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Sally Pointer is a freelance heritage educator, archaeologist and presenter of traditional skills and historic crafts. She is also an author and an Experimental Archaeology MSC student at Exeter University.
Sally lives near Hereford, which is in the west of England on the Welsh border. It’s a rural area and perfect for her hobby of “hedge bothering” – a mix of foraging, looking at all the species that are in the hedge, what the birds are up to, and also checking for any pixies or interesting bits of wood.
We talk about her time spent in the Middle East as a child, where she and her family could go off into the desert and find stone age campsites and dinosaur bones, just sitting there. This sparked a love of experimental archaeology: finding out how people actually spent their time, what they made and how they lived.
We discuss the misconceptions about “cavemen” and how actually they weren’t at all stupid. They made Bunsen burners, they dug mines, they wore makeup, and they wanted the same things out of life that we do now.
Sally has written a book about the history of makeup and tells us about a slightly alarming experiment she performed on herself, which explains why on earth people were so keen to wear toxic white lead makeup, despite its dangers.
There is lots more in our conversation, including the stupidest thing a member of the public has ever said to us at an event, how to gain an extra two hours in the day, and whether Sally could survive in the wild.
To find out more about what Sally does, and see her YouTube videos covering things like the acorn pasta and nettle material mentioned in the episode, see: https://www.sallypointer.com/
Transcript
Guy Windsor
I’m here today with Sally Pointer, who is a freelance heritage educator, archaeologist and presenter of traditional skills and historic crafts. She is also an author and an Experimental Archaeology MSC student at Exeter University. She is also a hedge botherer, and yes we will get into what a hedge botherer is in the interview so without further ado, Sally, welcome to the show.
Sally Pointer
Very happy to be here.
Guy Windsor
Whereabouts in the world are you?
Sally Pointer
These days, I'm near Hereford but I have moved around a fair bit. Spent a lot of years up the Welsh Valleys. But as a child even spent several years in the Middle East, so I get around a bit.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so what made you settle on Hereford?
Sally Pointer
It was more of a case that a few years ago, we needed to combine households with my parents to help with dad's care needs. We ended up with a rambling pile in the middle of nowhere with room for us, our cats, and workshops. And yeah, it's great. My end is completely full of buckets of mud, half tanned hides, stone spear points. Mum’s end is tidy, the cats go to whoever thinks is going to feed them most.
Guy Windsor
Right, fair enough. That's actually a good way to do it. So you have pots of mud. Is it special mud?
Sally Pointer
Always. Isn't everybody's mud special?
Guy Windsor
Well, I don't know, I mean, what's special about your mud?
Sally Pointer
So I tend to accumulate things that are going to be useful for different projects. So I've got boxes that have got bits of interesting ochres in them. I've got things that are a nice grade for polishing back bits of metal, there are some that you can use for dyes. To be perfectly honest, there are some bits where I just really could have done with cleaning my boots earlier and they're evolving new life forms all by themself.
Guy Windsor
Fair enough. Okay. I’ve never heard of using mud to clean... but actually, when you think about it you can get abrasive powders, which you mix with water to create a slurry. I guess that is actually mud.
Sally Pointer
It is the same thing. So jewellers’ rouge which is used for the very finest polishing on things is just different grades of red ochres. You can use some coarser sand stones. Well think about sharpening stones. Think about when you're working through putting edges on swords, traditionally. Today, we have amazing sharpening blocks, but you go back far enough in time, and it's about finding the right piece of stone, and maybe using it with a little bit of water. As soon as that starts breaking down, you're creating mud.
Guy Windsor
Yes. Actually, when using a water stone, what you're supposed to do is build up a slurry on the stone, and it's the slurry that actually polishes the edge. My granny had a housekeeper because this was back in the 40s and 50s. And she used to sharpen the kitchen knives on the back step.
Sally Pointer
Yes, yes, I've come across that as well. You’ve got to have the right sort of back step, they don't make back steps the way they used to.
Guy Windsor
The stone has to be just the right kind of fineness. Okay, so clearly, you are very much into doing stuff with your hands. How did you get into experimental archaeology in particular?
Sally Pointer
It's something that I think had been coming for a long time. I spent several years as a child out in the Middle East. And what you did at the weekend was you persuaded your dad to load up a Jeep with buckets of water and things and you drove out into the deep desert. And you either went looking for dinosaur bones. Or if you were very lucky, the sands would shift, you'd see a prehistoric campsite, you'd see the fireplace, and around it, there'd be a scatter of stone flakes where somebody had sat and made tools, and then moved off. And you could pick up these arrowheads. And you could also see the waste flakes that had been left behind. And like most children, as soon as you see that sort of thing, you want to know how it works, you want to have a go, you bash rocks together and you don't get very far or maybe you cut your finger. But you get this idea that all of these objects are made, all of these objects come from somewhere. And that slowly develops into a sense of if you want to understand the past, you would need to understand how people coped with the everyday things. And making things and trying them out is one of the best ways of understanding what's time consuming, what's precious, what's something that you can only really do when you've got downtime, and the sorts of things that you can do in an absolute rush because you desperately need something at this moment. And it's all experimentation, but it's it is helping us learn.
Guy Windsor
Okay, there's a lot to unpack there. Okay, so out in the Middle East, you could just get in a jeep and go off and find a stone age campsite, just sitting there in the desert.
