Dr. Claire Millington

‘How It Was’ stories

Posted on February 5, 2026 by Claire_M

I’ve got my proofs for ‘Roman Life on Hadrian’s Wall’ back and am working on a proposal for another book about Romans, so how to write history books is something that is in my head a lot at the moment.

One big thing I’m thinking about are the differences between writing for academic readers and for general readers, that is people who are interested in history but not academics. Academic archaeology writing is usually very cautious. It’s more like a conversation between a group of colleagues who are remembering previous conversations and thinking what other people have said and respecting their expertise. There are questions that people have explored and drawn conclusions about, which can be re-opened or not, but fundamentally academics are interested in how the work of experts fits together, rather than the particular stories that are being told. The idea is generally to establish what are facts and discuss theoretical models that are the ways the facts might fit together. One of the purposes of this is to stop what are basically myths being passed off as history, because the evidence has either not been sufficiently understood or modern viewpoints are getting in the way. The example I most often deal with is the idea that there weren’t many civilians, and especially not women and children, with the Roman army, which is a myth that sprang up largely due to the interests of the soldiers from the eighteenth century onwards who studied the Roman army. It’s part of why I wrote ‘Roman Life on Hadrian’s Wall’, to put the spotlight on these people in an attempt to say something about their lives and importance to Roman imperialism.

There is a very big difficulty however in trying to understand people in the ancient past. We don’t have much writing from people who weren’t free men with lots of money. This means that we don’t directly have the viewpoints of most people who lived in the past to tell us what their lives were like. This is of course what people now are most often interested in. What was it really like? What did people think and feel? Modern stereotypes tend to cause confusion here. Ideas about childhood, for example, change a lot. When are people actually grown up? Modern culture keeps examining people’s brains and declaring adulthood to be older and older – apparently adolescence now continues into your thirties. By that age Roman men could have had several army promotions and women might have been married several times as well as having raised to adulthood the oldest of their children. Writing for more generalist readers means being aware of modern assumptions as well as not dragging readers into the academic questions that are fundamentally important to the facts. Putting this all together though, means it’s possible to avoid unrealistic ‘how it was’ stories and instead to write something new, accurate and interesting about the past, which is really what I’m trying to do.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged academic, academic-writing, archaeologist, Archaeology, books, fiction, history, non-fiction, roman, trade-books, writing | Leave a comment

Chalk horses for children

Posted on January 25, 2026 by Claire_M

One of the difficulties in writing for children about prehistory is that, judged by modern expectations, the ancient world was brutal. The problems of this are stark in Rosemary Sutcliffe’s ‘Sun Horse, Moon Horse’, a book that I didn’t read as a small child, although it was first published in 1977. Manderley press has given it a truly beautiful new edition and this week I took it to read on the bus.

The forward by Tiffany Francis-Baker addresses these problems directly: “Exploring the lightest and darkest parts of life, and the cross-over between myth, fantasy and reality, Sun Horse, Moon Horse does not shy away from serious, complicated themes like invasion and diaspora, power and violence, sacrifice and survival, as well as the more gentle themes of friendship, family and community, all set against the beautiful backdrop of the natural world. Above all, this story is a reminder of the wisdom and resilience of children in a world that can be far too quick to dismiss the voices of the young.”

This seems to me to say it about right: the world is not a safe space for adults, however much we may wish it otherwise. It is frequently horrifying that children grow up in this world that we have made, and at least in the UK, adults can have a very natural urge to overprotect children. But children are in this real world and as they grow up we must equip them to deal with realities. Giving children books where the story – fictional or not – acknowledges the horrors but keeps the focus firmly on important things like friendship, family and community, gently suggests ways of coping. Sutcliff’s writing is terrific, and in her own preface she quietly warns a young reader that “in a way, my story has a happy ending”. Both these introductions act as content labels, and I think this is enough. Sutcliff’s introduction is very short and let’s a child decide whether or not to continue reading. Francis-Baker writes a longer introduction that a child would probably skip; like the expensive hardback edition, this seems intended towards an adult. Either way, there’s enough of a description for a reader to decide if it’s for them.

I’m not sure that this viewpoint is one that will find much favour; I suspect it may be adult unease at the book’s content (human sacrifice) that means its is less well known than her Eagle of the Ninth trilogy. Or it might be just that adults decided that this book wasn’t suitable for me as a child. My mother tells of the nightmares and screaming that followed an infant school Easter assembly about the crucifixion. At seven I probably was too young, although I have absolutely no memory of the event and it doesn’t seem to have done me harm learning about it then. Terry Pratchett (whose chalk horse I shall come onto in a minute) held similar views. He criticised schools for banning books because the word ‘witch’ was in the title, paraphrasing G.K. Chesterton: “The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.”

Even so, pitching a book to a children’s publisher that ends with a human sacrifice (as does Sun Horse, Moon Horse) sounds daunting. I think as a young child I would have found the ending deeply affecting, although probably no more so than the deaths of horses in Elyne Mitchell’s ‘Silver Brumby’ series, over which I wept copiously. Sun Horse, Moon Horse is a terrific book that deserves to be read for the sheer imagination with which it conjures a prehistoric world and how the people who lived in it might have perceived it.

