Featured on PDR in the collection Theodor de Bry’s Engravings for Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report (1590)

At the turn of the seventeenth century, as England and Scotland began to colonize North America, historians undertook a parallel journey into their own ancestors’ past. They observed in the annals of Roman descriptions about Britannia a practice similar to what contemporary colonial explorers were reporting from the Eastern seaboard: figurative tattoo and body modification. The ancient Picts — a Roman name given to the people of Caledonia who lived above Hadrian’s Wall — seemed to evidence the “savagery” out of which Britain had emerged, and which Britons were now rediscovering on the shores of the New World.