Sally Pointer
Yeah. And it would probably have dinosaur bones sitting next to it just to really confuse the issue. It's a unique place, I don't know of archaeology, anything quite like it elsewhere. As a child, you take that very much for granted. But once we came back to the UK, I was very fortunate to have the sorts of parents if I said, I'm interested in, I don't know, dyeing fabrics with plants, or I'm interested in brewing an interesting potion, that say, well, here's an old saucepan, make a fire at the bottom of the garden, shout if you hurt yourself. They would encourage us to learn by doing things. And I was very lucky in that.
Guy Windsor
So do you actually have a collection of dinosaur bones and things that you found in the desert?
Sally Pointer
We do. Yes.
Guy Windsor
That’s fantastic. We've actually had a guest on the show whose job is to help basically get dinosaur bones out of the ground and into the museum. She works for one of the museums in Chicago and she's a paleontologist who does that like for a living this like, but you know, as a school kid, you just kind of wander out and pick one up and brilliant, I'll take it home off you go.
Sally Pointer
And children are very, very good at spotting dinosaur bones. For a lot of years, I ran an education gallery for the museum of Wales. And one of my jobs was to help field enquiries. And almost every single Saturday I'd have a small child come in with a shoebox with interesting bones in it. And sometimes they were dinosaurs. You never knew.
Guy Windsor
Wow. So how do you tell a dinosaur bone from a very old chicken bone?
Sally Pointer
It's not always easy. If you're lucky things are properly fossilized, you can clearly tell that they've been converted into stone. It's a bit of a grey area, if somebody brings in something that's from more recent prehistory, where the bone might be very, very old, but it hasn't gone through fossilization. I do remember somebody once bringing me in a bone and saying I found this. I think it's really, really old. And I said to them, oh, gosh, that looks really, really fragile. As they handed it over to the desk to me, and the second it touched my hands it broke into about 300 pieces. I don't think we ever did work out what exactly it had been because it was in too many pieces. I was mortified and had to go for a nice quiet sit down in a dark corner for a while afterwards. And I think they thought I just willfully broken their amazing treasure. And it was just that it was so brittle, and so fragile that there was there was no hope for it.
Guy Windsor
It’s basically shaped sand at that point. Nothing holding it together. And speaking of bones, I can see over your left shoulder, a skull. Is that an old friend?
Sally Pointer
He's a fake one. He goes to school workshops and things with me because it's sort of slightly frowned on taking real skulls and to see small children these days, don’t know why.
Guy Windsor
That's very strange. Because they love that sort of stuff. When we were staying in Italy, seven years ago, my kids were quite little, like six and eight, I think, we went into the Cathedral of Pisa, which the Leaning Tower is next to. And there is a saint in a glass coffin who's been there for about 500 years. San Raniero, I think his name was. And my kids were completely not terribly impressed by the whole cathedrals stone building. Boring, right. But there was a dead body. That was awesome. I was holding up the little one so that she could actually see the dead body properly. She was fascinated.
Sally Pointer
They have all these questions about is it real? And what does “real” mean? Yes, it's real. But it's not alive anymore. But it did used to be a real person.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. And we get that sort of question a lot. Like, one question I get asked an astonishing number of times when I'm carrying a sword around, is that sword real? No, it's a figment of your imagination. What do you think it is?
Sally Pointer
I think people get very confused between the idea of is it original, meaning is it of the period that it represents? Or is it pretty much exactly the same thing, but we made it recently. And this is something we have we have a lot of with archaeology, particularly on the public interpretation side, this whole question of, is it authentic, which is a terrible word because it doesn't really mean anything. Or only means something in context. But what people are generally asking is, is this thing you are showing me from 1000s of years ago? Or is it something that you made yesterday to the best of your knowledge the same way that they made it 1000s of years ago? And in itself that's an amazing conversation to have.
Guy Windsor
That’s a good question. I think with the sword thing, I am not usually carrying around anything even looks antique, right? They're all shiny. They are relatively new. I think the question they're really asking is, is it sharp, but they don't quite know how to formulate it. And they're kind of okay with somebody carrying around a blunt sword. And they're not so comfortable with people carrying around a sharp sword. Although, I mean, you can murder somebody with a blunt sword quite easily. So, okay, I do have to ask, because after the intro, I think the average listener is probably a bit confused. What is a hedge botherer?
Sally Pointer
Well, this started off as a joke an awful lot of years ago. So I have always been one of those people who takes myself off on long walks, pokes around in hedges. It is a little bit to do with foraging, but it's actually much more about do I recognize all the species that are in the hedge? What are the birds up to? Can I spot any pixies? Are there any interesting bits of wood I can take home, and my late husband started teasing me about it. And you'll occasionally hear veterinarians referred to as dog botherers. So he said, oh, you're off out hedge bothering again. The poor hedges, there they are minding their own business. And there's you poking them, talking to the birds, seeing what the slugs are up to. Anytime anybody drives down the lane, they see really just the back half of you and your wellies sticking out of a hedge, wondering what's going on. So you're clearly hedge bothering. And eventually we start being more visible on the internet. And I started sharing pictures of things I'd found whilst hedge bothering. And it's taken off a little bit. And there are now quite a lot of people right around right around the world who will refer to going out for a good poke around in the woods as hedge bothering, which I think is just brilliant.
