The History Blog

Some time ago, I was wandering around the Internet nerding out over old things as is my wont when I came across the YouTube channel of a genius. Before my astounded eyes, professional hairstylist Janet Stephens recreated the hugely intricate hairstyle of Empress Julia Domna (170–217 A.D.), wife of Emperor Septimius Severus, using only period-appropriate tools and a sculpted bust of the empress as an example. No pins. No perms. No hairspray. Behold Janet’s amazing skills in action:

Naturally I watched the rest of her videos in quick succession. Then I secured a copy of “Ancient Roman Hairdressing: On (hair) pins and needles,” a paper she wrote that was published in the 2008 edition of the Journal of Roman Archaeology (JRA). The depth of her knowledge blew me away. She is fully conversant in the archaeology (including unpublished artifacts), ancient literary sources and published scholarship of Roman hairstyling, and not just Roman but Etruscan and Greek as well.

Her work in this field is unique because her experience as a stylist gives her particular insight into how hair works and what can be accomplished with what tools. She upends a number of assumptions — that Roman women must have used wigs to achieve their more elaborate hairstyles, that they used hairpins — and injects a whole new simplicity and accuracy to the very vocabulary of ancient hairdressing.

Virtually all commentators demonstrate modern technological biases that lead to anachronistic speculation: in both looking at images and interpreting literary passages, they assume that the Romans used the same hairdressing technologies as do moderns. In addition, not being hairdressers, they fail to understand the technical possibilities of the tools that the Romans did have at their disposal. I will analyze the physical capabilities of the single prong hair-pin in order to show the impossibility of its application in many contexts. As an alternative I will propose sewing needles, arguing that, as Roman women of the 1st c. A.D. abandoned vitta-based [(vittae were linen or woollen ribbons used to tie the hair together when arranging it)] coiffures in favor of more elaborate fashions, they used needles (artifacts well attested in antiquity) invisibly to stitch together the style’s various components.

And that’s just the second paragraph. The rest of the paper lives up to its promise and then some.

Her most recent video, Julia Domna: Forensic Hairdressing, a recreation of a later hairstyle of the hirsute empress, was presented to great acclaim at the Archaeological Institute of America’s Annual Meeting in Philadelphia earlier this month.

Correction: I initially wrote she had done the recreations live, but that was my misunderstanding. In fact, Janet’s Julia Domna videos were running on a computer while four pre-styled mannikin heads, one at each stage of Julia’s hair loss as portrayed on coins, provided real-hair examples for the people attending to examine. A 4×8 foot graphic illustrated the probable progression of hair loss from one stage to another.

Shocked and awed by her combination of scholarly research and styling craftsmanship, and cat-killingly curious about how all the elements came together, I asked Janet Stephens if she would submit to an interview and she has most graciously done so.

Q: How did you first begin to research ancient hairdressing?
A: My research began with a visit to the Walters Art Museum in 2001. They had just finished renovating the Greek/Roman collections and displayed a number of portrait busts at eye level, out in the center of the room, like a cocktail party. I had never seen the back of a roman portrait before—they are usually placed high on shelves/pedestal with the backs tight up against a wall. As I circled the portraits I saw the logic of the hairstyles and determined to try some at home. It was electrifying, can’t thank the Walters enough.

Q: When was the first time you tried to recreate a look and how successful was that initial foray?
A: I think it was my first day off after that visit! I pulled out a long haired mannikin to try out Julia Domna, type 2. I made it as far as the serpentine bun and hit a wall. Bobby pins and hair pins just wouldn’t do the job. It was all library leg work and practical experimentation after that.

Q: Which came first: your love of history or your love of hair?
A: My love of hair definitely came first (as a child I had the best coiffed dolls in the neighborhood), and my love of hair kindled my love of fashion and social history.

Q: Your article in the JRA demonstrates an astonishingly thorough command of the archaeological record, and of primary and secondary sources relating to Roman hairstyling (and not just Roman, but also Etruscan and Greek). How did you master such a density of material?
A: 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.

Q: Did you do all this research on your own or through a school or other institution or …?
A: 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.

Q: You say in the JRA article that sculptures tell you where to part the hair, what direction to twist it in, even whether the curl is natural or artificial. I’m particularly curious about the latter. How you can identify the source of the curl?
A: It helps to have a lot of hairdressing experience! This is a complex topic with room for much ambiguity. Identifying artificial curl on a statue requires a visual literacy similar to that necessary to distinguish a particular painter’s work by his brush strokes. It can be difficult to identify artificial curl today because of the vast array of hair care technologies available.

