Strength before Weakness

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

So ancient Roman statues have some really weird hairstyles. Archaeologists just couldn’t figure them out. They didn’t have hairspray or modern hair bands, or elastic at all, but some of these things defied gravity better than Marge Simpson’s beehive.

Eventually they decided, wigs. Must be wigs. Or maybe hats. Definitely not real hair.

A hairdresser comes a long, looks at a few and is like, “Yeah, they’re sewn.”

“Don’t be silly!” the archaeologists cry. “How foolish, sewn hair indeed! LOL!”

So she went away and recreated them on real people using a needle and thread and the mystery of Roman hairstyles was solved.

“A hairdresser comes a long, looks at a few and is like, “Yeah, they’re sewn.”

“Don’t be silly!” the archaeologists cry. “How foolish, sewn hair indeed! LOL!”

So she went away and recreated them on real people using a needle and thread and the mystery of Roman hairstyles was solved.”

Did they? Did they really? The archeologists all laughed at the plucky hairdresser and then she proved her theory by simply recreating the styles?

See, what actually happened is that Janet Stephens (the hairdresser/hair archeologist in this post), who published an article about her theory in The Journal of Roman Archeology in 2008, spent about 6 years of research pursuing her idea that perhaps Roman hairstyles were sewn hair and not wigs. She did both hands-on experimentation sewing the actual hair, and more traditional research reading through a ton of sources. This is coming from an interview done with Stephens herself:

“Lots and lots of reading, poring over exhibition catalogs, back searching the footnotes to the reading and reading some more! It helped that I am fluent in Italian and, in 2006, I took a German for reading class. Working in my spare time, the research took 6 years.”

“I am an independent researcher, but my husband is a professor of Italian at the Johns Hopkins University, so I have library privileges there. We are friendly with colleagues in the Classics/Archaeology department and at the Walters Art Museum. They were kind enough to send me articles and clippings, read drafts and help with some picky Latin, though I try not to impose.”

(Source: http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/14729)

Wow, so people in the Classics/Archeology department and at the art museum sent her articles and clippings and HELPED her with her research as opposed to laughing at her in their gentleman’s club! It’s almost like people working the archeology/art history these days aren’t all stuffy old white guys from the 1950’s!

Stephens also presented her work at the Archeological Institute of America Conference, and according to the interview I cited above, it was apparently well received: “It seemed to create a a lot of buzz and people said they enjoyed it. It’s not every conference where you go to the poster session and see “heads on pikestaffs”!”

“The first three found were fragments less than a few centimeters long and might not have been recognized without experience working with later period bone tools. It is not something normally looked for in this time period.”

The archaeological team almost missed them because these bone fragments were both tiny and unexpected as “[the] technology [was] previously associated only with modern humans”. As in, Neanderthals had not been shown to have even been capable to make these artefacts before that point. I don’t think people quite understand how big of a deal this is - this is about the equivalent of finding pottery in a modern human group about 20 000 years ago (they haven’t but that’s the level of *that shouldn’t be there*)

This was identified *by the archaeologists working on the project* because they’d found them before. They fully knew what these artefacts were in the first place, they just didn’t expect to find them there.

Then to prove it, they replicated the use-wear by buying a modern tool off the Internet and doing microscopic analysis. There was not a single modern leather worker mentioned in either the article linked or the actual paper put out. That is absolutely something that would have been acknowledged in both of the papers.

This paper was revolutionary in our understanding of Neanderthal crafting capabilities, recognisied by brilliant and diligent archaeologists and this entire narrative of incapable stuck up archaeologists is an insult to their work.

The women who recognised that the blades were being stored out of reach of children were also archaeologists. Janet Stephens’ research is part of a legitimate branch of archaeological research called Experimental Archaeology. Experimental archaeology has been practiced academically/professionally since the 80s. I’m a hobbiest in a lot of historical crafts and have been the person that a colleague turned to when struggling to identify an artefact. We were able to figure out what it probably was because I knew what use-wear to look for and how to find parallels.

I’d risk it all to be in Carolina by midnight

Keep working til the work gets done, one day we’ll watch the sun rise

Over the Blue Ridge skyline