Guy Windsor
My mind hiccupped on the interesting bits of wood to take home. Because whenever we went anywhere, when I was a kid, my parents would have to negotiate me down from about 200 sticks at various degrees of excellence down to one or two that would fit in the back of the Land Rover. So yeah, so you're still dragging interesting bits of wood home with you?
Sally Pointer
Of course, and one particular use are for handles, so axes. For example, if you have, say, a prehistoric axe, with a handle that's from a naturally shaped piece of tree, it's got to be a really specific shape. And once you start looking for these things, you realize that they're not that easy to find. So it becomes something you'd watch for almost obsessively. You're going along the hedges in the winter, going oh, is that the right shape? No, not quite. Oh, that's the right shape. Oh, but it's a really rubbish species. That wouldn't be very strong. Because the last thing you want to do is hit something with a bronze axe and have the have the wood shatter. It becomes something that you tune into and watch out for.
Guy Windsor
I was very much into traditional bow making for quite a while. And it trains you to look at trees as sort of bows in embryo. And, yeah, I guess people who do for example, dressmaking have the same thing, like when they're walking around and seeing people wearing dresses, they're like, oh, that's how they did the hem on that one. Your eye tunes into these things and thinking about like how they used to build houses and how they used to build ships. There are very specific tree formations that were desirable for particular bits of the house, like the absolute best way to have the gable is if you have basically the crotch of a large tree upside down. Because then all the grain is going in the right direction and it's super strong and will last literally like 600 years. There’s one like a 10 minute walk from my house. There's a house that's been built that way and you can still see the timbers on the side and it's like that grew that way. That’s not just been hacked to pieces, all the grain is going the right way. So fantastic.
Sally Pointer
These things I absolutely love. I love watching for these things. And it's that overlap between things that grew in nature and things that people have made use of are very fundamental to an awful lot of the things I do.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, and like all of the stuff that you're working with, because it's sort of pre-industrial revolution, might be cultivated, like firewood was cultivated. But it's not been produced as a raw material. It's just the raw material that's laying around.
Sally Pointer
One thing though, something that I hadn't thought about a lot of until fairly recently, was just how critical firewood management is even back into fairly distant prehistory. One of the reasons why we stay mobile hunter gatherers for such a long time is that if you stay in one place, you use up all the firewood really quickly. It's not just about game resources, or forageable plants, it's about wood, particularly if you're in the colder parts of prehistory. So there's quite strong evidence, even Mesolithic groups are not necessarily coppicing and things, but they are actively managing firewood resources, they use up all the dead wood in an area, open out clearings, that allows new grass, which brings in animals for a while, so the hunting is great. But after a little while, new growth starts coming back in, you've used up all the dead firewood, it's time to move on to a new area, start the cycle again, might take a generation to come back round for that spot. And that idea that we're altering our landscape from incredibly early dates within what we today think of as being a very basic lifestyle just blew my mind.
Guy Windsor
You know, there's a sort of idea that basically Stone Age people were rather stupid sitting on a log bashing rocks together. And we have expressions like being a caveman. And when you look at some of the artifacts they've created, like, beads, for example, almost certainly stitched to some piece of clothing that’s now disappeared. But you can see the beads and the pattern when you find the grave. It's like, this is not a culture that had no spare time because they were all the time just running after woolly mammoths or whatever. They have this really sophisticated material culture. Given the infancy of technology at the time, they have really simple tools. But I'm thinking of that absolute breakthrough, where they figured out that this kind of clay pot thing with holes in it wasn't a cheese strainer, you turn it upside down, and you put bits of wood and stuff in the bottom of it, and you've got a Bunsen burner. So they could solder stuff. That's like, how many 1000s of years ago.
Sally Pointer
One of the things I think it's really interesting to remember is that certainly within the last 50,000, 100,000 years, we are biologically the same people as them. Physically, anything you or I could do, in theory, they could do. Anything they could do, physically, we can do. However, we are not culturally the same, we would seriously struggle to understand the world that they inhabit, and the way that they think about things. They I'm sure would be completely baffled by the way we approach life. But basically, the needs are the same. We want to be warm, we want to be fed. We want somebody to snuggle up to by the campfire, we want the nice things in life. And we have really good evidence that people as far back as we've been modern humans have put time into the nice stuff, not just the survival stuff.
Guy Windsor
I like one of the oldest mines in existence is about 70,000 years old. And it is for ochre, which has its only function is to make things red. So they're making paints and probably makeup and things like that 70,000 years ago, and they're not just picking stuff up off the ground, they're actually digging a mine to get this stuff out so that they can make themselves pretty. It's amazing. So, slight left turn. You have a book on the mythology of herbs. What is the mythology of herbs?
Sally Pointer
So this was a book that I wrote a very great many years ago. It's long since out of print and that's probably a good thing because in hindsight, what took me a year or two to write at the time, I could probably do in two or three days with the benefits of the internet these days. What I was trying to look at at the time was all of the stories that we could find about plants. Today, we tend to be very, very pragmatic about plants, you look at it and go, it's a lettuce, it's good for us, it helps us lose weight. You go back in time a little bit further, and people say, oh, well, that the shape of this plant tells you what it's useful for. Or if you pick this plant, on a particular saint’s day or under a certain phase of the moon, it's going to have different associations, or here is a plant that is clearly associated with elves because every time my cattle are near it, they get blistered ears, and they become sick. And these are stories that tell us about how people view the world, and how they make sense of medicinal properties or psychosomatic properties, or just the way that biodiversity works in the days before we had formal science. And it's about stories and they are stories that connect people to plants and the natural world. But they tell us about how people's brains tick, this idea about the doctrine of signatures. So you've probably come across this with the swordplay thing that there's a number of plants that because they have slightly toothed edges, and happen to be good for staunching wounds, well they're clearly battlefield herbs. And the shape tells you that. And the amazing thing is they're not wrong. It's not why the plant works. But it just happens that that particular family of plants all have certain similarities in shape. And they happen to look like a knife with a serrated edge. Therefore, they are brilliant for when you cut yourself. The logic is bonkers, but it still works.