The Romans did not have the range of technologies that we do (electric dryers, plastics, cheap metal clips, air conditioning, hair spray), so changing the shape of hair was both risky (irons heated over fire) or time consuming (air drying wet hair so it takes on an unnatural shape can take many hours). How long these artificial curls might endure depended on climate and weather. I believe most Roman women made do with their natural curl patterns and avoided artificial curling.

But on Roman portraits, curls that are too neat, ribbon-like, evenly sized and orderly may be suspected as artificial. I always examine the entire hairstyle, looking for signs of wave or straightness. I look for signs in hairstyle components where curl would be irrelevant or counterproductive to the finished style, and I pay special attention to mismatches between one zone of the head and another. Artificial curls are arranged in strict rows or stacks, with a logic and consistency to their rotational direction, say clockwise on one side of the head and counterclockwise on the other. Natural curl tends to be chaotic and “frizzy”, there is usually a mix of different diameters of curl and they don’t always rotate in the same directions.

Q: Were you already an accomplished stylist by then?
A: Yes. I now have over 20 years professional hairdressing experience. I have also taught in an accredited beauty school and as a color educator for a major haircare company.

Q: Did you have to do a lot of trial and error to figure out how certain hairstyles were achieved?
A: Not really, once I realized they could be sewn together, the styles came together fairly quickly. Using high quality portrait examples is a must, though.

Q: Which ones were the most challenging and why?
A: The ones I do on mannikins are the hardest, because I have only my two hands to work with. A live model can follow directions or help out by holding on to a piece of equipment or hair. But in terms of sheer manual dexterity, the “beehive” (ca. 117 A.D.) is the toughest so far.

Q: I was surprised by how much hard science — like the isometric tension keeping bodkins in place and the anatomical requirements of hair length for any given style — was in your JRA paper. Are these factors you can calculate by observation or did you have to learn them by experimenting?
A: Hairdressers learn a lot of biology and anatomy during cosmetology training and we apply it every day in the salon. We all learn that certain hair lengths work better for certain styles. I prefer using vertebrae to measure hair length because it is precise but not dogmatic. I have used bodkins to dress my own hair and I use them to manage the long hair of clients. You become familiar with how they work and it just becomes a matter of finding ways to describe them.

Q: How did you find those unpublished needles in the Johns Hopkins collection?
A: The Johns Hopkins University has a very good archaeological collection and museum. Their gracious former curator, Eunice Maguire, helped me with the needles. There is a lot of unpublished material out there.

Q: How was your “Julia Domna: Forensic Hairdressing” presentation received at the Archaeological Institute of America Conference this year?
A: 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”!

Q: Is there anyone else doing anything like what you do?
A: Dr. Elizabeth Bartman (president of the AIA) and Prof. Katherine Schwab of Fairfield University have each employed hairdressers to recreate the hairstyle of Faustina the Elder and the ancient Greek Erechtheion caryatid hairstyles, respectively. But, so far as I know, I am the only professional hairdresser working as a scholar in her own right on the topic of ancient hairstyle recreation.

Q: Do you have any specific goals, attitudes you’d like to change or new approaches you’d like to establish in the archaeological community?
A: I would love it if all archaeological museums would display their sculptures out in the middle of the room instead of in niches and against walls! And I wish there were mirrors behind every small sculpture displayed in a case.

Q: For instance, creating consistent terminology (i.e., bodkins and needles instead of curlers/hairpins/bobby pins) standards in the scholarly literature?
A: That’s a great idea…and I would extend the concept to include technologically neutral descriptions of hair itself.

Q: If you could choose one ancient hairstyle or technique to bring back into fashion today, which one would it be and why?
A: Selfishly, I would love to see more women of every age wearing their hair as long as they can: that way I could find hair models more easily!

Inspiring, isn’t she? Not only is Janet Stephens an expert in her profession, but in just six years she taught herself to be an expert in the academic field of ancient hairdressing, maybe even the primary expert. Now run, don’t walk, to watch all of her videos and clamor for more.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti is in Tripoli to sign a new treaty with the post-Gaddafi government, and he brought the head of a first century A.D. Roman sculpture with him to seal the deal.