Sutcliff’s book is not perfect. Lubrin is dark skinned, of mixed ethnicity, which Sutcliff (writing in 1977) presents as a stigma to be overcome. His mother cries because of his “darkness” which comes from her side of his family. His racial difference is linked to his creativity and his ultimate self-sacrifice is for a community where he was bullied for both. Although Sutcliff does offer nuance – Lubrin has a variety of different responses and relationships within his society – when read in 2026 the book is marred. Even so, it envisions humane and sympathetic views about understanding human life at different times and places, and is written exceptionally well. Flaws aside, I loved it.

Did The Armourer’s House spark the idea for Tiffany Aching?

Sun Horse, Moon Horse also made me wonder again about Terry Pratchett and whether he had read Sutcliffe. The central part of the plot is the making of the Uffington White Horse by an artist, Lubrin Dhu. Lubrin has in fact invented drawing, it is not something that his society does (which is not historically accurate, but fiction doesn’t have to be). He solves the problems of how to make a huge figure that he can’t see the whole of, and with his community he re-makes it three times to get it right. In the end:

“One long, lovely, unbroken line swept the whole length of the arched neck and back and streaming tail…the head had something of a falcon’s look about it; the two farthest legs did not join the body at all. None of that mattered. He was not making the outward seeming, up there among the drifting cloud-shadows and the lark song. He was making the power and the beauty and the potency of a horse, of Epona herself, though his conquerors would never know it.”

This is really similar to Pratchett’s description of the horse in A Hat Full of Sky:

I meant why do they call it a horse? It doesn’t look like a horse. It’s just . . . flowing lines . . .”

. . . that look as if they’re moving, Tiffany thought.

It had been cut out of the turf way back in the old days, people said, by the folk who’d built the stone circles and buried their kin in big earth mounds. And they’d cut out the Horse at one end of this little green valley, ten times bigger than a real horse and, if you didn’t look at it with your mind right, the wrong shape, too. Yet they must have known horses, owned horses, seen them every day, and they weren’t stupid people just because they lived a long time ago.

Tiffany had once asked her father about the look of the Horse, when they’d come all the way over here for a sheep fair, and he told her what Granny Aching had told him when he was a little boy. He passed on what she said word for word, and Tiffany did the same now.

“’Taint what a horse looks like,” said Tiffany. “It’s what a horse be.”

Devil’s Dyke in the South Downs. (AndyScott CC BY-SA 4.0)

Both books are inextricable from the chalk downlands of southern England where they are set and it is obvious that both writers loved these landscapes. Bleakly though, adults are wreaking harm on these chalklands – by changed climates, agricultural chemicals, ripping out hedgerows, bad development, tipping sewage into rivers, invasive plants, and pollution. Our children will be made responsible for the consequences. The very least we can do is to give children books that support them both in coping with big and difficult things as children, and in helping them to become grown ups who can deal with responsibilities, perhaps especially those that are not their fault. I think Pratchett and Sutcliff’s books are on that list.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged a-hatful-of-sky, book-review, book-reviews, books, chalk-horses, childrens-books, fantasy, prehistory, rosemary-sutcliff, sun-horse-moon-horse, terry-pratchett, tiffany-aching, uffington-chalk-horse, writing | Leave a comment

Dead right answers in 2026

Posted on January 11, 2026 by Claire_M

I’m sat at my keyboard wondering a lot of things. Whether a proposal I sent to an agent will be accepted, give or take some re-working if she likes it enough to ask me to do that. How long it will take before I can move house, and if it is really just a case of waiting until our house-buyer is ready. Not knowing these things is really uncomfortable but also they are things that will be over and probably soon. What is my year going to be like? Ask me at the end of it when I will know. These are questions that have definite answers that some time in the future people will be able to say ‘yes, that happened’ and ‘no that didn’t’.

Writing about archaeology is very often not like that at all. The answer is more often ‘this is what we think right now,’ which makes academics cautious about making bold statements. This is because we are writing about things we are finding out now, and don’t know what is coming in the future as well as the fact that we can see some glaring gaps in what we know. Of course there are questions that do have quite clear answers – when and where a particular piece of Roman pottery was made, for example. Sherds of pottery are common finds in excavations and as pottery was mass-produced there are lots of different forms that can be identified by specialists. Comparing these forms with chemical and petrographic analyses of the materials they’re made from means they can be pretty sure about their findings. Once we think we know, we stop asking the question – and that is a very comfortable position to be in. It’s also often misleading. People tell stories that later turn out to be wrong but by then myths have been established that can be creative and satisfying but become difficult to uproot. The courageous and faithful guard who stayed at his post at Pompeii’s Herculaneum Gate is a great example of this.

Tombstone of Regina, a Catuvellauni woman from south England who was enslaved and freed by her probably Palmyrene merchant owner Barates at South Shields. In South Shields Fort Museum.

More often we have to deal with uncertainty and finding out new things that change what we think we know. Such as who else apart from the soldiers were with the Roman army when they rampaged about conquering and what were their parts in history? We’re now a lot more interested in the merchants and traders, wives and families as well as local people and people who were enslaved than we used to be. This is something that interests me and lots of people who study the Roman army, and so I have written a book about about the evidence from around Hadrian’s Wall and what I think the answers are – at least for now.