Guy Windsor
Any plans to update the book and reissue it? Because it does sound interesting.
Sally Pointer
I might at some point, it does need an overhaul. It was written a very great many years ago, I could certainly do better with it. And I've got a lot more stories to tell now because I keep finding out things about plants and how people interact with them. So yes, I'll put it on the list.
Guy Windsor
Excellent, good. Okay. I'm sure listeners will be thrilled. Because I actually do this quite a lot. Guests come on and they have interesting ideas, I say I'd like you really should make a book out of that because people want to read that book. And occasionally, occasionally, the guest comes back on the show one or two years later, to plug the new book. Just a little hint there. Okay, so you have this YouTube channel, where you're basically explaining how to make textiles out of nettles, making pasta out of acorn flour, and a million other things. But I did notice when I was going through them, that you don't seem to have an awful lot on weapons.
Sally Pointer
Well, I might not have anything specifically on weapons, but I think it does all tie in there. Because if you want to understand why people defend themselves, go out to hunt, go out to basically be really, really horrible to other human beings. You've got to understand what it is in day to day life that's important to them. And when you start understanding the efforts that people go to, to make their clothes nice, to eat interesting food, to gather resources and store them and process them, then you've got a bit more of an understanding about just why people are prepared to go to the lengths that they go to with weapons to either defend them or nab them off somebody else. So I would argue that to a point that does come into it, even though I may not talk about it specifically. But there are also other areas that probably do have overlap. So I did a video not too long ago, it was only a very, very short one on different ways of putting string together. So we were looking at plys and how they go together. But look at bow strings, you can take a two-ply piece of cordage and yes, it will work as a bow string. We have archaeological examples that probably are bow strings that are made in two ply. But if a bow string goes ping on you, it does it very instantly. And at the very least you've spoilt your shot, but in the worst case scenario flicks you in the nose or knocks your eye out or whatever, does something really, really horrible.
Guy Windsor
It can break the bow too.
Sally Pointer
It can. If you make your bow string out of three plys of cordage put together carefully, you've got a couple of different things happening. If one strand breaks, you've got two more to take the strain, you'll probably be able to finish that shot before it all goes horribly pear shaped on you. But also, three plys will distribute the kinetic energy that's stored in the bow much more efficiently down the string, which gives you more control over your shot. It is going to be a better bow for having a decent piece of string on it. So it all comes down to string. String is very important stuff.
Guy Windsor
Very true. And yes, there is a plausible connection between general string making and bow strings in particular, have you come across the work of Tim Baker, who is a bowmaker in the United States?
Sally Pointer
I know the name. I don't think I'd looked at any detail.
Guy Windsor
In one of the earlier volumes of the Traditional Bowyer’s Bible, he has an article on string making, which is absolutely fascinating. He also has an article on making a stone age bow, where they literally, they did it all with stone technology, they took down the tree with stone hand-axes and they split it and shaped it and everything using stone tools and produced this really nice bow really quickly. That was certainly like you know, heavy enough to take down a deer, no problem. So maybe you should have a look at him because the way that they're constructing the bow strings is they're trying to minimize the springiness of it. So you want it to be twisted as little as possible, because you're not trying to make a spring, you're trying to make basically a bar. But if you don't twist it, the fibers don't stick together. So it'll unravel. So you have to make your threads with minimal twists, and then you do the counter twists for the plys with minimal twists, and then you put the plys together with minimal twists and you end up with this string that is really carefully built to have very specific properties.
Sally Pointer
Fascinating. I love that sort of thing, I will definitely follow up on that.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, I'll make a note, I'll look it up specifically and send you the exact details, because it's a fascinating thing. He wrote a fantastic article on bow design and performance, which is about how does the cross section of the bow affect its performance, how does its length affect it, and going into all sorts of details of if you have this kind of wood available you make a bow that's like this, which even though it's not nearly as efficient as it might be if you made it out of a different kind of wood, if that better wood is not available, you can still make a bow that will take down game that you can eat using this rather shitty bow wood but you have to make all of these design compromises. And he made 600 bows to produce that article. He wasn't taking anything for granted, he was making replicas of literally 600 different bow designs, and then shooting an arrow through a thing that measured the speed of the arrow. So you have an objective measure of, you've got a bow of this size this weight, this draw weight, this size of arrow, this weight of arrow and that’s the arrow speed you get. It is genius. It gives you a way of looking at bows that you might enjoy it. And then maybe we can get you into bow making and maybe from bow making. No, you stick with the fibres, it’s is fine. I’m not trying to persuade you to take up martial arts, I promise. Alright, so you're making textiles from nettles and acorn pasta. What do you think would happen? Do you think you'd actually now have the skills where if you were dumped in the wilderness somewhere, you'd probably be alright?