The head belongs to a statue of Flavia Domitilla Minor, the daughter of the emperor Vespasian and sister of emperors Titus and Domitian. The statue was excavated from the UNESCO World Heritage archaeological site of Sabratha and was on display at Sabratha’s Roman museum in 1990 when thieves broke the head off of the body and absconded with it. (Some of the news stories are saying it was stolen in the 1960s, but I think that’s just one of the AP’s trademark typos getting passed around like a game of telephone.)

It turned up last year as lot #261 of the April 14 Antiques sale at Christie’s London. I will give you one guess as to the provenance they claimed on the piece. Oh yeah. It’s our old friend the Swiss private collection. They removed the lot from their website after they got busted, but this article quotes their original lot notes: “private collection, Switzerland, circa 1975; acquired by the present owner in Switzerland in 1988.” It was still attached to its body in a Libyan museum in 1988. Such a blatant lie.

London-based Libyan archaeologist Hafed Walda saw the lot before the auction and alerted Christie’s that it was the Domitilla head stolen from the Sabratha Museum. They ignored him and sold it to an Italian buyer for £91,250 ($142,000). Archaeologist and brilliant blogger Dorothy King also tried to get Christie’s attention but they blew her off too.

My experience of Christie’s is that that’s par for the course, but just in case … I knew they couldn’t give me the buyer’s details, so I asked the head of department, Ms Georgina Aitken, to pass mine on to the buyer as I had some information about the history of the piece. Ms Aitken said she would not do so unless I told her what the information was. I briefly explained that there was evidence to suggest that the head might have been looted and that the provenance was faked, and that Christie’s were aware of this and did nothing. There are more chances of pigs flying than of this information being passed on to the buyer.

Said buyer took his purchase home only to voluntarily relinquish it a few months later to the Carabinieri Art Squad. Christie’s had the audacity to respond thus:

A Christie’s spokesman said: “Additional information was brought to our attention after the auction. We subsequently cancelled the sale and are assisting all relevant bodies with the return of this object.”

See how weaselly that “additional information” bit is? Because Hafed Walda told them where that head really came from before the auction so they couldn’t say they had no idea they were selling stolen goods again. No, they just got additional info long after the fact, you see, that really clinched it for them. Please. Anyway they just reimbursed the buyer and that’s the end of that. No consequences. This is why they keep selling artifacts from “Swiss private collections” over and over again, even when there’s hard evidence that they were stolen.

To close on a less enraging note, here’s a fun fact about Flavia Domitilla Minor: she died at just 21 years old three years before her father Vespasian became emperor in 69 A.D. Twelve years after that, her younger brother Domitian became emperor. He deified her and granted her the title of Augusta.

Her daughter Flavia Domitilla converted to Judaism/Christianity (the Talmud claims the former, Eusebius the latter) and was exiled to the island of Pandataria by her uncle Domitian for her “atheism” which included a refusal to worship her own mother along with the rest of the imperial family and traditional Roman pantheon. She is now a Christian saint and her former property is the exquisite catacomb of Santa Domitilla.

Archaeologists excavating a Croatian cave overlooking the Adriatic Sea have discovered what they believe is the oldest astrologer’s board ever found. They were digging at the entrance to the cave in 1999 when one of the researchers’ girlfriends burrowed her way through debris into the cavern. She discovered a 33-foot-long passageway leading to a chamber that had been sealed off in antiquity, probably in the first century B.C. during a war against invading Romans. Inside were thousands of pieces of pottery, ivory, and bones around a stalagmite shaped like a phallus.

It took several seasons to excavate the cave. The floor of the cave and all the artifacts were caked in thick, sticky cave clay making them a challenge to dig out and to clean. Once excavated, researchers spent years piecing together the fragments of what turned out to be high quality Hellenistic drinking vessels from the 3rd and 2nd century B.C. The tiny fragments of ivory turned out to be pieces of a Greco-Roman astrology board, beautifully carved with the signs of the zodiac.

Radiocarbon dating of the ivory indicates the ivory is 2,200 years old, which is just around the time that astrology, originally a Babylonian discipline, became popular under the reign of the Ptolemys in Egypt. It’s the Greco-Egyptian version of astrology that established itself in Europe and that is still in popular use today.

An ancient astrologer, trying to determine a person’s horoscope, could have used the board to show the position of the planets, sun and moon at the time the person was born.

“What he would show the client would be where each planet is, where the sun is, where the moon is and what are the points on the zodiac that were rising and setting on the horizon at the moment of birth,” said Alexander Jones, a professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University.

