Headstones are a rich source of information for historians and genealogists, but since they’re not easily scanned like paper documents, you usually have to visit in person. Thanks to a program funded by a tax on plastic bags and staffed primarily by volunteers, people looking for their Irish forebears will be able to view headstones from selected historical cemeteries in Ireland.
Experts train local volunteers for two weeks. The volunteers take pictures or good ol’ fashioned pencil rubbings of headstones, and then collect any other information — stories, legends, audio of oral histories and video of the headstones — associated with the graves. Smartphones, digital cameras and GPS devices facilitate data collection and digitization. The data is then uploaded to the Historic Graves website where people can search for specific graves using keywords, family names, year of birth, or year of death. You can also search by graveyard, or, if you don’t know the cemetery’s name, by map.
It’s a brilliant way to utilize the knowledge and passion of local heritage groups, parks employees, schools and volunteer graveyard maintenance organizations to share a wealth of Irish history with people who might otherwise never have a chance to see where their ancestors are buried, or even just to enjoy the beauty of and history behind these cemeteries.
[Project coordinator John] Tierney said historic graveyards were full of heritage and character and were “unique connectors between people and place”.
“The goal is that communities will develop a richer view of their local heritage with benefits for locals and for tourists who find Irish historic graveyards so fascinating. Many of the 19th and early 20th century Irish city graveyards have links across to families and communities in the UK and by making the burial data available via the web and smartphone devices, it is hoped to connect into the growing area of genealogical tourism.”
The data will be parlayed into handy county, area, and national cemetery trails for local and international heritage tourists to follow. There will also be a separate mausoleum trail.
The survey started eight months ago and there are already over 6,000 graves from 80 graveyards in 12 counties recorded and published on the website. Data from various older surveys has been centralized and added to the site, which is why there are graveyards in England and Scotland visible on the map. They have a long ways to go, though. There are over 3600 historic cemeteries in Ireland and the ultimate aim of the project is to document and digitize every one of them.
If you’d like to help, you can sign up to transcribe memorial inscriptions from the photographs. Register to be a transcriber here, then view the pictures and transcribe the names and dates. Your transcription will be published as soon as you submit it, making that record instantly searchable.
When Google Art Project launched in January of last year, it gave anyone with a computer access to 17 major museums in nine countries including the US, France, Germany and the UK. The interface was on the clumsy side, unfortunately, making it hard to navigate, and although some stand-out individual pieces were presented in almost microscopic detail, the overall coverage was limited.
Now Google has announced the completion of the second version of Google Art Project. From 1,000 gigapixel ultra-high resolution images of paintings, the database now offers 32,000 images of not just paintings, but photographs, sculptures, textiles, rock art, ancient artifacts and so much more from 151 museums in 40 countries. If you’d like to take a turn through some of those museums and institutions, 46 of them have virtual tours, including the White House, Athens’ Acropolis Museum and the nearest and dearest to my heart, the Musei Capitolini on the Capitoline Hill in Rome.
The interface is vastly improved. You can navigate speedily from collection to collection. If you want to take a virtual tour of the museum, click the yellow man icon in the upper left next to the museum name and the Details button, then navigate just as you would use Street View in Google Maps. If you’d like to browse the artworks instead, just click on the thumbnails in the collection gallery. Click the details button for more information about the piece, including a link to the artwork on the website of the museum. Of course you can also search for individual artworks or artists using the menu in the top left.
They also have a much more user-friendly personal gallery where you can not only save the images in a collection of your own, but also make notes and share them with friends. If you’re in the mood to be surprised, click the Discover button on the left vertical menu (it looks like a light bulb) and Google Art Project will take you on a random tour of its wonders. You can browse it as a gallery or view as a slideshow.
The educational resources are greatly enhanced. Click on the Education link on the menu at the bottom of the screen to get an art historical overview in the Introduction and Look Like an Expert sections. The DIY section offers tips and ideas for ways to use Google Art Project as an educational and creative resource, to create a virtual exhibition of your own unbounded by geographical and financial limits. DIY even connects to 10 other museums’ own proprietary educational databases, like the Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History which I dearly love and have spent many lost weekends perusing.
