Writing In Place

Someone once recommended to me that as an academic, you should always have three projects going: one is a project that is almost done (or deep in the writing phase), one is a project that is just getting started, but has a clear outcome in mind and trajectory, and one project that is speculative and emergent without a clear goal, trajectory, or tidy research focus.

This summer at Polis, I’m working on a writing project (and with any luck, I’ll have something to share on Writing Wednesday) that focuses on the draft of the article on the kiln that I worked on over the winter. Most of what this is right now is integrating the catalogue with the arguments that we’re making. As part of this, we need to expand the catalogue by adding the analysis of a few objects that we hadn’t formally described. Of particular interest to us are the handful of pot stands found in contexts associated with the kiln and the later pool. These stands probably supported vessels that were “leather hard” and awaiting firing. They must be local production; it is improbable that there was a trade in pot stands. As a result they represent local fabrics and their size might give us some idea of the kinds of pots being produced at the site. We have argued that there was likely some lamp production in the area. This would not require pot stands nor a levigation pool the size of the one present in the second phase. The pot stands tell us that other kinds of vessels — most likely cooking pots or other utility wares — were produced here.

While we’re doing this, we have our next project on the horizon. My colleague Scott Moore and I have been slowly developing a provisional catalogue of Roman lamps from the site. Since there is a lamp deposit associated with the kiln area that gave us a running start. Comparing the lamps found near the kiln (albeit at a higher level) and those found elsewhere at the site required us to expand some of the preliminary analysis of these objects. The next step is to extend our analysis to all the Roman lamps from Polis. This is a bigger job, but manageable over the next season.

The larger future project is publishing the North Basilica. This is a complicated undertaking, but one that begins with notebooks, stratigraphy, and context pottery. A very tentative plan is to start the process of analyzing the notebooks and do some dives into the context pottery boxes to see what we’re up against. The first step might be to determine whether we should produce a Roman and Late Roman pottery volume and whether the material from E.G0 offers a complement to the material from E.F1 and E.F2. This would obviously be a significant pivot, but we certainly have enough stratified deposits and a diverse enough assemblage of material to produce something significant.

The key thing about all three of these writing projects is that they benefit immeasurably from being here in Polis.