Sally Pointer
Yeah, I'd miss tea. I would really miss caffeine. We've got very, very few plants in Britain that have got caffeine in them and the ones that we do have really aren't good for you. So that would be an issue. But apart from that, yes, in principle, I have all the skills necessary. Wouldn't necessarily enjoy it. Not full time. I've got to the age where I quite like being warm and dry and being able to put my feet up with a good a good book. But yeah, in principle, I could clothe myself from scratch, it would take a while. None of these things are quick. I certainly don't know everything about what's forageable or huntable in the British countryside. But I know enough that in the short term, I wouldn't starve. I think these days, actually, you would struggle to live entirely off the land in Britain. I know there have been experiments done fairly recently, where people have tried for a month at a time. And unless you have access to good hunting, it's really, really difficult. We just can't get enough protein and fats.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, because so much of the land is taken up with stuff that isn't good to eat. Like, you know, soy fields and motorways and cities. And it's not like back when there used to be deep forest all over the place where you have all this biodiversity and there are birds everywhere and little animals and rabbits and what have you running around and you can work across a much wider range.
Sally Pointer
Yes. I just spent three days in the woods over the weekend. And I was sitting outside my tent in the morning with my first cup of tea, just watching the birds and the small animals, thinking, yes, I recognize all the things I'm looking at. But there's actually very, very little here that would be worth catching. If I had to. Our landscape has changed.
Guy Windsor
How would you catch a bird using pre industrial technology?
Sally Pointer
I think probably netting is one of the most efficient ones. So you work out where they're roosting. And then you net an area sharpish so that they get entangled when they wake up. That's probably one of the easiest ones. There are recipes for things like bird lime, so sticky things that they will get tangled up in. Yeah, probably with the resources that I would have available, netting is going to be the most efficient way of doing it.
Guy Windsor
And there's also the question of, if you're in an area, I mean, I'm living in Suffolk, which has like some of the best flint you'll ever find. Flints everywhere, they even like cover the churches with flint. But if you're in a part of Britain, where flint ain't available, you're going to be struggling to make sharp tools, I think.
Sally Pointer
Flint does appear everywhere you get people because people carry it. We have trade in flint from incredibly early dates. And there are other there are other rocks that will do the trick. So in areas that genuinely don't have access to flint, people are very ingenious about the types of stone that they use. But it is completely remarkable that you can go to areas of Britain for example, that have no native flint, and on archaeological excavations you will still find flint tools because people have made it happen.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, I read some of those there's like traceable long distance trade in stone going back like 100,000 years. We do like to think that we invented everything last week. Okay, so you also have, apparently from the work that you've done a deep interest in perfumes and cosmetics. What is the main difference between the historical cosmetics and the modern industry? And by historical let's say, pre white lead?
Sally Pointer
Well, I should probably start by saying I'm the least likely person to have an interest in this because anyone who's ever met me in person, knows I am the scruffiest individual you'll ever meet. But this one all came about because donkey's years ago, I worked for a year or two at Warwick castle. And we got vast numbers of visitors, vast. I've never worked anywhere quite like it for volume. And you'd have some of the same conversations over and over and over and over again. One that came up all the time were visitors saying well, I like the idea of the Middle Ages, but I wouldn't want to live here because I would miss my shower gel, deodorant, mascara, whatever it was that they were interested in. And I had so many conversations with people that were along the lines of well, okay, maybe they didn't have mascara in a tube the way we do today. And maybe we didn't have shower gels in jars, but people did have a concept of hygiene, they have a concept of beauty. There are fashions in all of these things that we can trace back through time. And that are very much a reflection of the similarities rather than the differences between people at different time periods. And I thought to myself, well, I could probably write a little pamphlet about this, you know, a 12 page Penny Dreadful that I could print on my computer, sell at events for some beer money. Well, several years and 70,000 words later, it came out as a glossy hardback with lots of experiments, as you do. This is the way these things happen.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. That's how most books get done.
Sally Pointer
It is. What fascinated me throughout it is that yes, there are periods when things change. And yes, there are trends. But there are actually more similarities than there are differences. So I could look back at the very, very oldest cosmetics that we have any evidence for at all. And in fact, you alluded to them earlier, we have prehistoric mining for ochre, there are actually Neanderthal finds of very, very small shells with blended ochres in, in quantities that don't imply things like wall painting, these are small amounts, you know, you're talking a eye shadow pot size.
Guy Windsor
You're talking about a compact, like my wife has in her purse.
Sally Pointer
Yeah, exactly. And they are interpreted as for bodily adornment, it may not be makeup, it might be wall paint, but you know, this is small quantities, where somebody has blended the pigments, specifically to give us a set shade. Now, fast forward to today, I could walk into any beauty counter on the high street, look at the ingredients in the blushers and the lipsticks and one of the top ingredients is going to be ochre. We're still using that 50,000, 70,000 years on, some things have not changed. The way we apply it might have done. But the fact that we're doing it hasn't, and for almost every period in time, we can see that within the standards of the day, people generally like to be clean, there are some periods where of course, people aren't hopping into a bath or a shower every day. And laundry is a bit trickier. But all the evidence is fundamentally, as a species, we would rather be cleaner than dirtier. We have concepts of beauty, some of which are probably universal, regardless of cultural differences. So for example, we know that the human eye sees red very clearly, and responds to that. So all the fashions where you might add extra red to cheeks or lips to make yourself what we consider today to be more attractive, it's extremely likely that our prehistoric ancestors would have not dissimilar responses, they might see it slightly differently because of culture. But fundamentally, they're going to respond to the same things. So yes, there are differences. There's the whole white lead thing that you mentioned, but these things go on for a very long time. I mean, we think of white lead as being a particularly sort of Tudor and 18th century thing. But actually, if you look back a tiny bit earlier in history, the Romans are using it. And not only that, the Romans know perfectly well it's not good for you. There's a Roman writer on architecture, who I think is called Prepertius, but I wouldn't absolutely swear to that. And he says something along the lines of why are we making water pipes out of lead? Don't you see what light lead does to women's faces? Surely this isn’t good for us. They know that this stuff's not good.