The Google Art Project YouTube channel has introductory videos about using the site, about the artists and the museums. Here is a trippy preview of some of the incredible museum views and gigapixel artworks:
Here is the Google Street View camera as it records 360 degree views of every public room in the White House:
The April issue of National Geographic is marking the centennial month of the sinking of the Titanic with exceptional new pictures of the wreck composed from thousands of side-scan, sonar and high definition images taken by the 2010 expedition.
“This is a game-changer,” says National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) archaeologist James Delgado, the expedition’s chief scientist. “In the past, trying to understand Titanic was like trying to understand Manhattan at midnight in a rainstorm—with a flashlight. Now we have a site that can be understood and measured, with definite things to tell us. In years to come this historic map may give voice to those people who were silenced, seemingly forever, when the cold water closed over them.”
The composite pictures are beautiful and eerie and detailed almost beyond belief. Earlier high definition pictures and video from the site were narrowly focused, bounded by the limits of visibility 2 miles below the surface of the North Atlantic and by the camera lens. The composites put all those little keyhole shots together.
Pictures and captions courtesy of National Geographic.
You also see parts of the ship scattered over the debris field which have never been seen before since earlier images focused on the large parts, particularly the bow:
The April issue of National Geographic also has a supersweet poster (aren’t all NG posters supersweet?) of Titanic’s demise, reconstructed based on the new data recovered from the ocean floor. The National Geographic website has an excellent companion layout with a featured article that in addition to covering the recent expedition also covers RMS Titanic, Inc.’s change in approach over the years from a salvage operation dedicated to collecting artifacts for display and sale to a curatorial emphasis on documenting and conserving the wreck.
There’s also a neat gallery comparing images of the wreck to pictures from Titanic’s twin RMS Olympic, an interactive wreck map with information on salient features, and zoomable images of the wreck. Don’t miss the zoomable pic of the stern in profile. It looks like it was torn apart and partially eaten by Krakens.
The United States has taken a census of the population every 10 years without fail since 1790. Census figures determine how many seats in the House of Representatives are allocated to each state. The first census takers were federal marshals who went door to door recording the name of the head of the household and the number of people in each household. Native Americans were not counted. Only three out of five slaves were counted.
(This is the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise, which stipulated that just three out of five slaves in every state would be counted for the purposes of determining population and thus the number of seats in the House. Slaveholding states wanted all their slaves to count so they could dominate the legislature; non-slaveholding states wanted no slaves counted since they didn’t have the vote, citizenship or even the right not to be sold like so much livestock, and would give the slave states disproportionate power in the House. James Madison suggested the three-fifths figure which was eventually adopted by the Constitutional Convention.)
Throughout the whole of the 19th century and half of the 20th, political districts were responsible for sending out census takers, called enumerators, armed with forms and pencils to canvass door to door. The enumerators would return completed forms to the precinct office where they’d be entered in ink in bound ledger books. This is why historical census records have all kinds of transcription errors and misspellings, not to mention many omissions particularly in rural areas where enumerators would have to travel for miles to find remote farms, many of whose inhabitants made themselves intentionally unreachable. Starting with the 1950 census, enumerators were replaced with forms mailed out to every address on file with the United States Post Office.
By law, all individual census records are sealed for 72 years. Summaries and statistical reports are released as soon as the data is tabulated, but the information about John Smith at 100 Maple Lane is kept under wraps for three score and 12. In the past, the population schedules were only made available on microfilm. With the rise of the Internet and the explosion of online genealogical research, many of those historical census records have been digitized, but researchers had to drag their cookies to a National Archives and Records Administration branch office and go through all the microfilm by hand.
The 1940 Census, its 72 years come round at last, slouches towards the Internet to be born. Now for the first time, census records will be released online. Bookmark this website: 1940 Census Archives, and return to it on April 2nd at 9:00 AM to see the 1940 Census in all its glory.
It really is glorious. This is the only census taken during Franklin Roosevelt’s many presidential administrations and the only one to tabulate the statistical realities of the Great Depression. It included new questions about employment, income, and home ownership vs. renting (see a PDF of a blank 1940 form here), which at the time caused some distrust of the census requiring a major media campaign to reassure Americans their answers would be kept in utmost confidence and framing the census as patriotic duty. Cesar Romero, the future Joker to Adam West’s Batman, pitched the census in a public service film. Pictures of FDR filling in the census form were publicized all over the country.
