On Pins and Needles: Stylist Turns Ancient Hairdo Debate on Its Head (2013)
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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.
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 :)
This is also part of why people worked 16+ hours per day. Washing clothes, mending tools, caring for animals, washing dishes, cleaning the house, ... washing machines, dishwashers, electric ovens, all these labor-saving devices are the big difference between subsistence families with no time, and you today with lots of time.
Originally you did it all yourself. You have a sheep; you shear it, your wife spins it to thread and knits, your children help along the way.
This, by the way, is really where the family unit comes from. Running a household plus making a living used to be a full-time job for several people.
Then, yes, the weaver appears. Maybe the weaver is a shepherd. I have wool; I'll make you a shirt if you give me enough potatoes and cabbage to eat for a week.
The freedom to not grow/gather your own food is how the trades came about.
To my understanding, at least.
Anyway to kind of answer your question this wasn't the middle ages and it was you know 1800s or so. And the process could be done almost all manually.
Also the way it was desribed some people from the village knew how to do some things better than others and they would barter or work together in groups. So maybe those that knew how to spin fibers would exchange it for milk or grains and so on. So yet, it was a lot of work. People maybe had a few outfits but didn't have walk in closets full of clothes. Pillows, carpets, bed sheets were prized posession would last for a long time, being patched and repaired of course.
Knitting and animal skins are both pretty well known as ways of obtaining cloth (or skin as it were), and getting skins wasn't such a big deal in times when there was no one saying that all the animals belonged to him.
I think it is less well understood how straightforward felting is; still not necessarily fun, but available to many people in an agrarian society. Also, we don't see weaving every day anymore, but a loom can be a very simple thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VerticalLoom.JPG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp-weighted_loom
(Simple especially in the materials necessary, I guess I wouldn't want to promise to build you one tomorrow)
As for hunting, in the UK as early as 1200AD, peasants couldn't hunt on much of the land, the largest game they could hunt was probably not enough to provide much in the way of skins. Of course, the UK isn't the whole world, so this doesn't apply universally, but it's still an issue that plays into it I think. It's also really hard to bring down animals like deer, even if you have a bow and arrow. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_hunting
This is the kind of stuff that fascinates me though, that loom looks simple, but could you just go out in the woods and get all the components with your every day, 1000 year ago equipment? Maybe, but still, that takes some time, resources and knowledge. Then once you have the darn thing, how do you even make clothes! I guess you just make a big square and cut holes in it? Either way, all of this really fascinates me.
how do you even make clothes
Tailoring is a thing. You'd learn patterns in your apprenticeship, then tailor to the body of the person who will be wearing it. Basic outlines would be marked in your workbench for daily use, but obviously the exact size needs to be adjusted.
As others have said, back then, everyone worked as much as possible just to get by, so I guess if you weren't a tailor, you were X, so there was something you could offer to exchange.
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.
In general, everyone in the family is absolutely always working, and they all have a wealth of craft knowledge which had been passed down through the family. Extended families and neighbors work together when many hands are needed. They're kid's books, but really interesting nonetheless.
especially if they were, say, 8 years old
From your family?
The extended family was far more an economic unit of organisation than it is in the modern west. It would be understood that your family should feed and clothe you somehow, with whatever assets they had, and in return you laboured in the family trade; generally outdoors / heavy manual for men, indoors / light manual for women. Clothing repair (darning) would be an important part of that.
Textile production would be specialised/industrialised even in the 1200s: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=42274 . That implies a normal commercial flow with working credit of some sort, based around bills of exchange. Note that it was even internationalised at this date, trading from England to Holland and Italy.
Have a look at e.g. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=z-uYTzxRUUcC&printsec=fro...
http://www.hurstwic.com/history/articles/daily_living/text/c...
Clothing was a sign of hospitality. Any family which could afford spare clothing would certainly keep warm, dry clothing on hand for travelers. In the wet, cold Northern climates, few things would be more welcome to an arriving traveler than a set of dry clothing.
The poorer you were the worse your clothing, i.e. handed down more times. If nothing else you could piece together rags.
There are still villages in remote areas, e.g. Himalayas, where weather and location mean you have to pretty self-sufficient. As others have said, if you have sheep or goats you have the natural resources, add some women (not trying to be sexist, this is just based on observation) to do the weaving, and bam, outfit.
"how can you afford..." People at the time didn't always have the money (or trade goods) and some lived in squalor (not all food/shelter/clothing needs met).
"hand made items like clothing..." Everything was handmade, so it was the norm. A shirt would be essentially worth the food required during the time it took you or the village weaver/tailor to make it. Fine clothes, such as those worn by nobles were notoriously expensive, often with a person's wardrobe being worth half of their entire estate (including land and buildings).
"which requires precious natural resources..." Many resources were more bountiful at the time, with more open areas and less population. Commons and wilderness closer by gave resources for the time to gather them.
"and time to create..." People had more time, without modern leisure pursuits. When you eat the subsistence level, you spend whatever time it takes to meet your needs (food, shelter, fuel, clothing).
But all these details were dependent on the time and place you're interested in. Feudal Europe had peasants living in squalor while the nobles controlled the land/resources and got rich off peasant labor. In places like the Pacific Northwest of North America, the salmon run was so abundant and nutritious that food was not lacking and I imagine people had time to hunt for furs and sew them into clothing before winter, as well as develop other arts and crafts.
When someone admits that they don't understand something, it's generally considered gauche to insult them for it.
I just couldn't help notice a disconnect. It would be like me asking on HN why, if tech salaries in SF are so high, why aren't all tech workers living like millionaires in the city. Anyone who's been to SF knows the situation, and anyone on HN must've heard about it. And I am writing about the tech industry on the Internet, so I could quickly google the topic and read some interesting analysis.
But I suppose it's taken me years of curiosity driven reading, and also some detachment and travel to other cultures to start to form a picture of how people may have lived. So I apologize for being rude.
I remain fascinated by the idea that humans have been "modern" (with the same and complete facilities for learning, reasoning, and complexity) for 10,000 years, perhaps even 50,000. They may not have had metal, they may not have had writing, but they had societies and intellectual lives just as complex as ours. They were not sitting around a campfire grunting, they were laughing, worshipping, making art, scheming, fighting, romancing, and surviving in many ways just like we do. I always think that a clan leader from the Stone Age would totally understand office politics.
I would call that myopic; the Internet does not yet contain all of human knowledge ever recorded. Given that Classic civilizations left many artifacts and were well studied throughout history, I would be surprised if some musty university library in Europe does not contain a thesis on ancient hairdos. I doubt Google scholar has been that thorough, yet.
I do get your point, and do agree that many details of ancient civilizations are lost to history, but it's not because they can't be found in Google.
[0] http://news.discovery.com/history/ancient-egypt/pyramids-tom... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel [2] http://www.korean-arts.com/about_korean_celadon.htm [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete
One thing Mates does in the book I mentioned is find translators' misunderstandings and prejudices, like the hair-sewing bit in the OP. That also comes up in Lucio Russo's The Forgotten Revolution about the sources on Hellenistic science -- classicists generally aren't scientists either.
(This comment is turning out to sound really hard on classicists, and I certainly don't feel that way. I'm just an interested reader.)
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.
Link: http://borepatch.blogspot.com/2013/06/long-lost-roman-concre...