Guy Windsor
Some of them knew. But it's quite a common human thing that a whole bunch of people doing something really stupid and a few people say actually, that's a bad idea and they just get ignored. It happens all the time.
Sally Pointer
Having worn white lead on my own face experimentally. I've made lead from scratch where you hammer out a sheet of lead into a thin roll, and you put it in a jar with a bit of vinegar. And then traditionally what you're supposed to do is bury the jar in a manure heap, well I didn't have a manure heap so it sat on the kitchen windowsill for a while until it grows a white crust and then you powder it up. That's your white lead. And I have worn it as makeup briefly. But I totally get why it works because it completely covers up any little blemishes with a very tiny amount. It's not this clown white that people think it is. Very tiny bit just blurs everything really, really nicely. I do tend to turn into a strawberry the second anybody says anything rude to me, so it covers up all the brushes, covers up all the freckles. It's a metallic pigment, so it doesn't sweat off easily. So there you are, you go out partying under all that candlelight, and your makeup is still in place at the end of the evening. It works. I could see why they liked it. It's just a shame it’s going to kill you with time.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, okay, so basically it is the best concealer ever. It just kills you. How much is a safe dose?
Sally Pointer
Wearing it once or twice is no problem at all. Lead actually crosses the fat barrier into your system relatively slowly. So as long as you're not ingesting it, wearing it a couple of times, particularly over a fatty foundation layer, you're not going to do yourself any serious harm, the difficulty is accumulative. If you wear it every day tiny amounts of getting into your system. We metabolize lead very slowly. If anybody ever gets lead poisoning these days, it takes months for it to clear their system. So it's those little tiny, tiny, tiny additions. And it does some quite cruel things because in the short term, it will start drying your skin so you end up needing to use more of the lead to get the same effect because your skin gets dry. Then it will start doing things like making your gums black and recede from your teeth and it will make your breath start to stink. So you need more makeup and more potions to cover that up. Then it will start giving you slight delusions or it'll affect your fertility. Now this is a big problem because a lot of the women who wore lead fashionably are women who have been married into particular families for their ability to produce sons as heirs, spares, and all the rest of it. So if you knock on to your fertility, you're no longer the prize wife that you were intended to be. And yeah, and eventually it makes you very confused and makes you irrational. There's some thoughts that Elizabeth I was known to be difficult in her later years. And there is some discussion that possibly it was her makeup that was contributing to that.
Guy Windsor
Wow. Yeah, I’m familiar with the damage profile you get from heavy metal poisoning generally. And so yes, it’s cumulative, a little bit every now and then isn't going to do too much harm. It shows a remarkable commitment to finding things out to actually stick it on your face, though. I couldn't do that. Like, I know this stuff is horribly poisonous. I'm not going to stick it on my face.
Sally Pointer
I do these things so you don't have to.
Guy Windsor
I say that to my students when I'm doing something with a, shall we say an unusually… What's the word? Not foolhardy? An usually bold risk profile. Let's call it that. I need to do the experiment because I need to know for sure. And when I've done the experiment, I can then teach this with a degree of certainty. But there's absolutely no need for the students to do the experiment, because it's fucking dangerous. Okay, well, kudos to you for your commitment to historical knowledge. Yes, I'll just slather poison on my face. It'll be fine. Okay, now, one thing I've come across a lot at events particularly, and you've had a lot more contact with the public at this sort of thing than I have, is some really astonishingly stupid comments. One particular favourite, a friend of mine who's a blacksmith was making nails at a English Civil War event. So you know, if you have a blacksmith stand, you don't want to be doing difficult blacksmith stuff, you just bash out nails because it's an easy thing to do that looks like proper blacksmithing, which it is. But the crowd being there doesn't get in the way. And one tourist says, Ah, so you're making nails, that's great. But of course, you and I both know we didn't have nails in the 17th century. To which the blacksmith replies, no, that's why Jesus fell off the cross. He was provoked. Do any incidents spring to mind of that sort of, like, what are the misconceptions that you just wish didn't exist?
Sally Pointer
And lots of it is that we aren't taught history very logically at school. So an awful lot of people have a very, very poor idea of how things progress and how things change. So they might have done the Vikings or they might have done the Tudors, but very few schools teach this idea of chronology as being very, very gradual, and that you don't wake up one day and it's suddenly the Age of Enlightenment, it takes a very long time to get to these things. And that every discovery is based on ways of doing the same thing before that. There's the occasional completely amazing thing like the introduction of electrical light or something, but almost everything else. You don't suddenly wake up one day with metal spears as a new concept. They've come from a very long tradition of using stone and bone and antler tipped spears. Things come out of other things. So I think most of the misconceptions that the public have are because they got into their heads that a particular time period has a specific innovation. And they forgotten that something filled that gap beforehand. And sometimes you're right, though, that they’re daft. I can remember standing with a friend at an event once and everyone was admiring her beautiful new baby, it was all lovely and decked out in appropriate costume. And a member of the public sauntered past and said, tut tut, they’re letting the side down because we all know they didn't have babies back then. We hope she was joking…
Guy Windsor
A friend of mine called Liz, who is well endowed in the chest department, was feeding her baby in the time honoured mammalian fashion, when somebody asked her, so what did babies eat in the 17th Century? It's like, okay, boobs are not a new invention. But then sometimes, a question comes out and it makes you think about things in a different way, that sort of coming at it from no knowledge at all they sometimes come out with questions, which are actually quite profound. Actually I didn't really think about that and I should.