“This is probably older than any other known example,” Jones said. “It’s also older than any of the written-down horoscopes that we have from the Greco-Roman world,” he said, adding, “we have a lot of horoscopes that are written down as a kind of document on papyrus or on a wall but none of them as old as this.”

We can’t trace where the ivory came from, but Egypt is certainly a viable candidate. Ivory was a precious material, so once harvested from its elephantine owner it could have been hoarded for years, maybe as long as a century, before it was carved. The board was made by carving ivory plaques in a 28-degree arc with a sign of the zodiac on the face. The plaques were then attached to a flat surface, probably a wood board.

The Cancer plaque is the most complete one, with Gemini and Pisces also clearly identifiable. A partially reconstructed plaque shows the back of an animal that could be Sagittarius’ horse’s ass. The rest of the plaques are too fragmentary to identify.

Researchers aren’t sure how and why these valuable Hellenistic artifacts found themselves smashed around a stalagmite in an Illyrian cave. The location, overlooking the Adriatic, was a well-traveled commercial route. Illyrians, who the Greeks thought of as somewhat barbarous, could have traded for the goods or pirated them and then brought them to the cave for religious purposes.

According to Stašo Forenbaher, a researcher with the Institute for Anthropological Research in Zagreb whose former girlfriend (now wife) tunneled her way into the sealed-off chamber in 1999, the broken artifacts around the stalagmite suggest the chamber was a sacred space which the locals used to sacrifice to a deity.

“There is definitely a possibility that this astrologer’s board showed up as an offering together with other special things that were either bought or plundered from a passing ship,” Forenbaher said. He pointed out that the drinking vessels found in the cave were carefully chosen. They were foreign-made, and only a few examples of cruder amphora storage vessels were found with them.

“It almost seems that somebody was bringing out wine there, pouring it and then tossing the amphora away because they [the amphora] were not good enough for the gods, they were not good enough to be deposited in the sanctuary,” Forenbaher said.

The Illyrians might not even have known what the astrologer’s board was for, but recognizing it as a valuable and beautiful object they sacrificed it anyway.

Archaeologists from the University of Basel in Switzerland have discovered the tomb of a woman with no connection to the royal family in Luxor’s Valley of the Kings. This is the first tomb of a non-royal woman ever found in the Valley of the Kings.

According to an inscription inside the tomb, her name was Nehmes Bastet and she was a singer for deity Amon Ra in the Temple of Karnak during the 22nd Dynasty (945-712 B.C.). She may have been the daughter of the High Priest of Amon, which would explain how she secured such a primo location for eternity.

At the time of her death, Egypt was ruled by Libyan kings, but the high priests who ruled Thebes, which is now within the city of Luxor, were independent. Their authority enabled them to use the royal cemetery for family members, according to [Mansour Boraiq, the Antiquities' Ministry top official for Luxor].

The unearthing marks the 64th tomb to be discovered in the Valley of the Kings.

The tomb was discovered entirely by accident. The University of Basel team’s remit is to clean and document some of the less glamorous and therefore less studied tombs. While cleaning near the tomb of Thuthmosis III (discovered a hundred years ago), they found a shaft with a chamber at the bottom. Inside the chamber was an intact wooden sarcophagus painted black and decorated with hieroglyphics and a wooden plaque engraved with Nehmes Bastet’s name and titles.

The coffin will be opened this week. Egyptologists expect (probably because of the weight distribution) to find a mummy covered with a cartonnage (plastered layers of linen) mask.

Ahram Online says the burial chamber contains a “treasured collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts.” There are no specifics on what these artifacts are, but they apparently were used to determine that the tomb itself pre-dates the 22nd Dynasty burial. It was originally cut during the 18th Dynasty (1550-1292 B.C.), the dynasty of superstars like Tutankhamun and Nefertiti. We don’t know yet what exactly allowed them to date the tomb or who the original resident might have been.

Interesting side note to this story: several Egyptology bloggers first heard rumors that the University of Basel had found a new tomb in the Valley of the Kings around the time of the Egyptian revolution last year. Security police had been withdrawn from the Valley of the Kings, so there was nobody on site to deter and capture the looters who would inevitably descend on the site like locusts should they catch wind of a new tomb.

