the

human past.

He's a prehistoric archaeologist for the state of Tennessee's Division of Archaeology,

where he manages ancient Native American sites on state-owned lands and conducts archaeological

excavations and research.

He's published widely on a variety of topics and he is one of the world's leading experts

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