THE HAIRDO ARCHAEOLOGIST.

THE HAIRDO ARCHAEOLOGIST. Abigail Pesta had an article in the Wall Street Journal (February 7) about the hairdo archaeologist Janet Stephens. Some of the appeal of the article for me is that Ms. Stephens is one of the great amateur classicists, of whom there were many in the 19th century, but few today. Her primary profession is hairdressing. Although she has no degrees in archaeology, she has published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology. Her first breakthrough was in showing that the elaborate hairdos on images of Roman women were not necessarily wigs. In doing so, she argued that the Latin word “acus” had been generally translated as a (single-prong) hairpin but that the alternative English translation as “needle and thread” supported her explanation for how the hairdos were held together—with needle and thread.