Bloggers coordinated with Dr. Thomas Schuler of Blue Shield, an international organization for the protection of cultural heritage during emergency situations, to warn the University of Basel team and to publicly dismiss the rumored find as just a secondary shaft to a pre-existing tomb. Thanks to them, researchers were able to do their thing without dangerous interference.

There is a great deal of evidence that the Maya used tobacco. Mayan hieroglyphics referring to tobacco have been translated. Deities, kings and shamans are often depicted smoking in Mayan art and iconography. The God L is depicted smoking a cigar on a wall relief in the Mayan city of Palenque, Mexico. A monkey deity smokes a cigarette on a vase from the late Classic period (200-800 A.D.). The Madrid Codex (pdf), one of the few Mayan historical records to survive the Christianizing zeal of the Spanish conquistadors, has multiple images of people smoking.

What we didn’t have, however, was physical evidence of the presence of tobacco in Mayan artifacts. Since we can’t know from a painting or a carving what the characters are smoking, finding the remains of tobacco fills in a major part of the historical puzzle. Using cutting edge chemical analysis, Dmitri Zagorevski, a scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Jennifer Loughmiller-Newman, an anthropologist from the University at Albany, have done just that.

They tested the residue inside 50 Mayan vessels from the Kislak Collection at the Library of Congress using gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GCMS) and liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LCMS), two highly precise but non-invasive methods to detect the presence of the specific substances even from minute samples. Most of the containers showed no trace of nicotine, either because there was never any in there or because it was removed by water or bacteria, contaminated in antiquity or after excavation, or simply because the vessel was reused enough over the years to destroy any residue.

Only one of the vessels, a small 2.5-inch-by-2.5-inch clay flask made around 700 A.D. in Southern Campeche, Mexico, passed the nicotine test with flying colors.

Zagorevski and Loughmiller-Newman’s analysis of the vessel found nicotine, an important component of tobacco in residues scraped from the container. Both techniques confirmed the presence of nicotine. In addition, three oxidation products of nicotine were also discovered. Nicotine oxidation occurs naturally as the nicotine in tobacco is exposed to air and bacteria. None of the nicotine byproducts associated with the smoking of tobacco were found in the vessel, indicating that the vessel housed unsmoked tobacco leaves (possibly powered [sic] tobacco) and was not used as an ash tray. No other evidence of nicotine has been found, at this time, in any of the other vessels in the collection.

The flask is decorated with a hieroglyphic text that reads “y-otoot ‘u-may,” meaning “the home of his/her/its tobacco” which you’d think would make it a shoe-in for the presence of nicotine, but this is actually only the second time ever that the contents of Mayan vessel have been found to match its label. (The first was a cacao vessel.)

Tobacco had many uses in Mayan society. The powdered tobacco held in this flask could have been chewed or inhaled like snuff. It could also be used in household applications, as a snake repellent and to kill botfly larvae.

In 2000, a group of archaeologists and volunteers discovered some Iron Age pottery outside the village of Hallaton in Leicestershire, central England. A metal detectorist followed up in the area and found gold and silver coins. Further excavation revealed they had found one of the most important Iron Age sites in Britain, complete with 333 Roman coins, 5,296 British-made silver and gold coins, jewelry, ingots, thousands of pig bones, complete skeletons of three dogs and the pièce de résistance: an elaborately decorated Roman cavalry parade helmet that was buried around 43 A.D., the year of Claudius’ invasion of Britain.

The discoveries indicate that the site was a major Iron Age hilltop ritual enclosure, an important religious center for the local inhabitants, primarily the Corieltavi tribe. The pig bones were buried at various times during the 30s A.D., some of them remains of huge feasts while others were buried with the joints intact as a sacrifice to the gods. Because of the careful placement of the dogs’ remains, archaeologists believe the dogs were intentionally killed and buried to guard the shrine.

The valuables buried underscore the importance of the site. The hoard of Iron Age British coins is the largest ever found in Britain, comprising almost 10 percent of all extant British Iron Age coins. Among the 333 Roman coins found was the oldest Roman coin ever found in Britain: a silver denarius dating to around 211 B.C. It was buried by the Corieltavi in the 40s or 50s A.D. The images of Roma on the obverse and the Dioscuri (the twins Castor and Pollux) on the reverse are extremely worn, meaning that that denarius traveled far and wide for about 250 years before being put to rest in Leicestershire’s loam.

