
On Pins and Needles: Stylist Turns Ancient Hairdo Debate on Its Head (2013) - gwern
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324900204578286272195339456
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bane
I've followed Ms. Stephens' work off and on since I found out about her
research, even submitted a few videos she's produced showing the technique
here on HN. It's absolutely fascinating and there's something really immediate
and connecting about her work. She also does a wonderful job documenting her
work and assumptions and should be given honorary letters from some institute
that cares.

Strangely enough, not too long before I found out about her, I was in a museum
looking at Roman busts and also found a similar fascination with the
hairstyles. Stone doesn't really capture the detail of hair, but it struck me
that there was real identifiable fashion in the hairstyles being worn (as
opposed to hair being styled to show tribal or ancestral membership).

I looked around for a little bit on the web but there's really pitifully
little we know about this kind of day-to-day minutia, and it's that kind of
stuff that really brings the past alive with me.

~~~
codezero
Yeah, there is a huge dearth in the day to day lives of average people
throughout history.

This sounds really stupid, but I am still generally vexed as to how people,
say, 500 or a thousand years ago managed to get their first outfit.

If you're barely scraping by a living, how can you afford hand made items like
clothing, which requires precious natural resources and time to create. Those
outfits must have had to last a very long time as well, what did they look
like, what was the total flow of the transaction?

How did the weaver get the raw materials? Was it all exchange based? I'll make
you a shirt if you give me enough material to make two?

Considering a lot of people didn't own the land or crops they farmed, how did
the workers get the money or raw materials to obtain something as simple as a
shirt, especially if they were, say, 8 years old.

Anyhow, I'm rambling a bit. It's really easy to take for granted a simple
thing like your shirt :)

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HarryHirsch
The economy of the Middle Ages has been studied (here, for example:
[http://www.dartmouth.edu/~mkohn/orgins.html](http://www.dartmouth.edu/~mkohn/orgins.html)),
and it had one distinguishing feature: there was no small coinage; the
smallest denomination that people would generally accept was a day's wage.

One can guess how people dealt with this: they extended credit to each other.
A village's general store served as its bank. Tools and _workmen 's boots_ had
to be ultra-reliable. In generally, the economy back then looked surprisingly
modern (Cicero talks about letters of credit in his letters, the risk in long-
distance trade was spread by buying shares in a voyage), the only thing that
was missing was advertising.

~~~
codezero
Was credit something extended to peasants though? It seems like that would
mainly apply to people with some wealth or assets to back the credit up. I'm
mostly interested in the complete bottom of the rung of society and how they
managed in those environments.

~~~
nichtich
I'm not a historian, but the bottom class seems toke a lot of debt. That's a
common way for a free man to become a slave. Also, debt relieve (or the lack
of) was always a big reason for mass movements or riots. As for peasants, I'm
not sure about Europe, but in China they are one of the biggest client group.
They would take out loans in planting season and pay it back in harvest. The
standardization of these loans' terms and making it a government monopoly is a
big part of Wang Anshi's[1] reform.

[1]:[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Anshi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Anshi)

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aeturnum
I'm more and more skeptical of historical narratives that portray the
knowledge and practices of past peoples as a strict subset of our own
knowledge. Along the same lines, we seem to constantly underestimate the
peoples of the past (ex: the long-time assumption that the pyramid was built
by slave labor[0]). We are absolutely more developed in some areas
(sanitation, mechanization), but some things elude us.[1][2][3]

[0] [http://news.discovery.com/history/ancient-egypt/pyramids-
tom...](http://news.discovery.com/history/ancient-egypt/pyramids-tombs-giza-
egypt.htm) [1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel)
[2] [http://www.korean-arts.com/about_korean_celadon.htm](http://www.korean-
arts.com/about_korean_celadon.htm) [3]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete)

~~~
tormeh
It's true, but we can make way better steel than Damascus steel, nowadays. We
are better at almost everything than any past people have ever been. Do you
know about anything a past people have done better than we know how today?
That would be really fascinating.

~~~
keenerd
> Do you know about anything a past people have done better than we know how
> today?

This is a cheap shot, but preparing laserwort or dodo.

More practically, anything that is done by hand and needs a lifetime of
training. But you need to be sufficiently specific. No one can use a longbow
the way medieval british could, but anyone with a bit of training and a modern
compound bow could probably match them. So you'd need to be specific to
longbows.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I hadn't heard of laserwort. It tickles me that there are (were) actual plants
named "rocket" and "laser".

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soperj
This is the kind of thing that keeps me coming back here. I'm sure someone
will eventually ask "why is this on hn", but for me this is the really cool
stuff that I come to HN every day hoping to find.

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comrh
Hearing about someone get so into a arguably esoteric subject and really
expand the knowledge base is inspiring.

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ableal
I'm reminded of the "Rem acu tetigisti" that P.G.Wodehouse would have Bertie
Wooster and Jeeves toss out on some occasions.

