Suzanne's Mom's Blog

I don’t know what it is about stories like this, but they really float my boat.

Here is an ordinary woman, a hairdresser who loves hairdressing, who tried to recreate an ancient hairstyle and ended up making a discovery that got published in a scholarly journal. What it took was being openminded, curious, and persistent.

As Abigail Pesta writes in the Wall Street Journal, Janet Stephens tried to re-create on a mannequin a hairdo she had seen on a bust of the Roman empress Julia Domna at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

” ‘I couldn’t get it to hold together,’ she says. Turning to the history books for clues, she learned that scholars widely believed the elaborately teased, towering and braided styles of the day were wigs.

“She didn’t buy that. Through trial and error she found that she could achieve the hairstyle by sewing the braids and bits together, using a needle. She dug deeper into art and fashion history books, looking for references to stitching.

“In 2005, she had a breakthrough. Studying translations of Roman literature, Ms. Stephens says, she realized the Latin term ‘acus’ was probably being misunderstood in the context of hairdressing. Acus has several meanings including a ‘single-prong hairpin’ or ‘needle and thread,’ she says. Translators generally went with ‘hairpin.’

“The single-prong pins couldn’t have held the intricate styles in place. But a needle and thread could. It backed up her hair hypothesis.

“In 2007, she sent her findings to the Journal of Roman Archaeology. ‘It’s amazing how much chutzpah you have when you have no idea what you’re doing,’ she says. ‘I don’t write scholarly material. I’m a hairdresser.’

“John Humphrey, the journal’s editor, was intrigued. ‘I could tell even from the first version that it was a very serious piece of experimental archaeology which no scholar who was not a hairdresser—in other words, no scholar—would have been able to write,’ he says.

“He showed it to an expert, who found the needle-and-thread theory ‘entirely original,’ says Mr. Humphrey, whose own scholarly work has examined arenas for Roman chariot racing.

“Ms. Stephens’ article was edited and published in 2008, under the headline ‘Ancient Roman Hairdressing: On (Hair)Pins and Needles.’ ”

More.

Photographs: Janet Stephens