Then there’s the helmet. It was found in thousands of pieces, the metal so corroded archaeologists joked that they’d found a “rusty bucket” this time. The pieces were embedded in the mud; archaeologists had to remove the whole block of soil encased in plaster of Paris to get it to the conservation lab. There they discovered the rusty bucket was a silver-gilt iron cavalry parade helmet, the cheekpiece decorated with the figure of an emperor trampling a barbarian under the hooves of his horse while a winged victory holds a laurel wreath over his head.

It’s one of a very few Roman cavalry helmets ever found in Britain and one of the earliest. It’s also the only Roman helmet found in Britain with most of the silver plating surviving, even though it’s too corroded to shine anymore. This would have been owned by a cavalry officer of high status. There’s speculation that it could even have belonged to a Briton in the Roman army who buried it as a sacrifice, although of course there’s no way to know who owned it, who buried it and why.

A Heritage Lottery grant allowed British Museum conservators to piece it back together like a 3D puzzle. It took them ten years.

Metals conservation expert Marilyn Hockey began unearthing the fragments “out of a big lump of soil” at the British Museum three years ago.

She said: “Working our way down this enormous lump of clay, we discovered at the bottom some amazing finds … the Emperor cheek piece told us it was something really special. To get something straight out of the soil like this is like gold. You can find out so much from it.”

Jeremy Hill, head of research at the British Museum, said his “mouth dropped” when he saw the object pieced back together.

He said that the helmet had helped “change our understanding of what Britain was like just before the Roman conquest”.

He said: “Every book on the Roman conquest of Britain is going to have a picture of that helmet in it now.”

Next up for the Hallaton Helmet is permanent display at the Harborough Museum, just nine miles from where it was discovered, along with many other pieces of the Hallaton Treasure. For more details about the finds and tons more pictures, please see the Leicestershire County Council website. There’s video of the restored helmet here. For more about the conservation, see the British Museum blog.

A group of amateur archaeologists working under the guidance of professional archaeologists discovered eight 6th century gold coins in a potato field near Biesenbrow in Uckermark, northeast Germany, last November. The treasure is composed of seven Byzantine solidi and an extremely rare coin bearing an image of the Merovingian King Theudebert I (reigned 533-548 A.D.). The coins are thin and bent, weighing around 4.4 grams each. The standard weight of solidi was 4.5 grams, so despite their bent and curled appearance, they’ve managed to stay remarkably intact.

The area has had a reputation for buried treasure ever since 200 coins from Rome and Constantinople were discovered there in the 19th century, the first appearing in 1851. Four of them are now in the Numismatic Collection of the State Museums of Berlin. Some of the lesser coins were given away, and the rest of the gold coins were all melted down by the farmer who owned the property. The find wasn’t well documented at the time. Biesenbrow village teacher W. Dalichow (we don’t even know his first name) wrote an account of the find in 1885 for the Brandenburg Provincial Museum in Berlin, but historians have questioned Dalichow’s accuracy.

Color him vindicated, because it was from Dalichow’s correspondence that archaeologists were able to figure out which potato field to search. In a letter, Dalichow mentioned the name of the farmer who found the coins and from there historians were able to figure out where that farm once was. Archaeologist Felix Biermann pinned down an area of 400 by 800 meters (1312 feet by 2625 feet) as the likeliest spot. He took a group of volunteers with metal detectors who had been trained in excavation work, and it was one of them who saw the first glint of gold just four inches underground. A retired actor and teacher found the King Theudebert coin.

The discovery is of major historical significance. The coins themselves, first of all, are rare and valuable. By the 6th century, only the Byzantine Roman emperor had the right to strike gold coins with his face on them. It was against the law to use them outside of the Byzantine empire. All taxes had to be paid in solidi and once collected, the emperor melted them down every year and minted new ones. This ensured that the soft pure gold pieces didn’t get whittled down to chips through heavy circulation. If the coins were taken out of the empire, then they weren’t going to be paid as taxes and the whole imperial system of gold recycling and preservation would falter. Of course the solidi ended up traveling anyway.

How they traveled to the Brandenburg area in around 550 A.D., we do not know. At that time, the area was a wasteland. The Germanic tribes had left the area during the early Migration period (starting in 400 A.D.) while the Slavs had yet to move in. The Frankish Kingdom of Austrasia was on the other side of today’s Germany, covering parts of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. King Theudebert I, grandson of King Clovis, was initially an ally of Byzantine Emperor Justinian I when he attempted to reconquer the Western Empire from the Ostrogoths in 535. Justinian paid Theudebert for his assistance, and then wound up fighting him when the Franks saw the Gothic War as a perfect opportunity to get some prime northern Italian real estate of their own.