Sally Pointer
And that's what I really love about working with the public, particularly mixed age groups. If you get a family that's got really small children, and grannies in tow and things. And yeah, the questions they asked might be relatively straightforward in terms of, there's probably an answer to it. But sometimes the way they ask them does make you think, you know what, I have never thought about that. I've always followed a certain logic and understanding about how we got to a particular object or a technique or a reason for doing things. And then somebody comes in with a very straightforward question from a totally different perspective. And that's how we learn. That's how, as academics, we keep on our toes, and remember that actually, our viewpoint is only one viewpoint amongst many. And just because it might currently represent what most academics agree with doesn't mean that there aren't other ways of looking at things. And family engagement is perfect for that.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, it's great, particularly the really little ones. They come out with the most extraordinary things. I mean, one kid, we were like letting the children play with the swords. And this child was so small, and was holding a very broad bladed single handed sword, which for them was like this enormous two handed thing. And it was so wide, that they could pretty much hide behind the width of the blade. So they got it into their head that they use the flat of the blade as a shield. It's like, listen, so somebody tries to stab you, and you just stop it with the flat of your blade like that.
Sally Pointer
We see superheroes do it like that, don’t we?
Guy Windsor
We do. Maybe it's not a practical thing. But I would just never thought to even think about that. There's this little tiny kids who is like, you could use it like this, you could use like that. You’ve got to think well, if a small child in the 20th century, it was the 20th century when this happened, comes up with this. You can bet that little children way back when we're coming up with similarly weird ideas that might actually spark other things. Okay, speaking of ideas, what is the best idea you haven't acted on yet?
Sally Pointer
Oh, gosh, let's have a silly one. Okay, I'm a great believer in lists, I'm a great believer in convincing myself that I will be efficient if I write a list and I'll say, I'm going to spend an hour doing this, and then an hour doing that, and then it doesn't work at all. Many years ago, I got it into my head that there was not enough hours in the day. So what I was going to do was, I'm was going to get an old fashioned clock, I was going to repaint the dial to show 13 divisions, not 12. And I was going to lose the minute hand, so that to my eye, there would be 13 hours in the day, apply my list, and I would immediately get a lot more done.
Guy Windsor
Genius, that is absolutely genius. That's basically the Pomerleau method, but on steroids. You know, the Pomerleau thing where you have, like 20 minute timer, or something. That's not my thing at all. But the way I do this, right, I have a whiteboard. And anything I absolutely need to do goes on the whiteboard. And for less I want to do it the bigger it gets written. So like “papers to accountant”, meaning sorting through all sorts of accountancy shit, that gets written like huge. So there isn't much room on the board to write other things. And I really want to get that space clear. And the only way I can get that space clear is by doing the thing. So I do the thing, and then I get to wipe it off the board and have all this clear space.
Sally Pointer
I might try that. That's a really good way of doing.
Guy Windsor
But I've had a thought for your clock idea. I'm a bit of a watch nerd. And my current favorite watch is this thing here, which has, I don't know if you can see it. But it's got the hour hand, the minute hand, the second hand, but it also has a GMT hand, which goes once around the dial in 24 hours. So when you're travelling, you can look at the watch. And you can set the GMT hand to for example, home time, which stays the same as you're moving around. And then you set the normal hands to local time. And it's also got a bezel around the side. So you can have your GMT hand. Let's say you have GMT at home, and you have like minus five because you're going to the east coast. So you can just twizzle the bezel round. And it will tell you by looking at the GMT hand what time it is in New York, for instance. It's great, I love that sort of stuff. But if you took a clock that had just a GMT hand, so it goes once round every time the Earth spins on its axis, you could put 26 divisions, give yourself two extra hours. And that way you can see the whole day, you don't have to like think about it has to go round twice. It could just be the whole day. Which I think that would help too. Because you're going to get the extra two hours. No? Just don’t schedule podcast interviews using that clock because other people are not aware of the real time. So is there an idea you actually have in the back of your head that you might want to actually act on?
Sally Pointer
I've always got lots of ideas, but mostly they're just about things I want to explore, things I want to try out, things that I want to make from scratch. None of them at any given moment are very exciting until they start happening. So yeah, there's always things going on. It's why I'm never tidy at home, there are always so many projects in progress.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, my study goes through periods of tidiness. When I get to the end of the project, I tend to tidy up and then the next project comes in and just makes it messy again. And then when that's done, it gets tidied up. And my workshop’s the same. At the moment, I've made a model of a Bronze Age sword, which I'm going to one of James Dilly’s workshops to cast in bronze in November. And I asked him whether I could make my own model so it's like my own design sort of thing, based on the British Museum original. And so at the moment, the bench is clean, and there's just this wooden sword sitting on it. Project is done. But now of course, this afternoon I'm going to go in and I'm just going to make another one I'm probably another one and another one. Because once you've done one you're like, well actually, I could tweak it like this and I could make it like that and adjust it. Have you done much bronze casting?