One not-so-small caveat: the data has not been name indexed yet. The census records are indexed by enumeration district — the geographic area a single census taker could cover in two weeks in an urban center, or in one month in a rural location. Commercial ancestry websites Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org have announced that they’ll create a name index (plus indexes of all the other fields too), but it’ll be some time before they’re done. (Ancestry.com is a pay service, but they’ll allow free access to their index and proprietary search tools through the end of 2013. FamilySearch.org is run by the Mormon church. Access is free and you can even help index the census.) If you want to locate a person using the government website, you’ll have to know where the person lived in order to track down his or her census information.
If you’d like to be ready to hit the records running, you can figure out which enumeration district the person you’re researching lived in. Go to the National Archives’ online public access search page and type “1940 enumeration district descriptions for [city or county]” (without the quotation marks). You’ll get any written descriptions of 1940 Census enumeration districts that include the place you searched for, plus any maps that include it. Track down the address and you’ll see a two part number separated by a hyphen labeling the area. That’s the enumeration district number.
I searched for the tiny town my father was born in just three years before the census and I got three written documents and two maps. I now have both of their enumeration district numbers good to go so I can look up my adorable toddling parents on April 2nd.
If you’re daunted by the prospect, check your local public library for resources. This Michigan public library, for instance, is offering a workshop on locating your family members on the census two days after the release.
For a three minute period overview of the census, see this film created as part of the training for enumerators. Notice the strong emphasis on the confidentiality of the data and on how a full and honest response is the duty of all patriotic citizens.
The National Archives YouTube channel has three other videos from this film that go into further detail on the census-taking process. They’re a tad on the dry side, but fascinating for genealogists, statisticians, social historians, archivists and other assorted nerdly species.
In the summer of 2010, experts from RMS Titanic Inc., the company that has legal custody of the wreck of the Titanic, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution returned to the famous wreck site off the coast of Newfoundland armed with the latest and greatest submarine imaging technology. The aim of the expedition was to map the entire 15 square mile debris field using high definition 3D and 2D photography and high resolution sonar.
The wreck site had been surveyed before, but none of the previous efforts combined covered more than 60% of the total area. Mappers were constrained by the limitations of manned submersibles (people can’t stay down there for long) and photo sleds (they can’t go very far afield). This time around, however, the Waitt Institute for Discovery provided cutting-edge robot surveyors called autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to capture the entire field with high-resolution side-scan sonar.
Once the sonar map was done, researchers used it to determine which areas have the greatest debris concentration or pieces of particular interest. They then dispatched remote operated vehicles equipped with high definition cameras to photograph those areas.
It took them almost two years to piece together the full picture of the wreck site from over 130,000 individual images, but the deed is done.
That’s the bow of the ship in the top center (detail here). The stern is on the bottom of the picture slightly to the left (detail here). When the ship sank, the stern snapped off and dropped to the ocean floor 2.3 miles below, so that spot is ground zero of the sinking of the Titanic. The stern debris includes the ship’s galley, upper decks, boilers, luggage cranes and cylinders. The bow came to its final resting place 1,970 feet away from the stern and facing in the opposite direction.
The square halfway down the map on the far right edge of the picture has been dubbed the deckhouse debris. It was one of the parts of the wreck that had never been seen before, and it turns out to be an important clue to understanding how the ship broke apart. It contains the ship’s third funnel and surrounding pieces of the deck. Its location, off-set from the bulk of the wreck, underscores the violence with which Titanic tore itself apart.
The History Channel, in a shocking break from their laser-like focus on ice road trucking, will be airing a special about the new discoveries on the hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Titanic at 100: Mystery Solved debuts on April 15 at 8:00 PM EDT. It will include footage from the survey, computer simulations of the sinking based on the survey data, and my personal favorite, a “virtual hangar” in which they’ll reconstruct the ocean floor wreckage and reassemble the ship.
