What I Learned on my Summer Research Leave

One of the hardest things for me as an academic is taking time to reflect not just on what I do as a scholar, but how I do it. When I get busy and have deadlines this feels like a waste of time and when I don’t have pressing deadlines, this feels like an indulgence and a gateway drug to academic solipsism. This is especially true when reflections are not methodological per se (that is not generalizable), but personal.

That said, I also recognize that reflective practices can help me work more efficiently and deliberately in the future. Reflecting on teaching, for example, has helped me become a better (and I’d like to think more effective) teacher. So there are a few things that I want to remember about this year’s summer research leave.

1. Pacing Myself. This summer was the first time that I think that I got my pacing right. That is, I didn’t start the my leave throwing myself into my work with reckless abandon. Some of this was the result of having a pretty intense spring semester, but some of this was just approaching my summer deliberately. Two months of leave, sleeping in hotel beds, eating restaurant food, witty banter, and so on take their toll not only on my energy levels, but also my sanity. Pacing myself at the start seems to work to keep my energy levels higher (or at least manageable) longer in the season which is good for my productivity and my attitude. 

2. Don’t Worry about Redoing Things. One of the most challenging things about my summer is switching projects and going from one brain space to another efficiently. I used to get really worried about retracing my steps and redoing my own work (or the work of others). This summer, however, I decided to allow myself to the time to retrace my and other’s steps. 

This summer, for example, my colleagues Scott Moore and Richard Rothaus and I retraced the steps taken to understand the abandonment and collapse of the Roman bath at Isthmia. This revealed little misunderstandings on our part and some inaccuracies in the original interpretation. More than anything, though, it provided us with a very firm foundation for understanding the Early Byzantine material and contexts that we are studying. I’ll post more on this when I post our final report.   

3. Write. I tried to make time every day to write. For me, writing is a crucial part of thinking and it helps me do field research more efficiently. When I don’t write, I struggle to conceptualize what I’m doing.

In many ways, this is part of archaeology as craft. Rather than an industrial model knowledge making where each step is separated from the one previous and the written text appears at the end, a craft model locates knowledge making throughout the process of archaeological work. Writing, then, isn’t the culmination of research, but part of every step of the process.  

4. Fieldwork. I had a few days of field work this season and this was less than ideal. Going from sitting in the work rooms or store rooms and into the heat and physicality of the field was exhausting and abrupt. I enjoyed doing fieldwork, of course, but despite trying to stay basically fit, I found that I did not have my archaeology legs. As a result, I got very tired and by mid-afternoon was too tired to make good decisions and concentrate on what I was doing.

I’m not sure that there are many more days of fieldwork in my career. Or, if I do have a chance to do fieldwork, it’ll have to be more than a day or two here or there and give myself time to get my fieldwork legs. This will not only allow me to appreciate fieldwork more but also do a better job! 

5. Big Picture, Small Picture. Finally, it’s very easy for me to become preoccupied with little details and the fiddly logic of stratigraphy, contexts, and assemblages.This is, of course, vital for making sense of the evidence “on (or in) the ground.” At the same time, this little picture is only meaningful if it somehow contributes to a big picture question. One of the things that I need to sort out over the next couple of weeks is the big picture question that I’m trying to address with my preoccupation with the little picture.

Stay tuned for some posts that try to reconcile these two key poles in archaeology (and most academic) knowledge making!