Archaeology is really about not-knowing everything and archaeologists focus at least as much on the questions as the answers. This can make it hard to write stories about the past for people who are not academics and are interested in knowing ‘what was it like’ rather than unsatisfying ‘probably’ or ‘maybe’ answers that might turn out not to be right at all. We’re also not journalists whose questions are also about facts but ones that have answers that can be quickly established and need to be speedily found out and written up. A lot of the questions we deal with don’t have right answers and don’t die off after an excavation report or academic paper has been written. These are really questions that are as much about our own lives as people’s lives in the past, which is what archaeologists, journalists, and anyone interested in history are dealing with. Answers are always questionable.

I think that’s going to be how I try to approach 2026. Try to be even more questioning about what I know. One way of doing this is to turn your statements into questions rather than certainties. More revealing is probably to think about why you ask some questions and don’t ask others. That is probably even more uncomfortable and there will be no perfect, dead right answers to be found, but it’s a process of how life and history writing goes on to find new answers.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Archaeology, books, education, hadrians-wall, history, life, myths, new-year-resolutions, roman-army, writing | Leave a comment

The merry merry month of mead

Posted on December 7, 2025 by Claire_M

It’s the time of year when the weather and roads are foul and if I don’t have to go outside I don’t. Scrunched up under a blanket on the sofa with hot tea and bakery biscuits I was watching the BBC’s Victorian Farm series, taking in the whole turn of the year in one go. Ending with the summer episode, I nearly spluttered my tea when the cast tried their hands at bee-keeping. Because the same nineteenth century kit that they were using – box skeps, knife and honey-extractor – was pretty much the exact same as my Granddad was using a good century later. Or to be precise, that my Granddad and me were using a century later as I was very much involved in his hobby beekeeping.

The skeps were a bit like old-fashioned filing cabinets, with oblong wooden frames that hung down in rows like files. These frames held a paper-thin sheet of beeswax impressed with hexagons for the bees to build their honeycomb on. The skeps also held things like a board that partitions the hive (so the queen doesn’t lay her eggs in the honey you eat) but mostly they were filled with these frames. Bees will make more honey than the hive needs to overwinter, so in midsummer the beekeeper lifts out the frames for a harvest, carefully brushing off any bees. Granddad used a goose-wing; the Victorians on the farm would have been pleased with his gentle economies.

I remember the honeycomb weight of the frames, the amber cells capped off with wax. Granddad took his knife warmed in a jug of hot water, and sliced off the comb tops, which I ate; they were rich with honey and the wax chewy and delicious. Then the frames went into the honey extractor, a metal drum with a cradle inside that held four frames at a time, standing upright against the drum. A lid went on top with a handle, and when the handle was whirled the cradle spun round, the force throwing the honey off the frames inside the drum. As I remember it, I spent ages winding the handle to spin the combs round but really it was Granddad who did most of the work. A tap at the bottom of the drum let the liquid honey pour into a container, then to be filtered, jarred and sold.

Some of the honey he made into mead, and all year the demi-johns sat under the rafters in his loft, where I would inspect them, hoping to see the quiet bubbles rise, slowly, one at a time. Even as quite a young child I had tiny sips of mead at Christmas, preferring the sweetness to the thimbleful glasses of ginger wine that were also allowed. I learned then that mead was special, a drink for festivities. Of course the idea of its specialness has a much longer tradition than this, and I will probably be researching some of it. But that is work, and this is a foul weather Sunday in December. Easier to read through Gawain again, and where in those Christmas feasts “men might be merry when addled with mead but each year, short-lived, is unlike the last and rarely resolves in the style it arrived.”

Flicking through my precious copy of the Reader’s Digest ‘Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain’, I find surprisingly no reference to mead, although it’s more frequently in Welsh folklore. According to Marie Trevelyan, an “old charm for jaundice was to put a gold coin at the bottom of a pewter mug, fill it with clear mead, and ask the patient to look into it without drinking any. This was to be done while repeating the Lord’s Prayer nine times over without a mistake.” As metheglyn, mead flavoured with herbs, she also says that it was the main ingredient in a nineteenth century love-drink, with a little something extra slipped in that the old people who told her refused to name. It was consumed from a drinking horn and “was very pleasant, and people said the person who drank it would forget father, mother, heaven, earth, sun, and moon. A rich man in Glamorgan discovered the secret, and used it to obtain the love of a beautiful village maiden, who ever after followed him everywhere. An eyewitness said : ” It was pitiful to see her following him. She would run through pools, over hedges, up hill and down dale, only to catch sight of him. At last he got tired of her, and wished to undo the spell, but could not ; and eventually, worn out with mental anguish, the poor girl died.”

It’s perhaps unsurprising that metheglyn (and mead) turns up more frequently in Welsh folklore, as it has a central place in the story of the Mabinogion. King Lludd fills a cauldron of the stuff and puts to sleep two fighting dragons, that are then buried and it’s said that as long as they sleep the British isles will be free of plague. Echoes of its magical properties come from over the border in Buckinghamshire, where Will Stanton in ‘The Dark is Rising’ (Susan Cooper) is offered a glass of it before he receives the book of grammarye that will magically impart all the knowledge he needs. He drains the glass and at the bottom has a vision of brown-robed men, monks, who made it. I was thrilled about this connection between the drink that Granddad made and metheglyn when I first read The Dark is Rising, although Granddad never attempted a flavoured version and nothing very magical happened after I drank it. Perhaps I should try again this Christmas.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged beekeeping, bees, folklore, gawain-and-the-green-knight, honey, honeybees, mabinogion, mead, metheglyn, the-dark-is-rising | Leave a comment

Numbered days

Posted on November 23, 2025 by Claire_M

Been thinking about numbers lately as several friends have reached the half century mark, five sixths of the three score years that denotes old age, or once did. Ten years then left to the expectation of a lifespan.