In 1979, an aerial survey found an extensive archaeological site in the town of Acy-Romance, 20 miles north of Reims in the Champagne-Ardenne region of northeastern France. Excavations began on the site in 1980 and continued until 1988, unearthing a complex of tombs and religious monuments dating from 1100 B.C. to 450 B.C. Between 1988 and 2003, archaeological teams staffed mainly by volunteers working on a shoestring budget focused on excavating the later Gallic village on the site. Despite their lack of resources and only being able to dig during the summer months, over time the researchers were able to excavate the entire village of 20 acres.
Acy-Romance is one of the only completely excavated Gallic villages, and it is the only one where the full layout of the town is discernible. A great number of postholes show where houses were built, their size and therefore the social standing of their inhabitants. Grain pits, cemeteries, temples, and courtyards testify to not just the physical construction of the village, but also the political, cultural and social structures of the settlement.
It appears that after around 400 B.C., the Iron Age inhabitants moved out. Although evidence suggests there were still scattered people living in the area, they weren’t living together in a town but rather homesteading on their own. There is no sign of a concentrated population living on the site again until about 180 B.C. when the Gallic village was built by the Remi people from scratch around a large Bronze Age tumulus which they repurposed as a hero’s tomb used for their ancestor cult worship.
Around the tomb were five cemeteries, each enclosed by a ditch, embankment and fence. Temples were built around the cemeteries. Around the temples residential quarters were built with actual neighborhoods. Livestock farmers lived in the northeast, agricultural farmers in the east, artisans in the southeast and manual laborers in the north of town. There’s no single large structure indicating a single king or ruler, but there are a number of houses considerably larger than average that suggest a wealthy social caste. Some of the graves are also much richer in burial goods than others.
Archaeologists found artifacts and organic remains that give us a unique glimpse into the daily life of the Gallic villagers. Their diets consisted primarily of fish, livestock, legumes, wild fruits and a wide range of grains including spelt, emmer, einkorn, barley, millet and oats. The only grain used to make bread (an unleavened naan-like flatbread) was spelt. The other grains were ground up in a mortar and eaten in preparations like porridge or soup. The remains of more than 4500 fish (mainly pike and chub) were discovered in the waste. Their consistently large size suggests they were individually speared rather than trapped in weirs or nets.
The livestock raised in the village were mainly horses and cows, both of which were consumed. In fact, the remains of meat in the kitchen waste tell a complex story about the community’s overall wealth and social strata. In the early days of the village, the choicest cuts and youngest animals predominated. Over time the quality and quantity of the meat declined, with what meat there was to distribute coming mainly from older animals and cheaper cuts.
By the mid first century B.C., the village was in decline. After Julius Caesar conquered the Belgian peoples in 57 B.C., he made the town of Reims the Roman capital of the area because the Remi people were his sole Gallic allies to stand by him during the entire war. As Reims grew, nearby Acy-Romance shrank. There are a few Romano-Gallic artifacts — tableware, coins — from the early first century B.C. that show the villagers were involved in the burgeoning consumer good trade that Rome always brought with it. The last villager died, was cremated and buried in Roman style in the early first century A.D.
The French government, as part of its outstanding program of digitizing Great Archaeological Sites, has funded the creation of a truly exquisite website about Acy-Romance. You can enjoy virtual tours (accompanied by the sound of metal being hammered, lowing cows, singing birds and the ocean) of the village, complete with pictures of the excavations and extensive digital reconstructions of how the town must have looked in its prime. Fair warning: the default site is Flash heavy, but they also have a Flashless version so you can browse this incredible treasure trove of information about Gallic life without all the geegaws and slow load time.
The Ghent Altarpiece, a dramatic and complex painting on multiple hinged oak panels started by Hubert van Eyck and completed by his brother Jan in 1432, is displayed within a bulletproof glass enclosure in Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium. Painted in the Ars Nova style that rejected the allegorical and idealized forms of the Middle Ages in favor of depicting nature as observed, the polyptych is a watershed in art history and a masterpiece of Early Netherlandish art.
