On Pins and Needles: Stylist Turns Ancient Hairdo Debate on Its Head (2013)

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324900204578286272195339456

by gwern • 12 years ago

104 39 12 years ago

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ableal• 12 years ago

I'm reminded of the "Rem acu tetigisti" that P.G.Wodehouse would have Bertie Wooster and Jeeves toss out on some occasions.

bane• 12 years ago

I've followed Ms. Stephens' work off and on since I found out about her research, even submitted a few videos she's produced showing the technique here on HN. It's absolutely fascinating and there's something really immediate and connecting about her work. She also does a wonderful job documenting her work and assumptions and should be given honorary letters from some institute that cares.

Strangely enough, not too long before I found out about her, I was in a museum looking at Roman busts and also found a similar fascination with the hairstyles. Stone doesn't really capture the detail of hair, but it struck me that there was real identifiable fashion in the hairstyles being worn (as opposed to hair being styled to show tribal or ancestral membership).

I looked around for a little bit on the web but there's really pitifully little we know about this kind of day-to-day minutia, and it's that kind of stuff that really brings the past alive with me.

codezero7• 12 years ago

Yeah, there is a huge dearth in the day to day lives of average people throughout history.

This sounds really stupid, but I am still generally vexed as to how people, say, 500 or a thousand years ago managed to get their first outfit.

If you're barely scraping by a living, how can you afford hand made items like clothing, which requires precious natural resources and time to create. Those outfits must have had to last a very long time as well, what did they look like, what was the total flow of the transaction?

How did the weaver get the raw materials? Was it all exchange based? I'll make you a shirt if you give me enough material to make two?

Considering a lot of people didn't own the land or crops they farmed, how did the workers get the money or raw materials to obtain something as simple as a shirt, especially if they were, say, 8 years old.

Anyhow, I'm rambling a bit. It's really easy to take for granted a simple thing like your shirt :)

HarryHirsch• 12 years ago

The economy of the Middle Ages has been studied (here, for example: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~mkohn/orgins.html), and it had one distinguishing feature: there was no small coinage; the smallest denomination that people would generally accept was a day's wage.

One can guess how people dealt with this: they extended credit to each other. A village's general store served as its bank. Tools and workmen's boots had to be ultra-reliable. In generally, the economy back then looked surprisingly modern (Cicero talks about letters of credit in his letters, the risk in long-distance trade was spread by buying shares in a voyage), the only thing that was missing was advertising.

maxerickson• 12 years ago

People didn't just abandon their children (which I don't think is a revelation, just saying it conversationally).

Knitting and animal skins are both pretty well known as ways of obtaining cloth (or skin as it were), and getting skins wasn't such a big deal in times when there was no one saying that all the animals belonged to him.

I think it is less well understood how straightforward felting is; still not necessarily fun, but available to many people in an agrarian society. Also, we don't see weaving every day anymore, but a loom can be a very simple thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VerticalLoom.JPG

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp-weighted_loom

(Simple especially in the materials necessary, I guess I wouldn't want to promise to build you one tomorrow)

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

Making & mending clothing, fashioning tools, etc... that was part of barely scraping by a living. In many climates clothing was necessary to survive.

This is also part of why people worked 16+ hours per day. Washing clothes, mending tools, caring for animals, washing dishes, cleaning the house, ... washing machines, dishwashers, electric ovens, all these labor-saving devices are the big difference between subsistence families with no time, and you today with lots of time.

Originally you did it all yourself. You have a sheep; you shear it, your wife spins it to thread and knits, your children help along the way.

This, by the way, is really where the family unit comes from. Running a household plus making a living used to be a full-time job for several people.

Then, yes, the weaver appears. Maybe the weaver is a shepherd. I have wool; I'll make you a shirt if you give me enough potatoes and cabbage to eat for a week.

The freedom to not grow/gather your own food is how the trades came about.

To my understanding, at least.

sjf• 12 years ago

Probably with a loom something like this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oewvqPF9JU

There are still villages in remote areas, e.g. Himalayas, where weather and location mean you have to pretty self-sufficient. As others have said, if you have sheep or goats you have the natural resources, add some women (not trying to be sexist, this is just based on observation) to do the weaving, and bam, outfit.

ars• 12 years ago

If you were 8 and needed a shirt you got it from someone who outgrew it. People shared items quite a bit.

The poorer you were the worse your clothing, i.e. handed down more times. If nothing else you could piece together rags.

rdtsc• 12 years ago

My mom told me how her grandma used to cut flax and then leave it in a marsh where it would rot/decompose and make the fibers easier to process. Then from fibers would be threshed (I think that's how it is called) and spun into a string. String was somehow processed into fabric (sorry don't know how). Well clothing and carpes were sown out oit.

Anyway to kind of answer your question this wasn't the middle ages and it was you know 1800s or so. And the process could be done almost all manually.

Also the way it was desribed some people from the village knew how to do some things better than others and they would barter or work together in groups. So maybe those that knew how to spin fibers would exchange it for milk or grains and so on. So yet, it was a lot of work. People maybe had a few outfits but didn't have walk in closets full of clothes. Pillows, carpets, bed sheets were prized posession would last for a long time, being patched and repaired of course.

oftenwrong• 12 years ago

This page discusses some of those aspects of Viking clothing:

http://www.hurstwic.com/history/articles/daily_living/text/c...

DrStalker• 12 years ago

http://www.reddit.com/r/askhistorians is a highly moderated (i.e.: nothing like most of Reddit) subreddit that has a lot of historians happy to answer random questions about anything that happened more than 20 years ago.

