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Hair of a Roman Girl
Roman hairpiece, Yorkshire Museum, York
This was one of the amazing finds to come from the excavation of a Roman cemetery on the building site of York railway station. It is the hair of a young Roman, styled in a bun and complete with two hair-pins.
The find was made in May 1875.
It was in a stone coffin lined with a lead sheet and filled with gypsum - a plaster-like material poured around the body. Records of the Yorshire Philosophical Society from 1875 say the coffin held the remains of a girl 'whose hair had never reached full growth and was probably 15 or 16 years of age when she died'.