Sally Pointer
A little bit. I think mould preparation is key. If the mould isn't good, the casting won't be good. If you can get your mould absolutely right, you're going to have far less cleaning up to do at the end. So the more time and effort you put into getting the model right, getting the mould right, the actual pouring bit is a function of having enough metal that's hot enough and pouring it steadily. That's all over in moments, the time you put into getting the mould right is going to really pay off.
Guy Windsor
That makes sense. It's all in the preparation. All right. So my last question. And I ask variations on this question to most of my guests. Somebody gives you a million pounds or whatever, to spend improving experimental archaeology worldwide, or any aspects of that, including, for example, teaching the public or whatever? How would you spend it?
Sally Pointer
Well, the thing to remember about experimental archaeology is that it attracts a really wide cross section of people, yes, there are academics doing it. But there are an awful lot more people who have really good craft skills, or have come out of the reenactment community, or have come out of the bushcraft community, or have come out of traditional skills. And for experimental archaeology, to have academic relevance it has to be tied into the wider body of research. If you just play around with making a spear for your own benefit that's experiential. That's about experiences. It's about building your own knowledge. It's very valuable. But it only really becomes experimental archaeology when you start recording things, you start sharing things, you start putting things in a format where somebody else could revisit it in a few years’ time. Can we replicate this? Does it tie in to the wider body of knowledge? And what do these new finds add to that? That only works if you can get your hands on all the academic literature. Now, experimental archaeology, it's getting a little bit better. There are some very good open access journals, and you've got the Exarch. Journal, and there's an organization that's doing amazing work. But almost everything is still behind a paywall. Academic Journals are behind a paywall. The average person, unless they have an affiliation, and I'm panicking about this at the moment, because I've just finished my Master's. Anytime now I'm going to lose my academic email address, which means my journal access is going to evaporate. I'm trying desperately to get a research fellowship out of somebody just to keep my access. So I would put that money into finding ways of making journal access, at the very least affordable, if not completely affordable for everybody. Because it's ridiculous in this day and age, with information being so widely available on a global scale that you physically cannot get at some of the experiments, the Site Reports, the write ups, the thinking, if you don't either pay for access or be associated with a formal academic institution.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, it's nuts. I mean, when I finished my PhD, I had the same thing, I suddenly had no access to university libraries. But actually, I need it more now than I did then. So you would take the money, and you would use it to somehow jailbreak all of the academic research that's been done so far. What really bothers me is the money is coming from the academic institutions and going to the publishers, but those publishers are not paying the authors.
Sally Pointer
Yes, yes, completely agree.
Guy Windsor
What the hell. I don't publish any of my stuff in academic journals for this exact reason. It's like, they don't pay you, they expect to get paid. Off they can fuck, frankly. I would much rather put my stuff out where my people can find it. So all of it, pretty much all of it is available for free somewhere. And if you want it neatly packaged as a book or a course or something, then you pay for it. But the actual information is all out there for free. Because that's that way people can engage with what I'm doing and say, well, actually Guy in this bit you've misread this passage from Fiore and it doesn't say this, it says that and which means this, which means you're doing it wrong. So I’ll have a look and go, oh, well actually, but have you considered that is the past participle of this. And so the discussion continues. So how would you actually jailbreak the stuff? Just having money isn't going to do it.
Sally Pointer
I honestly don't know, I don't know whether there are ways to subsidise some of the access levels so that it becomes affordable, because I don't have any huge problem with paying a pound or two to view something. But when a lot of these articles are 15, or 20 quid, and you don't know whether you need them yet.
Guy Windsor
And you have to maybe read 100 of them to get anywhere.
Sally Pointer
So I truly don't know exactly how it would work. But there must be ways to either fund a couple of completely new publications that are open access by design, and the money is there to enable that to happen. Of course, people need paying, you know, we’re not saying that the publishing houses don't need money to operate, of course they do. But maybe there's a way to do that. But maybe there's just a way of getting the general subscriptions lowered. I truly don't know how it would work. But something somewhere needs to happen if we want all the people who are doing this amazing, experiential work in all sorts of fields to be able to turn it into academically sound, experimental work.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, I think the problem, really, is that the reason academics don't just post their stuff out for free is because the only way they're going to get to keep their job or get the next job or whatever, is if they publish in certain journals. And that's why they put their work into hock with these journals, which only people with institutional access have access to. So I think the problem really is in the employment structure in academia. Because if you took that away, then there'd be no reason for academics to supply these publishing houses with free academic research which they can then package up and sell out to institutions. That might be the place to go. So maybe use the money to create a journal that is free by design. The trick is getting it get getting it the sort of status that means if you have a bunch of articles in this journal, you're more likely to get your senior lectureship or whatever. Tricky. So, yeah, you wouldn’t just use the money to buy up a whole load of flint?
Sally Pointer
Tempting, but even I can't use a million pounds’ worth of flint.
Guy Windsor
Fair enough. All right. Well, thanks so much for joining me today, Sally, it has been lovely to meet you. And I hope one of these days, we get to do a bit of actual crafty stuff together because that'd be really interesting.
Sally Pointer
That would be a lot of fun.
