File:An incomplete Roman boxwood double-sided comb dating from AD 50-410. (FindID 837833).jpg

English: An incomplete Roman boxwood double-sided comb dating from AD 50-410. The one-piece comb has been formed from a single piece of boxwood. The comb is a double-sided 'H' format with teeth on both sides of a central reserve. The comb is lentoid shaped in section with a set of coarse teeth on one side of the central reserve and a set of fine teeth on the other. The side with the finer spaced teeth (8 per cm) 69 teeth in total, was primarily used as a 'nit' comb whilst the other side with the broader spaced teeth (5 per cm) 43 teeth in total, was used for general grooming. The central reserve is decorated on both sides with a ridged bar 2.32mm wide and 92.22mm long running horizontally along the central section of the comb. The comb has suffered some damage to both sets of teeth and is missing a section from one edge.

Dimensions: length: 96.21mm; width: 57.50mm; thickness: 10.20mm; weight: 33.53g.

A very similar comb was found in at Tollgate Farm, (Stoke-on-Trent Museum Archaeological Society, November 2010). Other double-sided 'H' form combs can be found in Derks and Vos (2010:74-77)

Derks and Vos (2010:55) write "Like the vast majority of wooden combs found across the Roman empire, all twelve specimens from Vechten are made of boxwood (Buxus sempervirens), a close-grained wood species famous in antiquity for its resistance to splitting. Typologically, all combs are of the double-sided H format with a significantly greater length than width, convex terminals and a lentoid section. Through a different number of teeth on each side of a central bar, these double-sided combs combine a coarse and a fine comb in one object. The long sides of the central bar often still show a straight or compass cut groove, which served as a guideline for the comb maker when sawing the teeth. In order to minimise breaking, in most cases a deliberate selection was made for radial billets, which were taken from the core of the living tree across the tree-rings to the exterior of the stem or branch. This allowed the comb maker to follow the direction of the tree-rings when sawing the teeth. Often the rings are still easily recognisable on the central bar. In cases where the combs have been broken, the breaking line coincides with the vertical line of a tree-ring boundary."

Derks and Vos (2010:66) write "While the number of published boxwood combs from the Roman empire is still relatively low, the exceptional conditions of the Egyptian desert and northern European waterlogged sites such as Vindolanda, Vindonissa and Vechten provide helpful windows for assessing the true size of their circulation. The conclusion forces itself upon us that they must have been ubiquitous. Moreover, they were used by all members of society, from the well-educated audience of the Roman poets who metaphorically referred to the combs by the wood species from which they were made (cf. note 1) to the ordinary soldiers in the barracks of Roman forts. While elite women used them for styling their hair into the elaborate hair styles we know so well from Roman female portraits, their main use may have been far more prosaic. The double-sided comb which united a fine and a coarse comb was perfectly suited for disentangling and cleaning hair. The ready acceptance of the comb in the provinces of the empire, in areas where the implement had hardly been known in prehistory and where it had first become available thanks to the new possibilities of long-distance exchange, is a sign of the rapidly changing ideas on personal hygiene and bodily appearance (cf. Hill 1997). Among the new practices of body care is the regular cleaning of the hair and the scalp. In some social contexts, such as army camps in which men were packed together and contamination of the community with lice and other parasites may have been easy and frequent (cf. Allason-Jones 1999), the comb may have been a very welcome implement. On the basis of their frequency in Roman forts, it has been argued that each soldier possessed his own comb, whether privately purchased or provided by the army. The analogy with early modern or contemporary state armies suggests that the appearance of the soldier's body was subject to disciplinary rules of the army authorities rather than just a matter of personal choice. Despite the marked absence of combs in male tombs or on funerary monuments for men, combs from military settlements show the importance the comb had for the construction of male identity, at least for that part of the empire's male population that joined the army."

Turner-Wilson (2009:130) "The majority of combs in this sample therefore occur in contexts from the third, fourth and early fifth centuries, and most were from graves. This reflects the general chronological trend of comb deposition in Roman Britain, but it is worth highlighting that combs are present in burials from many parts of the Roman world from the first century onwards (Pugsley 2003). Still, the widespread use of combs in late Roman Britain suggests there might have been an increase in interest in caring for the hair during this period. It was not surprising that there were no toilet combs associated with the late Iron Age in this sample, as only textile weaving combs are usually reported from this period."

References: Derks T. & Vos W., 2010. Wooden combs from the Roman fort at Vechten: the bodily appearance of soldiers. Journal of Archaeology in the Low Countries.

Pugsley P., 2003. Roman domestic wood. Analysis of the morphology, manufacture and use of selected categories of domestic wooden artefacts with particular reference to the material from Roman Britain, Oxford (BAR Int. Series 1118).

Fell V., 1991. Two Roman 'Nit' Combs from Excavations at Ribchester (RBG80 and RB89), Lancashire. Ancient Monuments Laboratory Report 87/91.

Turner-Wilson A.L., 2009. Healthiness, Through the Material culture of Late Iron Age and Roman Large Urban-Type Settlements of South-East Britain, Volume 1