Its historical and artistic significance is matched only by the complexity of keeping a work of such vastness and variety in reasonably good condition. Fully opened, the 18-panel polyptych is 11 feet by 14.5 feet. Over the centuries, the panels were separated from each other and held in all kinds of questionable environments receiving questionable treatments. An elaborate outer frame that encased the entire altarpiece is thought to have been destroyed during the Reformation, and the panels were taken down and hidden twice to keep them safe from marauding iconoclasts and Calvinists. The three middle upper panels depicting Mary, God and John the Baptist had their original frames removed and the top cropped off sometime in the 18th century.
In 1815 the Diocese of Ghent pawned six of the eight original wing panels for a few hundred bucks then failed to redeem them. The King of Prussia ended up buying them, and during their stay in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie gallery, the panels were split in two lengthwise and then cradled at the back. German troops helped themselves to more panels from the Ghent cathedral during World War I, but returned not just the looted panels but also the legitimately purchased ones to Belgium to defray some of the reparations debt stipulated in the Versailles Treaty.
In 1940, Belgium decided to ship the altarpiece to the Vatican for safekeeping. It was en route in France when Italy declared war as a German ally, so it stopped in its tracks. Military representatives from Germany, France and Belgium actually signed an agreement to leave the altarpiece alone in Pau for the duration of hostilities, but Hitler had other ideas. In 1942 he had the altarpiece seized and sent to Germany. It ended up being stored in a salt mine until the Americans recovered it after the war and returned it to Belgium.
Then there are the fires, vandalism, thefts (at least six separate thefts over six centuries, including the 1934 theft of the Just Judges panel which has never been solved; a copy made shortly after the theft is in its place now) and even its current rig complicating the altarpiece’s conservation needs. The glass enclosure and steel support structure was erected for security reasons. There are extreme fluctuations in temperature and humidity within, great enemies of old paint and wood.
In 2007, heritage organizations in Belgium raised the alarm about the altarpiece’s condition issues. In 2008, the cathedral formed an advisory committee of government representatives and panel painting conservation specialists to study the situation and devise a conservation plan. They concluded that fluctuating climate conditions inside the glass enclosure needed to be immediately stabilized using short-term solutions like raising the heat in the cathedral, replacing the hot spotlights with cooler daylight lamps and deploying portable humidifiers.
The committee also concluded that the altarpiece should be completely dismantled so that all urgent conservation issues could be addressed. That would give experts a chance to do a thorough, in-depth study of the polyptych to provide individual conservation plans tailored to the specific needs of each panel. That in-depth study was performed in the actual cathedral. They just raised a glass barrier around the altarpiece space so experts could work on site moving the delicate paintings as little as possible while providing a fascinating show for visitors.
The advisory committee submitted a grant proposal to the Getty Foundation’s Panel Painting Initiative to fund the assessment of the structural condition of panel supports and its supporting technical documentation. One of the Panel Painting Initiative’s main objectives is aiding in the transfer of knowledge from senior panel conservators to juniors, and since one doesn’t often get a chance to learn from master conservators working on one of the greatest wood panel paintings of all time, the Getty accepted with alacrity.
They added a codicil requiring that the results of the study, including X-rays, extreme high resolution photographs in both visible spectrum and infrared light, and detailed documentation be uploaded to the web. And so they have been: Closer to Van Eyck: Rediscovering the Ghent Altarpiece. The pictures are so huge you can view details from every panel with microscopic magnification. You can split the screen to compare panels, or compare the photo version to the infrared versions. There are extreme closeups of important details, and pictures of the cleaning tests on each panel which show little clean patches after conservators experimented with dry cleaning using microfiber cloths. The website also offers freely downloadable pdf versions of all the conservation and dendrochronology reports.
It’s amazing, really. I’ve been lost in it all day.
It has the name of a Prince song but the content comes straight from Queen Victoria’s and Prince Albert’s journals and letters. Victoria 4 Albert is an animated series in five parts that tells the story of Victoria’s and Albert’s relationship in glorious stop-motion puppetry, cut-out/collage animation, traditional drawn animation and shadow puppets. The script was written using excerpts from Victoria’s journals and Albert’s correspondence which gives the production a genuinely intimate feel.
The four-minute episodes depict their lives from birth to their wedding. The first episode was released on Valentine’s Day and a new episode will be released every day until February 18th. I include the first three below. Visit the Victoria 4 Albert website for the next two days to see the remaining two episodes.
