Kudos to Janet Stephens, a "non-archaeologist" who showed the so-called experts a thing or three about ancient hairstyles and their silly assumption that all of those extragavant hairstyles were wigs.
From
The Wall Street Journal Online
Ms. Stephens Says Ornate Coiffures Weren't Wigs After All; The
Vestal Virgin Challenge
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
By ABIGAIL PESTA
By day, Janet Stephens is a hairdresser at a Baltimore salon, trimming bobs
and wispy bangs. By night she dwells in a different world. At home in her
basement, with a mannequin head, she meticulously re-creates the hairstyles of
ancient Rome and Greece.
Ms. Stephens is a hairdo archaeologist.
Her amateur scholarship is sticking a pin in the long-held assumptions among
historians about the complicated, gravity-defying styles of ancient times.
Basically, she has set out to prove that the ancients probably weren't wearing
wigs after all.
"This is my hairdresserly grudge match with historical representations of
hairstyles," says Ms. Stephens, who works at Studio 921 Salon & Day Spa,
which offers circa 21st-century haircuts.
Her coiffure queries began, she says, when she was killing time in the
Walters Art Museum in Baltimore back in 2001. A bust of the Roman empress Julia
Domna caught her eye. "I thought, holy cow, that is so cool," she says,
referring to the empress's braided bun, chiseled in stone. She wondered how it
had been built. "It was amazing, like a loaf of bread sitting on her head," says
Ms. Stephens.
She tried to re-create the 'do on a mannequin. "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." The only other article
by a nonarchaeologist that Mr. Humphrey can recall publishing in the journal's
25-year history was written by a soldier who had discovered an unknown Roman
fort in Iraq.
Ms. Stephens dates her fascination with hair to her childhood in Kennewick,
Wash., where she entertained herself as a five-year-old by cutting the neon
tufts on her Troll dolls. When she chopped off all the Troll fluff and realized
it wouldn't grow back, she says, she got into styling, creating Troll costumes
including an Egyptian suit of armor made of tin foil. "Whatever you're most
passionate about when you're five is what you should do for the rest of your
life," says Ms. Stephens, 54 years old.
In recent years, Ms. Stephens has reconstructed the styles of ancient royals
including Faustina the Younger and Empress Plotina—sometimes on live models.
Last year she gave a presentation at an Archaeological Institute of America
conference in Philadelphia in which she lined up several mannequin heads.
"It was like a bad science-fair project," she says. "I had no idea what I was
doing." Also speaking that day: a researcher with new insight into spearheads
from the Iron Age in South Italy.
 |
| The "Mullet from Hell." |
There is one hairstyle that Ms. Stephens says she hasn't been able to find a
real, live model to submit to. The style, seen on an ancient Roman sculpture
known as the Fonseca Bust, boasts a tall, horseshoe-shaped pile of curls in the
front that would involve cutting the model's hair. "It's like a mullet from
hell," she says.
At the cavernous, Buddha-filled Baltimore salon where Ms. Stephens is
employed, her fellow stylists find her archaeology work a bit mysterious.
Nevertheless, they occasionally model for her Roman re-creations.
One of them is Rachael Lynne Pietra. Her long tresses provided an ideal
medium for demonstrating a style worn by the Vestal Virgins—women who took a vow
of chastity and guarded a sacred fire in ancient Rome.
"People have been interested in the construction of that hairstyle for
centuries," says Ms. Stephens. Big problem: Vestals wore their hair covered, so
there are almost no carvings or images of the complete hairdo.
Ms. Stephens solved the mystery by studying many portraits, each showing bits
of braids poking out from the front and back of the head covering. Then she
"started scribbling" on the images, she says, "color-coding everything—this
braid looks like it belongs with this one; that braid belongs with that
one."
In a YouTube video by Ms. Stephens, "Vestal Hairdressing," she intones: "The
Roman grammarian Festus informs us that both brides and the Vestal Virgins wore
an ancient hairstyle called the Seni Crines."
The resulting nest of braids was "awesome," says Ms. Pietra, the model in the
video. Although it did feel "heavy." She promptly took it down.
Ms. Stephens is "crazy, crazy intelligent," Ms. Pietra notes.
Not everyone agrees with the hairdresser's theories. Last month, at an
Archaeological Institute of America conference in Seattle, Ms. Stephens says, a
woman doing a dissertation on Vestal Virgin hair took issue with her argument
that the Vestal hairstyle was built out of seven separate braids—not six as long
believed.
"I walked her through it," Ms. Stephens says. "There's a logic to
hair."
Marden Nichols, curator of ancient art at the Walters Art Museum, says Ms.
Stephens is able to "break new ground" specifically because of her work as a
stylist.
"Like many classicists, I spend my days analyzing works of literature and art
that relate to activities I have never performed: harvesting crops, building
temples, sacrificing animals," she says. Ms. Stephens can "draw upon practical
experiences."
Thus far, none of Ms. Stephens' clients have asked her to do one of the
ancient 'dos on them. But after her work appeared online, she says, "I did have
a man fly down from Boston to get an Augustus Caesar cut."
A version of this article appeared February 7, 2013, on
page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: On
Pins and Needles: Stylist Turns Ancient Hairdo Debate on Its Head.
