by Ted Sherman

Created on: May 10, 2008

Creating art on human bodies has been practiced since before the dawn of history. Cave drawings, as well as 5,000-year-old Etruscan, Cretan and Egyptian tomb and temple wall paintings have survived to show a wealth of images of eye, face and arm decorations on men and women, as well as early versions of tattoos.

The famed faces and figures of Queen Nefertiti and other Egyptian noblemen and women were enhanced by henna dye and other chemicals that outlined their eyes, lips and eyebrows. African tribes have long used paint, tattoos and pierced body parts as integral practices in their culture and ceremonies.

Body art in prehistoric times was not confined to Europe and Africa. There are also examples of centuries of similar traditions among the Maori natives of New Zealand and the Aborigines of Australia, as well as among many other civilizations that still practice the art on islands throughout the vast Pacific.

Early ancestors of Native Americans brought their practice of face and body painting with them when they migrated thousands of miles across the now-extinct land bridge between Asia and the Americas. Archaeologists believe the event to have happened over several centuries more than 10,000 years ago before the last Ice Age covered the area with permanent ice and snow and separated the continents with the Bering Sea.

There are also beliefs that some of the originally-Asian tribes migrated as far south as Central and South America, and the body-painting, tattooing and piercing traditions of the Incas and Mayans are similar to those of Native American tribes in North America.

As the original immigrants spread through what is now Canada and the United States, each of the various tribes evolved its own systems of religious, warrior and cosmetic face and body painting traditions. Indian body religious and ceremonial painting was greatly exaggerated and ridiculed in American culture as entirely war paint in 19th and early 20th Century literature and movies.

I earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Philadelphia Museum College of Art many decades ago, but spent most of my adult life working in the advertising and graphic arts industry, and rarely opened my paint box after college. However, while certainly no expert in Native American body painting, since my retirement to the Arizona desert nearly 20 years ago, I've sketched and painted many scenes and portraits of indigenous people from nearby tribes.

The closest Native American reservations to my home in Tucson

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