Threescore and ten I can remember well – Old Man, Macbeth.

Except that lifespan has increased in the UK and other wealthy countries, as long as you’re not homeless on the streets, or having your telomeres, the endstops of your chromosomes tattered away by racism, or through many other means being spun away before your time. The reporting this week of the COVID inquiry brought back to focus the 23,000 people who died unnecessarily because of the revolting inability of politicians to make good decisions during a pandemic also shortened people’s lives and expectations. That number is not exact, as the relatives of those who died will be able to tell you with much greater precision.

This ideal of longevity itself is long-lived, as is really clear from Roman tombstones, where ages are only usually included to make a point. The borne unbearability of children’s deaths, recorded with precision of months and days, even though half of Roman children did not survive their childhood. Little Ertole was only four years and sixty days when she died. Her father Sudrenus said on her memorial that she was officially called Vellibia and was a happy child.

Ertole’s tombstone in Corbridge Museum. The happy girl is shown playing with a little ball, although the monument was originally made for another child, with the inscription scraped off and re-used. There is another story in this stone too.

Ages are also included on gravestones for very old people. Sometimes these are accurate. A person who reached 80 years and five months was mourned by their family in Brougham Cemetery, just outside the fort and settlement at Old Penrith. Their name may be lost to time – the inscription is damaged – but the exactitude of their age survives.

In most cases though these great ages were fantastical, such as the ‘100-year old’ legionary centurion Julius Varens whose wife Secundina and son Martinus commissioned a monument for at Caerleon. Was he really 100? Probably not, the idea was to celebrate the great age that Varens had achieved. There are even more improbable tombstones: Volumnia Dynamis, a freedwoman who was a dry-nurse, was said to be 105 when she died, and the stele of Gaius Oius Secundus in Spain says he was 125. Old age was particularly plentiful in Spain if we are to believe these stones’ stories. We shouldn’t though, it’s very noticeable that ages are rounded up to the nearest five years. In fact if you compare the number of Roman inscriptions with ages ending ‘5’ or ‘0’ against what you’d expect the number to be of people aged say, 25 rather than 24 or 26, you find that this is true. A lot of adult Romans either didn’t know or particularly care how old they were.

The idea that age can tell you something about what a person is worth underlies what is written on all of these stones. These are the voices of survivors who mourn their dead in their own society. The bodies of those dead sometimes tell a different story.

A skeleton of a Roman-era woman from The Mount at York showed that she had been killed by having her face smashed in so hard that her teeth were broken at the roots, as well as several stab wounds to her spine. This is a pattern of face-to-face ‘overkill’ recognisable today as elder or familial abuse, where the assailant knows the victim, even if by today’s standards she was only around 46 years old. Two older women at Watersmeet in Cambridgeshire had suffered badly from arthritis and one had a fractured forearm that had not healed. They were not included in the main cemetery and were possibly buried while still alive. There was certainly no evidence of care taken over these disabled women’s funerals. Another woman at Bourne in Lincolnshire had simply been dumped in a ditch with little ceremony or care. She was aged over fifty and the site was industrial; and I suspect she may have been enslaved worker there with few kin to ensure her proper care.*

People in the Roman world were also brutally evaluated as slaves, and their age and gender were the two factors that made up most of that value. An imperial edict from 301 CE documents the maximum prices permitted for enslaved men and for enslaved women. At 40 the value of both men and women began to fall, with the biggest fall for both coming after 60 years old, when death would be expected.

Price in denarii
Age	Men	Women
0 to 8	15,000	10,000
8 to 16	20,000	20,000
16 to 40	30,000	25,000
40 to 60	25,000	20,000
60+	15,000	10,000

Diocletian’s Edict of Prices

This kind of evaluation was also one of the themes of the pandemic, that only people who were old, or who had ‘underlying conditions’ would be killed by COVID. These were people considered to have less value, and to be a drag on the economy. A supreme court judge, Lord Sumption, even felt comfortable telling Deborah James, a woman whose cancer was terminal that her life was of “less value“, because she had fewer years ahead of her than did his grandchildren. His argument was crass, largely based on economics, what will we pay to support these older people? What will we pay for children? What are people worth?

Numbers seem more and more to be being used to evaluate people. How many steps in a day, heartbeats in a minute, fat cells in a body. Did you in fact bring on yourself your own poverty and sickness, the weight you place on other people? Is your body in fact worth it? Metrics for producing a healthy young workforce, and selling gym memberships and ‘health’ supplements. Only if you can measure can you sell it. We’re at a point where we have wondrous new technologies, computer programs that can calculate probabilities and find patterns, solve problems if we ask them carefully and give them good information. There’s plenty of wealth in this world too, what we seem to lack is imagination and a better view of human nature.