Theudebert’s minting of coins with his own image rather than the emperor’s was in keeping with his increasing prominence in Western politics. He was the first Merovingian to issue his own characteristic coinage rather than pay homage to the emperor, and it was a direct insult to Justinian. Theudebert even wore the pearl-bedecked crown of the Byzantine emperor on his coins. Constantinople was concerned that Theudebert would seek to expand his kingdom even beyond Italy at Byzantine expense.

Historians speculate that the entire coin cache — these eight coins are believed to be part of the same treasure that was first uncovered in the 19th century — was buried by Thuringian warriors on the run after losing battles against the Franks.

Archaeologists have discovered 3,000 rock paintings dating from the first century to the twentieth in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, Mexico’s National Anthropology and History Institute (INAH) announced Friday. The art was found at 40 different sites in the desert region between August and October of last year, but the Institute waited to reveal the find until laboratory analyses confirmed the ages of the pictographs.

Guanajuato has been a rich source of rock art discoveries since the 1980s. In an attempt to locate and document as many of the painted sites as possible, INAH developed the Rupestral Art Project of the Victoria River Basin which has sent a team of researchers into the area for four consecutive years. This season’s find more than doubles the known rock art sites in the region from 30 to 70.

[T]he oldest images refer to rites of passage, healing, prayers for rain and mountain worship, and were created by ancient hunter-gatherer societies that occupied the area during the first centuries A.D.

These paintings, with yellow, red and black the predominating colors, generally represent human figures with headdresses, robes and shields, as well as some as yet unidentified instruments. Often in hunting and battle scenes they carry bows and arrows.

“A great diversity of animals is also to be seen, chiefly deer, canines, insects like centipedes and spiders, a great variety of birds, generally with their wings outspread, and radiating circles that probably represent the sun,” Viramontes said.

The expert said that the ancient hunter-gatherers who “created images on rockfaces were doing more than just leaving an imprint of their collective memory of historic, climatic and ritual occurrences – they painted the exposed fronts and sheltered backs of boulders as points of contact between the material and spiritual world.”

The later pictographs also include much religious symbolism, although a Christian-influenced variety courtesy of the Spanish conquistadors. The cave paintings that date to Mexico’s colonial period (1650–1810)‎ include images of crosses, shrines and altars. They were made using white pigments characteristic of the indigenous Otomi people who settled in arid northeastern Guanajuato starting in the 16th century.

There are also images painted in the 19th century by local ranchers. Crosses, altars and human characters predominate. The ranchers used rough strokes of red pigment as opposed to the Otomi white. They also dressed their human images in the kinds of clothes that they wore at the time: baggy pants and hats.

The 20th century paintings are of cups and crosses. Archaeologists believe they were painted during the Cristero War (1926-1929), a rebellion against the Mexican government sparked by by President Plutarco Elías Calles’s strict enforcement of anti-clerical articles in the Mexican Constitution of 1917. According to the locals, the cave in question was used as shelter by people of various religions who also performed rituals there.

Regis Cursan, the pastry chef at London’s Nobu restaurant, was scanning the mud of the Thames bank near Putney bridge with his metal detector what he found a small bronze Roman coin. When he rubbed some of muck off, he saw the Roman numeral XIIII on one side and a figure on the other side that he at first thought was a goddess but turned out to be a couple having sex. It was not a coin after all, but rather a spintria, a 1st century token common in the Roman world which some experts believe was used to pay for the services of a prostitute.

This is the first one ever found in Britain which makes it an exciting discovery. Cursan has donated the token to the Museum of London, where it is currently on display.

“This is the perfect archaelogical object. It’s sexy and provocative in the best sense of the word,” said Caroline McDonald, museum curator.

“The lot of a Roman sex slave was not a happy one and objects like this can help the Museum of London provoke debates about issues that are relevant to the modern city and its visitors. Museums should engage with these more grown-up and sometimes less comfortable topics.”

Nice segue from titillated glee to somber reflection on the plight of sex slavery.

The thing is, we don’t know what those tokens bought exactly. The articles about this discovery lean heavily on the brothel token theory, that the numeral on the back represents a price paid maybe even for the specific act depicted on the front. That would be convenient in a mobile, multi-cultural, polyglot empire where prostitutes were slaves who could have come from anywhere and their clients from somewhere else entirely. No need to negotiate price or explain what you want in words; just buy the apposite token and exchange for services.