The private non-profit Historic Royal Palaces — stewards of the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, the Banqueting House, Kensington Palace and Kew Palace — commissioned animator Chiara Ambrosio to create the series as a teaser for their upcoming new permanent exhibit on Queen Victoria’s life that is being installed at Kensington Palace even as I type. Like the Victoria 4 Albert series, Victoria Revealed uses extracts from Victoria’s journals and letters to give visitors an inside view of her life as a girl and young woman living in Kensington Palace, her marriage to Albert, her life as Queen, mother and grieving widow.
Important paintings, sculpture, jewellery, clothing and many other historic objects will be combined with audiovisual displays and low-tech interactives to evoke key moments and themes in Queen Victoria’s life.
The fascinating history of Britain’s longest reigning monarch will be illuminated through these carefully selected exhibits – ranging from her tiny black silk baby shoes, a collection of her toys, her wedding dress (displayed for the first time in a decade), mourning clothing worn following the death of Prince Albert in 1861, and archive footage of her Diamond Jubilee celebrations.
Exhibits will also include music Albert wrote for her, jewelry he designed for her, and drawings they made of each other as newlyweds. For a glimpse into their family life, their children’s baby clothes, toys and accessories like a carved cradle and a teething ring will be on display.
The new exhibition opens March 26th, in time for The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics. The Palace has been closed since January to set up the exhibit and for other refurbishments that will spruce up the State Apartments, improve the visitor facilities and provide wheelchair access to all the floors.
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.
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!
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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.
Okay, so you weren’t able to get to England or sell your kidney to buy a scalped ticket for the sold out blockbuster Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan exhibition at London’s National Gallery. For the many of us all over the world in that sad boat, we will have to content ourselves with a viewing of an HD documentary on the exhibit: Leonardo Live (which isn’t live for us but was broadcast live originally).
Captured live on November 8, 2011, LEONARDO LIVE provides a virtual walk-through of the exhibit, with exclusive commentary from scholars and curators. Hosted by highly respected art historian Tim Marlow and presenter Mariella Frostrup, the exhibition brings together the largest number of da Vinci’s rare surviving painting and some international loans. While numerous exhibitions have looked at da Vinci as an inventor, scientist or draughtsman, this is the first to be dedicated to his aims and techniques as a painter.
When I last blogged about this, the screening dates hadn’t been published yet. Now they have and you can buy your tickets in advance. It opens in 450 theaters around the country on February 16. Since most of the screenings are a one-night-one-showing-only event, I suggest you book early. You can plug your zip code into this site to get a listing and map of the theaters nearest to you that are showing the movie.
For some fascinating background on the Herculean effort it took to put together this unprecedented exhibit, read this article from the Telegraph. It took five years from idea to exhibition, and it would never have happened if Queen Elizabeth II hadn’t agreed up front to allow Luke Syson, the National Gallery’s curator of Italian paintings before 1500, to offer loans of important Leonardo drawings from the Royal Collection in return for loans of Leonardo paintings.
So Syson started by negotiating the loan of the Lady with an Ermine from the Czartoryski Foundation in Cracow. Next he asked his colleagues at the Louvre for La Belle Ferronnière. With two such stunning portraits secured for the show, it would have been hard for Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan to turn down his request for Leonardo’s Portrait of a Musician, because with the addition of the two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks it looked like every surviving picture painted by Leonardo in Milan would be in the show.
Every picture he painted in Milan (the frescoes in the Castello Sforzesco and The Last Supper excluded, of course, on account of they’re attached to walls) is fully half the total number of the Leonardo paintings known to survive.
Headstones are a rich source of information for historians and genealogists, but since they’re not easily scanned like paper documents, you usually have to visit in person. Thanks to a program funded by a tax on plastic bags and staffed primarily by volunteers, people looking for their Irish forebears will be able to view headstones from selected historical cemeteries in Ireland.
The data will be parlayed into handy county, area, and national cemetery trails for local and international heritage tourists to follow. There will also be a separate mausoleum trail.
Q: How did you first begin to research ancient hairdressing?