205guy3• 12 years ago

I find codezero's lack of historical perspective rather uninformed and somewhat naïve.

"how can you afford..." People at the time didn't always have the money (or trade goods) and some lived in squalor (not all food/shelter/clothing needs met).

"hand made items like clothing..." Everything was handmade, so it was the norm. A shirt would be essentially worth the food required during the time it took you or the village weaver/tailor to make it. Fine clothes, such as those worn by nobles were notoriously expensive, often with a person's wardrobe being worth half of their entire estate (including land and buildings).

"which requires precious natural resources..." Many resources were more bountiful at the time, with more open areas and less population. Commons and wilderness closer by gave resources for the time to gather them.

"and time to create..." People had more time, without modern leisure pursuits. When you eat the subsistence level, you spend whatever time it takes to meet your needs (food, shelter, fuel, clothing).

But all these details were dependent on the time and place you're interested in. Feudal Europe had peasants living in squalor while the nobles controlled the land/resources and got rich off peasant labor. In places like the Pacific Northwest of North America, the salmon run was so abundant and nutritious that food was not lacking and I imagine people had time to hunt for furs and sew them into clothing before winter, as well as develop other arts and crafts.

johnny99• 12 years ago

It wasn't 500 years ago, but homesteaders similarly had to make from scratch most of what they wore, and used, and ate. I've been reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder books with my daughter, and Wilder goes into quite a bit of detail about all the very many things her family had to be able to do themselves, using only raw materials.

In general, everyone in the family is absolutely always working, and they all have a wealth of craft knowledge which had been passed down through the family. Extended families and neighbors work together when many hands are needed. They're kid's books, but really interesting nonetheless.

pjc503• 12 years ago

I can't find it at the moment, but there was someone who as a research project handmade a linen shirt with medieval techniques, accounted for the hours of time taken, and multiplied by the modern minimum wage, to get a figure of about $3000.

especially if they were, say, 8 years old

From your family?

The extended family was far more an economic unit of organisation than it is in the modern west. It would be understood that your family should feed and clothe you somehow, with whatever assets they had, and in return you laboured in the family trade; generally outdoors / heavy manual for men, indoors / light manual for women. Clothing repair (darning) would be an important part of that.

Textile production would be specialised/industrialised even in the 1200s: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=42274 . That implies a normal commercial flow with working credit of some sort, based around bills of exchange. Note that it was even internationalised at this date, trading from England to Holland and Italy.

Have a look at e.g. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=z-uYTzxRUUcC&printsec=fro...

205guy3• 12 years ago

bane wrote: "I looked around for a little bit on the web but there's really pitifully little we know about this kind of day-to-day minutia."

I would call that myopic; the Internet does not yet contain all of human knowledge ever recorded. Given that Classic civilizations left many artifacts and were well studied throughout history, I would be surprised if some musty university library in Europe does not contain a thesis on ancient hairdos. I doubt Google scholar has been that thorough, yet.

I do get your point, and do agree that many details of ancient civilizations are lost to history, but it's not because they can't be found in Google.

soperj• 12 years ago

This is the kind of thing that keeps me coming back here. I'm sure someone will eventually ask "why is this on hn", but for me this is the really cool stuff that I come to HN every day hoping to find.

comrh• 12 years ago

Hearing about someone get so into a arguably esoteric subject and really expand the knowledge base is inspiring.

aeturnum• 12 years ago

I'm more and more skeptical of historical narratives that portray the knowledge and practices of past peoples as a strict subset of our own knowledge. Along the same lines, we seem to constantly underestimate the peoples of the past (ex: the long-time assumption that the pyramid was built by slave labor[0]). We are absolutely more developed in some areas (sanitation, mechanization), but some things elude us.[1][2][3]

[0] http://news.discovery.com/history/ancient-egypt/pyramids-tom... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel [2] http://www.korean-arts.com/about_korean_celadon.htm [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete

tormeh• 12 years ago

It's true, but we can make way better steel than Damascus steel, nowadays. We are better at almost everything than any past people have ever been. Do you know about anything a past people have done better than we know how today? That would be really fascinating.

thaumasiotes• 12 years ago

Today we're better at everything, but through history the situation "the people in the past were better at X than we are now" has been quite common.

keenerd• 12 years ago

Do you know about anything a past people have done better than we know how today?

This is a cheap shot, but preparing laserwort or dodo.

More practically, anything that is done by hand and needs a lifetime of training. But you need to be sufficiently specific. No one can use a longbow the way medieval british could, but anyone with a bit of training and a modern compound bow could probably match them. So you'd need to be specific to longbows.

abecedarius• 12 years ago

The early Stoics knew propositional logic, and their successors didn't until the mid-19th century. (Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6380918-stoic-logic) Then the likes of Boole and Frege made it possible to see what they were getting at again from what survived -- which was, mainly, hostile reviews. Until then, anyone would've told you the current theory of logic was as advanced as it'd ever been, and the Stoics were guilty of arid pettifogging.

One thing Mates does in the book I mentioned is find translators' misunderstandings and prejudices, like the hair-sewing bit in the OP. That also comes up in Lucio Russo's The Forgotten Revolution about the sources on Hellenistic science -- classicists generally aren't scientists either.

(This comment is turning out to sound really hard on classicists, and I certainly don't feel that way. I'm just an interested reader.)

rajat• 12 years ago

At least one form of Roman concrete was better than anything we moderns had been able to come up with until we rediscovered the formula a few years ago.

Link: http://borepatch.blogspot.com/2013/06/long-lost-roman-concre...

On Pins and Needles: Stylist Turns Ancient Hairdo Debate on Its Head (2013)

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