There could have been a scarier reason for the rise and fall of spintriae. Most of the ones discovered date to the reign of Tiberius. Suetonius says Tiberius was an avid prosecutor of laesa maiestas (literally “injured majesty,” called lese majesty in English after the French) cases. Crimes against the imperial dignity included carrying “a ring or coin stamped with his image into a privy or a brothel” so, the argument goes, a token brothel/toilet economy sprang up under Tiberius to save johns’ necks.

The problem with the brothel theory is that no ancient sources mention the existence of spintriae, and none of them have been found in any actual brothels. Pompeii, for instance, had one official brothel and an estimated 25 smaller ones operating from first floor flats above taverns and private homes. Plenty of spintriae have been found around town, none of them in the brothels.

Romans included explicitly erotic imagery in their daily lives. There are frescoes of people having varied and active sex in the baths at Pompeii. Mighty erect phalluses are everywhere, warding off bad luck. The spintriae could have been used as gambling chips, board game tokens, claim check tokens at the baths, at religious festivals (it’s no weirder than Mardi Gras beads, if you think about it) or handed out as naughty gift items. Martial describes showers of “lasciva numismata” (lascivious coins) raining down on the crowds at Domitian’s triumphal games (Epigrams, Book VIII:LXXVIII).

The late 12th century Buddhist temple complex of Banteay Chhmar (also known as the Citadel of the Cats) in Cambodia has been ill-treated by time, climate, war and looters. Banteay Chhmar is the fourth largest temple built during the Angkorian period. It was built 105 miles from the capital of Angkor in a desolate region of northwest Cambodia near the border with Thailand. It’s baking hot in the dry season, the roads are impassable during monsoon season and jungle vegetation thrives.

It was commissioned by King Jayavarman VII in honor of a Crown Prince, probably his son Indravarman. An inscription found at the site describes how four royal servants saved the prince’s life on two separate occasions. The inscription says they died protecting him and thus their images were placed in the four corners of the shrine. The temple is rich with bas-reliefs depicting deities, history and legend of Khmer culture. Angkor Wat has almost no bas-reliefs.

Despite its historical, religious and artistic importance, however, Banteay Chhmar’s remote location and climatological challenges resulted in eight centuries of neglect. The Khmer Rouge used it as a stronghold and mined the perimeter heavily. After the Khmer Rouge left, looters braved the minefields. In one such shameless and depraved act, Cambodian soldiers drove pickup trucks to the temple walls and used jackhammers to remove entire sections of the bas-relief. The theft was only discovered because by random coincidence a French expert who had worked on Banteay Chhmar found a section of the stolen wall in an antiques store in Thailand and called the cops.

In 2007, the KR mines were finally cleared which gave researchers and very adventurous tourists access to the site. The next year California-based Global Heritage Fund (GHF) began working with the local community under the aegis of Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture to conserve the crumbling structures. Their aim is not to put it all back together like new, but rather to address underlying structural issues and damaging plant growth and turn as many piles of stone blocks back into walls, temples and galleries as possible to ensure the long-term survival of this architectural marvel.

What they don’t want is to make Banteay Chhmar the new Angkor Wat, swarmed by a crushing average of 7,000 visitors a day. Right now Banteay Chhmar averages exactly two visitors a day. The local economy, already bolstered by the construction work on the temple, could benefit enormously from the temple’s becoming more popular, but not too popular.

Sustainable tourism is very much a priority for the Global Heritage Fund and for Banteay Chhmar Community-Based Tourism (CBT), an organization of local villagers dedicated to preservation of local heritage for the benefit of the people who live there. There are no hotels in the area, so if you want to visit the CBT has six homestays in Banteay Chhmar village where you can get a room for $7 a night, and you’ll know all that money stays with the villagers instead of lining Paris Hilton’s trust fund. Five bucks will get you entry to the entire temple complex including all the satellite temples over multiple days.

It’s that kind of local investment in the temple’s well-being that will keep it from becoming the victim of unscrupulous looters, tourist exploitation and its own harsh environment.

You can see footage of the conservation work being done on the temple and the marks looters left behind in this short video from the GHF:

If you have time on your hands, watch this fascinating lecture by Banteay Chhmar expert Dr. Olivier Cunin. He’s got architectural reconstructions of how the temple looked when first built and everything.