Romans mostly didn’t only not care exactly how old people were, and they said that both children and very old people should be celebrated (even if they also didn’t live up to those ideals, and there were plenty of wealthy men with big platforms to say that children shouldn’t be mourned over-much). Romans also invented birthdays for ordinary people. Until then it was only cities or the birth of monarchs that were occasions for celebration. With Romans came the idea of celebrating everyone, exchanging gifts and having parties, even writing poems and books about birthdays. How old you were didn’t matter: the famous birthday invitation sent by Claudia Severa to her friend Sulpicia Lepidina gave the date, but didn’t even mention her age. Maybe we could think more like that too.

*Gowland, R. L. (2016). That ‘tattered coat upon a stick’ the ageing body: evidence for elder marginalisation and abuse in Roman Britain. In L. Powell, W. Southwell-Wright, & R. L. Gowland (Eds.), Care in the past : archaeological and interdisciplinary perspectives. Oxbow Books.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged aging, birthday, children, covid, eugenics, history, longevity, old-people, pandemic, roman | Leave a comment

Great-granddad Samuel and the Rudston Venus mosaic

Posted on October 27, 2025 by Claire_M

The woman with a mirror – and a lot else too. (Photograph by Chemical Engineer – CC BY-SA 4.0.)

“It was a woman with a mirror,” said mum when we met up. She confirmed what I already had guessed, that the mosaic that I’d been looking up for research reasons was the same as the mosaic her mum’s dad had had a hand in the finding. The family story goes that my Great Granddad Samuel Turnbull was out on his bike near Kilham where he lived, when he saw a friend of his was ploughing. Sam was a farm labourer and the two men stopped to chat, with the friend showing Sam some bits of something that were coming up in the field soil. He was for ploughing it in, but Sam said no, looks like something, maybe best not. That something was the mosaic now known as the Rudston Venus, and thanks to the decisions of two farm workers, it has been preserved and is now in Hull Museum. There is a photograph, probably, of its finding, although mum is a bit poorly and unsure where it is. It tugs a memory, of a man with a bicycle standing by a wall with his friend behind, although my memory might be inventing that. I wonder who took it, maybe it was reported in the Driffield Times or maybe my great granddad had a camera out with him (though that seems unlikely). Hopefully it might turn up.

The mosaic is now in Hull Museum and belonged to a villa that had been known about since farm workers found it in 1838, as a story about it on Hull Museum‘s website explains. The account is somewhat negative about the workers, who are said to have dug through another mosaic seeking for treasure, although I wonder if they were told to do that by the landowner; the account isn’t very full. It also gives information about the discovery of the Rudston Venus, adding the date, 1933, and the farmer’s name Mr H. Robson, who was presumably my great granddad’s friend, unless the discovery was actually made by one of his labourers. This contestation about who saves or destroys, continue to be class-ridden in the kinds of folk-tales and stories the media tell about archaeological finds. These discovery stories, are now about detectorists treasure-seeking and bringing up finds that would otherwise not be brought to light, although too many detectorists are still more concerned with the money they can make rather than preserving archaeology.

This is not a popular view – the common man with his detector saving national treasures has become almost a folk hero – and it is true there are many knowledgeable and law abiding detectorists who report their finds (the law as it stands can be read here), and there can be a lack of resources for excavation of significant finds such as hoards. Museums are underfunded and detectorists and landowners who generally share the ownership of finds most usually charge museums the market value. Some of course do what I think is the right thing: give them to local museums (who must then pay to keep them secure). It also seems unfair to blame detectorists and leave the landowners out of the picture. And archaeologists are of course employed in the construction industry and try to record archaeology before it is destroyed, which can make our position ambivalent. It is complicated and fraught. EDIT: Tess Machling has blogged today about these problems in more depth.

Another of the villa mosaics. From https://www.romansociety.org/Imago/Image-Details/id/1476

The mosaic discovery is not to me its most interesting story in any case, for all that it directly involved my family. It’s only one tiny part of a much bigger picture about goings on in Yorkshire right back to Roman antiquity, and the lives of people who have lived there. Beyond the news stories about archaeological finds, it’s research that’s really needed to be able to understand something about the past that the finds represent – otherwise they are pretty baubles and not a lot else. Newspapers claim to write the first draft of history but they normally lose interest after that. So, I’m really glad that the Rudston villa has been well studied and published locally.*

The mosaics at Rudston have a lot going on in them. There are classical ideas that have a distinctly North African flavour and are found only at Rudston, with designs probably carried back from Carthage. There are also decidedly local ideas and re-workings such as a motif unique to Britain, of a rake carried by the personification of Autumn in a mosaic showing the Four Seasons. Looking at the leaves blowing outside I start to drift into wonderings about the agricultural seasons and work, and how these changed in Roman Britain and after, more connections that can be followed through the material to try to better understand the past. Time for me to get back to my own research though, where this short story started.

*R. Ferraby, P. Johnson, M. Millett, & L. Wallace (Eds.), ‘Thwing, Rudston and the Roman-period exploitation of the Yorkshire Wolds’ by the Yorkshire Archaeological Society. The chapter on the mosaics by Eleri Cousins whose findings I summarise in this piece can be read for free here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Archaeology, carthage, europe, history, hull-museum, italy, mosaic, north-africa, roman, roman-art, roman-britain, rudston, yorkshire | Leave a comment

Unrelatable Romans

Posted on September 2, 2025 by Claire_M

Writing and talking about Romans again and spending a lot of time thinking about Roman slavery. Mostly for my ‘Friends, Romans and Enslavers’ talk for the Vindolanda Trust that you can watch online on their YouTube channel.

