Putting The Pieces Together.
Aureus of Antoninus Pius. 145CE. Courtesy of Nickle Galleries. Photo Credit: Scott Coleman
I F**k’n Love HISTORY!
To start, I did notice I dropped a lot of F-bombs in my last piece and for that I probably should apologize for being slightly excessive, but it is my voice and that particular day called for it. That is my half-assed way of saying…”meh, deal with it…but I’ll do better. Like, I’ll try to use less F-bombs.”
Now, on to the good stuff.
I do love writing about history despite how tedious and time consuming it can be. The time it takes to research your material, construct a valid argument, realize your argument sucks, restructure your argument, then ask your friends to proofread your argument, only to have them tell you, in that friend-kind-of-way, your argument sucks, run back to the drawing board, drink some vodka-tonic (I lie, I wouldn’t drink vodka-tonic…without fresh squeezed lime. I’m not a monster), rewrite the whole F**k’n thing, write the bib — Bibliography— CURSE THE BLUE BLAZES about writing the bib, proofread—again— editE, eDit, edit, proofread, one final edit, and finally, submit to a journal, professor, or whoever it is for, only to get rejected, or get a C-. That, my friends, is the beauty of writing history.
I sure know how to make History appealing, don’t I?
SO WHY DO HISTORY?
Because it is about putting the pieces together to come to a fuller understanding of how the F**k we got here —Today! It is nerd-sleuthing. Investigating centuries old, even millennia old, cold cases. And as I dive deeper down that rabbit hole I talked about in my last post, the pieces have become infinitely more complex. History is so much more than learning about a bunch of dead old codgers, it is a reflection of our current selves while exercising the mind and growing as a human.
WTF You Talkin About Coleman?
In my current research on rural-agrarian Byzantine settlements in central and eastern Anatolia, the traditional methods of how we researched these settlements are outdated. That is to say, we have been looking for what we want to look for and we isolate, isolate and isolate the shit out of everything. We create historical narratives around Economic History, Military History, Social History, Numismatics, Archaeobotany, Women’s History, Gendered Histories, Queer Theory, Affect Theory (that one is for you Syd.), Histories of individual emperors, Art History, History of fortifications, Bulgar Invasions, Slavic invasions, Seljuk Turk invasions, Arab Invasions, this invasion and that invasion, Whig History, Marxist History, Colonial History, Indigenous History, and on and on and on we go like hamsters running on that cheap-ass spinning wheel. I mean the list is F**k’n endless.
AGAIN, THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH SPECIALIZED FIELDS!
But these approaches only provide snapshots of particular pieces of history. This becomes a methodological conundrum when you try to pull everything together to understand how an ancient or medieval settlement functioned in a holistic manner. Especially when the site has evidence that ranges from imperial figures, military presence, shitty pottery, one piece of nice pottery, dead kids (ancient kids, like they’ve been dead for a thousand years, so don’t freak out), animal remains (cattle, pig, A F**K’n CAMEL in ANATOLIA!), coins that span over six centuries, Religious artifacts, A F**K’n CAMEL in ANATOLIA, and a fortification wall with one tower, possibly two, constructed on top of a mound that is in the middle of nowhere. With all this information how does any scholar/academic pull this information together to construct how day-to-day life operated? Thoughts?
Now there will always be an intrinsic bias to any historian’s, archaeologist’s, or classitist’s research questions, methods and interpretations of the evidence. You just can’t get away from it. However, we try to be as objective as humanly possible. If you asked me why I am studying what I am studying, old me would say something like, “because it is important to understand how remote rural-agrarian settlements operated and contributed to the Byzantine empire as a whole, blah, blah, blah.
I Am F**K’n Wrong!
Why am I wrong? Because I choose my research topic based on the past and current influences of my education. Not that there is anything overtly erroneous with this, but my research choices are more of a reflection on the current state of Byzantine history and archaeology than they are a reflection of my genuine free will in choice. This thought has been stewing in the back of my head for awhile now and it is time to get that F**ker out of there. So how does a aspiring, lowly peon like myself address this problem of methodology? Is there even hope in remotely addressing such a massive problem?
YES THERE IS AND NO, IT IS NOT ME!
Picture Break!
Çadır Höyük, Yozgat Province, Turkey.
The Primary Case Study For My Research.
That blip of a mound with a single tree to its right.
With all that being said, I’ve stumbled across an article by William Anderson called The Medieval Afterlife of Ancient Mounds. In the article the author argues, more-or-less, that when studying these Höyüks (artificial mounds with many occupations built on top of each other) that memory of landscape and symbolism of the site need further consideration for why these sites were (re)-occupied in the early to middle Medieval period.
Generally, when Byzantinists have seen a fortification, whether around a city, village, or on a mound like the one in the above picture, the narrative usually revolves around military and economic histories that tended to support how we interpreted Roman urban decline. Or, as it has been put in the not so distant past: Rome collapsed, Arabs came, People ran behind walls, Everything was poor and shitty. Byzantium expanded and contracted and was some a crazy ass, orthodox Christian, decadent place that we shouldn’t give a rat’s ass about.
F**K’n GIBBON.
Recent Byzantine scholarship has turned these narratives around in the past couple of decades. However friends, we have a long way to go. This article by William Anderson, and more importantly my dear friend and colleague Syd (that’s the only name all ya are gettin), have got me rethinking some shit about how we approach the study of rural settlements.
Functionality and Purpose of a site are intertwined with Identity of a settlement. Moreover, identity is interwoven with the Memory which produces Symbolism for the past settlement and its landscape. Everything else, economic, military, social histories and so forth are dependent on how the inhabitants perceived the site’s identity and the memory which is connected to said identity. Thus, function and purpose, which is the umbrella that economic, military, social histories all lie under, needs to be studied alongside how identity and memory are perceived.
From metsmerizedonline.com
How The F**k Do We Do That?
I am working on that at the moment, and this post has gone on long enough. Hope you enjoyed and please leave a comment.