Wig Hair Curler from Betsy (VCU_3D_5027)

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A ceramic wig hair curler fragment was salvaged from Betsy, a sunken ship (44YO0088) situated in the York River, off the coast of Yorktown, Virginia. Curlers were utilized to style the hair on wigs, an extravagant accessory of male fashion. The remains of Betsy were remarkably well-preserved, offering the opportunity to collect data on eighteenth-century shipbuilding and furnishings (Broadwater 1992:39). It was part of a fleet of vessels that the British deliberately sank in 1781. See John Broadwater's work in Shipwreck in a Swimming Pool: An Assessment of Methodology and Technology Used on the Yorktown Shipwreck Archaeological Project, published in Historical Archaeology 26(4):26-46. This artifact was three-dimensionally scanned using a Go!Scan 50 at the archaeological curation facility of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources in Richmond, Virginia. Courtesy of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, which has granted permission for the model to be downloadable for non-commercial educational purposes.