Few people who know anything about history would be surprised to hear that people were enslaved in large numbers in the Roman world. It’s sort of strange then how slavery seems to get hived off into its own section in mainstream books on Romans and often it’s either sensationalised or not really talked about in the stories they tell.

Marble statuette of a slave boy with a lantern, Roman (MET, 23.160.82)

I think this is because Roman slaves are a really uncomfortable topic. Not in the way that modern slavery is, where what happened and was done to and by our great-grandparents reverberates today – Romans are centuries old stuff. Theirs was a different system, not really something to be described as ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than the racialised enslavement of the modern world but decidedly different in that it wasn’t racial, and for example, those enslaved could enslave others, the idea of freeing slaves was an important part of the system, and the jobs that those enslaved had were different too. So you can make comparisons between ancient and modern but they were different systems of enslavement. Why I think Roman slavery tends to get elided is simpler: it gives us the ick.

We enjoy hearing about the lives of people who we can imagine are in lots of ways like us. For example, finding out that the officers’ wives at Hadrian’s Wall invited each other and their husbands too to their birthday parties is something we can quite happily imagine. The murders in the inn outside Housesteads fort is something a true-crime documentary could feature. The gruesome enemy-heads-on-spikes outside the fort, well yes those were barbaric but not to be found in civilised Roman towns. It’s just easier to imagine the better off people we tend to be more interested in, partly because they have blingier stuff, and we know their names too. Enslavement though was everywhere and so maybe we do need to think about it more when we’re imagining Roman life.

One writer who I think has done this really well recently isn’t actually an archaeologist or historian, but a novelist. James Hynes’ book ‘Sparrow’ is a coming of age story about an enslaved boy working in a brothel. In particular, his narrative doesn’t see a conflict between being engaging, and well researched. For me at least, it really works. It is unremittingly brutal and would make Catullus blush in its descriptions. But it’s brutal for historical accuracy’s sake rather than simply being gratuitous, although there is some line between the two that it sometimes perhaps crosses. Nor does all writing about slavery I think need to lean in quite so hard as he does. But it at least manages to look at what the past was with its eyes open. Sometimes I think we could open ours a bit more too.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged hadrians-wall, history, roman, roman-army, slavery, vindolanda | 1 Comment

Salt sellers

Posted on July 14, 2025 by Claire_M

There is a scandal over a memoir I read some time ago. It’s a book called ‘The Salt Path’ and what it purported to be was a truthful tale of personal triumph over terminal illness and poverty, a hooky kind of book that reeled me right in. The scandal is that it seems to be mostly made up, although it’s hard to know how much is true given that the other sides of the story have taken suspiciously long to come to light – and they also sound a lot like score settling.

Near Lands End, Cornwall Keven Law CC BY-SA 2.0

The authors have done alright. Four best-selling books and a Hollywood film in they have been paid handsomely for delivering to punters like me exactly what we wanted: an undemanding and seductive story that hits all the right beats. It was very easy to switch off critical faculties and accept the woo that for some people at least terminal illness and poverty can be vanquished if you really put your mind to it and walk like you’re a medieval pilgrim. Maybe Chaucer got it right about that bunch of chancers.

Its premise, that if only sick and poor people would behave differently they could be miraculously cured, is popular. I think it’s appealing partly because it puts the burden of being sick and poor on the shoulders of the sick and poor. Everyone else gets to sanitise their hands and move on. It’s also a fake unboxing of that spurred tormentor, hope. I read reports of reviewers with chronic and terminal illnesses who instead of being given the comfort that they deserve, now felt that they were inadequate, that what was happening to them was their fault. Instead of the story being faulty.

In an attempt to prove that one of the writers did have the terminal condition in the book, medical evidence has been put on social media. Doctors’ letters have had bits redacted with a black sharpie, which ironically highlights that we don’t have the whole story and doesn’t really help. I’m cynical anyway: my mum-in-law, her lungs shot from fabric dust (she said) and smoking (do you blame her?) caught covid in hospital in 2023. She was 68. She worked as a curtain cutter. She died. Her death certificate mentions bronchopneumonia, lung disease (non-occupational), and an autoimmune disease, one that women get and takes so long to diagnose it was probably too late anyway, Some facts, a narrative of sorts.

I read The Salt Path with hunger as I was trying to make myself feel better since I’d been diagnosed with MECFS and had spent a large part of eighteen months or so in bed with even my thoughts evaporating within my own mind. I don’t exactly remember when I read it; probably late in 2019, just before we were all plunged into the world of sickness that I was emerging from. The cure for MECFS was supposed to be a controlled and increasing amount of exercise. Push through, it’s in your head, do not whatever you do listen to yourself. Try to walk a consistent amount every day and gradually increase your activity. The story coming from patients, mostly women, was the opposite: do not at any cost push yourself. I listened to that story, and was glad of my recovery, supported as I was by my husband, but still The Salt Path resonated.

Unfortunately, the research behind the forced exercise cure was in 2021 revealed by a NICE review to be of either low or extremely low quality. The treatment has been withdrawn. But it doesn’t stop the public and some doctors’ suspicion that sick women malinger – and that there are far too many of them. If you cannot be cured then what? What are we supposed to do about you? We’re an expensive social problem. People ask how you are, if you’re feeling better. There is no socially acceptable answer. The truth frequently drew scorn: if I hadn’t done so little and had so much care from my husband I would not now have a life that looks very much like the one I had. “I’d have had to work,” was the roll-eyed response to my story. “I couldn’t do that.” May The Salt Path be a parable that comforts them.

