saxifraga-x-urbium:

systlin:

Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them. 

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

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

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

It’s just. 

50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job. 

i also like that this is a “ask craftspeople” thing, it reminds me of when art historians were all “the fuck” about someone’s ear “deformity” in a portrait and couldn’t work out what the symbolism was until someone who’d also worked as a piercer was like “uhm, he’s fucked up a piercing there”. interdisciplinary shit also needs to include non-academic approaches because crafts & trades people know shit ok

My favorite example is Janet Stephens, professional hairdresser and amateur, published archeologist.  One of the insights that she discovered was that women in ancient Rome stitched their braids together to keep the hairstyles in place, and so they didn’t wear wigs nearly as often as had been thought.  

Looking for styling clues in translation, Stephens discovered that the Latin word acus was sometimes translated as “hairpin” and other times as “sewing needle.” Something finally clicked when Stephens came across a citation for acus in the 1986 edition of Charlton T. Lewis & Charles Short’s A Latin Dictionary. In a tiny citation at the bottom of the definition for acus, she found a note for a passage on hairdressing from the second-century Roman grammarian named Sexus Pompeius Festus. In Latin, Sexus Pompeius Festus wrote, “Acus dicitur, qua sacrinatrix gel etiam ornatrix utitur.” In English, that translates to “Needle, that which the clothmender and the hairdresser use.”

To borrow an ancient phrase: Eureka. Roman women did indeed sew their hair up with needle and thread, using the same tools a tailor would. Stephens published her findings in a 2008 article in The Journal of Roman Archaeology called “Ancient Roman hairdressing: on (hair)pins and needles.” A hairdresser and her mannequin head schooled the notoriously stuffy community of antiquities scholars.

…

Before Stephens’s work, scholars largely ignored women’s hair — as they ignored most things about women — while translating. For example, in a passage from Ovid’s Art of Love, a narrator begs his female lover to get her hair redone after he beats her violently. “[Stephens] notes an intricate, braided hairstyle that has been sewn into place is extremely stable,” said a blogger by the pen name Livius Drusus, who runs thehistoryblog.com. “In order to tear her hair out of its stitching, the narrator has to have used a great deal of physical force.” If the translation doesn’t explain that, the hair-pulling brutality of the narrator reads like hyperbole, rather than an admission of his abuse.