There’s a better book about the salt roads and chronic illness, though it’s not reducible to a Hollywood film script. Thursbitch, by Alan Garner. I recommend it.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged alan-garner, books, chronic-illness, covid, health, memoir, non-fiction, the-salt-path | 1 Comment

No Large Language Models were harmed in writing this.

Posted on July 2, 2025 by Claire_M

I am reading a history book that is so full of facts they roll away from my grasp like tiny kaleidoscope beads and I can barely see the pattern they make. It makes me think about the mirrored lines between fiction and what declares that it is not fiction, and how the facts in the book I’m reading could resolve themselves into any number of shapes, could become story.

I try harder. This is a good book. The author is someone I know. And if I didn’t his expertise come labelled: he has done the work that is needed for a qualification. He labels his facts with the precision of an archivist. If I want to, I can check his work. Trust in him but verify. These references are a process of arriving at truth.

This is not a question of probability, that vacant shake of words into patterns that can’t even pretend at human thought. There is no I in AI. In the kaleidoscope of another mind the facts would fall into a different shape. In mine they whirl and will not fix.

I long for a history where I can press my nose to window glass and imagine I stare at people. These facts are as hard and opaque as knucklebones. They are excavated skulls from which life has long fled; archaeology does not reanimate. Inside my head the facts swirl, rearrange into a pattern that reflects my own face. It is too clear. I shake it again, and again.

C18 restoration of a Roman statue of girl or nymph casting knucklebones. Borrowed from the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

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Hearsay history

Posted on June 10, 2025 by Claire_M

I’m writing a generalist book about Roman life as it was lived on Hadrian’s Wall and it’s bringing up all sorts of methodological thoughts about how to write this kind of book. These type of books, the books that appear in Waterstones or in museum bookshops (as mine is more likely to) need to be trustworthy and entertaining stories for readers who are interested in only some of the things that I am.

Hadrian’s Wall. By Michael Hanselmann – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4352073

One thing that people don’t seem to like to deal with is complexity. That is about as far away from me as you can get. Not a criticism of them, or of me, only an observation. If the world is to be a many splendoured thing then different minds are what makes it so. So I need to be the person who tells them ‘this is how it was’ in a way that’s interesting to people who like to think about people who lived in the past and what their lives were like, rather than all the things that academics weigh up to end up with a ‘probably’. That’s what I owe readers who are paying me for the book.

Another thing I’m not, technically speaking, is a historian. Historians are people who write stories about the past using written sources. I’m an archaeologist and an epigrapher writing stories about the past from the things people left behind (in academic parlance: material culture). Sometimes these things have writing on them, more often they don’t. But for the purposes of this book I am writing a kind of history, albeit with a different training to an academic historian. Sneakily I wonder whether a historian’s training would even actually help with the things that I’m wondering about, because these are probably not questions set out in a way that an academic would. Next time I meet up with a friend who is an actual historian I shall ask though, rather than our normal rural world chit chat about family, if the pub will ever get a new landlord or lady and re-open, and if the bus timetable has changed.

Normal topic of conversation. By Cameron T. Young – https://www.flickr.com/photos/160759456@N06/52668131721/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=128642224

The main thing I’m wondering about is where the line is drawn between ideas I might stick down on a piece of paper and chuck out for other academic experts to think about and respond to, and things I can just say using my own expertise. In some ways it’s more straightforward when it’s about something like say Roman coins, where I am not a specialist. That stuff I check what has been said already and unless it’s wrong in some way (either because more information has come up since, or because they don’t know something about an area where I am specialist in), I just put it into my own words (no plagiarism please!). If it seems well dodgy, I just leave it out. The checking is important though, otherwise it’s just hearsay.

Weirdly more difficult are things where I really do know stuff from a specialist perspective. Writing this in academia means convincing some kind of peer reviewed publication’s editor to let you write the thing, then getting feedback from peer reviewers (which you can sometimes ignore if they’re just wrong…or I suppose I should mean, they have a different opinion) and your readers are experts too so can better assess if you’re writing horseshit. Being responsible in writing for a more generalist sort of person maybe means actually restraining a bit your own specialism sometimes and being clear that it’s what you think and other experts might disagree. Without getting too complex about it all. What I’m writing is more like a tertiary source, the territory that Wikipedia and other reference works inhabit. On a good Wikipedia page everything is referenced, and the editor writes from high quality secondary sources. It’s not a place for primary research.

Coins of the Roman Replic and Empire – from Cassell’s History of England, Vol. I .

I’m also doing a kind of peer review by (probably annoyingly) asking people specific and detailed qs about the things I am uncertain about – after I have properly done my homework and read whatever I can find out first. These are the people who will be thanked fulsomely in my acknowledgements for what is a peer review of sorts. And asking people to read chapters as I often read friends’ drafts and using their feedback. If I do all this it should be a reliable book, the rest – writing it in a way that’s interesting – will be up to me.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged academia, books, hadrians-wall, history, nonfiction, reading, romans, wikipedia, writing | Leave a comment

House haunting

Posted on June 9, 2025 by Claire_M

Splashing vinegar and sugar and warmed-then-cooled water resentfully into a vase. A recipe for flower preservation to ensnare a buyer for the house. I am moving and already the process is driving me out of my skull insane. The house is a dream – for someone else. It is now someone else’s house that I live in to their dictates, the desires of this imaginary buyer. For a woman who arranges the flowers I grew in the garden, a delight of a woman who – I bear her no ill will – dreams of a life that is dreamed by men and women who are not me. I unpick the threads of my life, as unspun as Penelope.

Outside I hack at the ground and wrench out weeds, earth griming and grinding into my skin like a blessing. In the greenhouse are cuttings of hydrangeas whose progress I watch interestedly. Some are going to the new house – wherever that is, although in my dreams I already am building the shed, putting the iron-work table and chairs in the sheltered corner where the morning sun will fall. Others are gifts for the people who help me – paid or not – to move my life. They grow; I hope.

Today is a viewing, an inspection in which the house and me will probably fail to sufficiently demonstrate it is for them. I will sit like an owl in my office loft with the patient cats – they too are not allowed to punctuate the fantasy I must sell them – while they wander through. It feels dishonest; I refuse to repaint, the house is as it is. The flowers though must be done, the bath-towels bagged, clothes shoved under a bed. Then they will leave and the flowers will be put away. Please let them buy – I want to be gone!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged blodeuwedd, flowers, garden, moving-house, writing | Leave a comment

Classical Staffordshire

Posted on March 25, 2025 by Claire_M

I had only a few minutes to look round the Royal Pump Room museum at Leamington Spa but I saw these Staffordshire figurines and wanted to find out more about them. The museum label gives a little information about their date and place of production, and that Andromache was bequeathed by Mr F H A Jahn. The figurines of Bacchus and Autumn was sold by Jahn in 1950. I looked them up in Windows on Warwickshire, a publicly accessible database of Warwickshire museums collections, and found entries exist only for Andromache and Bacchus. This gives no extra information about Bacchus but says Andromache is a Leeds pearlware figure in enamel colours, which refers to a glazing type that produces a higher quality finish.

Bacchus, c.1775-1800, Staffordshire, with Autumn, Copeland, Staffordshire c.1847 behind to his right.

There is a rich intertwining of classical subjects and Staffordshire’s pottery industry as Edith Hall and Henry Stead discuss in their chapter on ‘Pottery Workers’ in People’s History of Classics (Routledge, 2020). It’s one though that my interest in is personal as much as academic; my Dad’s side of the family worked in Stoke’s potteries until my Granddad benefitted somehow from post WW1 mobility and ended up as a headmaster. His family’s firm was on Lascelles St, Tunstall. It was a small pottery works that I think finished biscuitware, and was bought out (and is now, family history is again somewhat hazy, Roy Kirkhams Ltd). Leonard Millington was already a teacher when Margaret Jones was scolded by her parents for standing on the corner of the road and talking to him. Times were different then. When she met my Granddad, Margaret was working at another firm putting the gilded rings on plates and cups, and doing pottery transfers, paid at a piece rate that varied depending on the customer. I think it was Woolworths work that was particularly well paid. The potteries had long employed substantial numbers of women – by 1870 half the British pottery workforce was female – so Grandma’s circumstances were pretty usual. Once Grandma got out of the factory through her (long and as far as I can tell happy) marriage she didn’t look back beyond retaining a taste for fine china; I have her Royal Doulton ‘Windflower’ figurine, cracked down the back from when a WW2 bomb blew out their window. That bomb also filled a waiting cradle with glass – thankfully my uncle was born a week late. Almost contemporaneous with Grandma’s earlier life was the Burslem potter who Hall and Stead say recollected impenetrable smoke in the town that made washing of curtains and upholstery a frequent chore; my grandma could also have told them that – and of her haste to bring line-dried washing inside before it got ‘soots’ on it and added to her work. The ‘soots’ were acidic and would burn holes in the fabric if not swiftly removed.

Returning to the pieces in the Pump Room’s case, I also looked up the donor, who must be Francis H. Aloysius Jahn who lived on Meadow Bank Avenue, in the Nether Edge suburb of Sheffield. His father Ludwig came from Thuringia, Germany, and was a china painter and designer who became Art Director of the Minton factory in 1893, in Stoke. Hall and Stead discuss how in the eighteenth century the pottery workers became expert in the classical subjects that they used to design and produce their fashionable wares before in the mid-nineteenth, with some false starts, workers’ institutes were set up offering artists’ education. One of the first of these institutes to be successful was the Minton Memorial Institute. It opened in 1858 and offered a museum to illustrate the history of pottery, a (free) library, and a studio for art teaching. It may be then that there is some connection between this institution and Ludwig Jahn’s later appointment at the Minton factory. His son Francis became a metalworker, painter and jeweller, who also collected glassware and, it seems, these figurines. He retired to Leamington and sold his collection to Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum, bequeathing the museum this figurine of Andromache.

The display case with Pomona, Staffordshire c.1800, at the front, Andromache and Diana behind.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged classical-civilisation, classical-reception, classical-studies, family-history, figurines, greek-myth, history, sculpture, staffordshire | Leave a comment

Nerd alert – Roman military households is published!

Posted on March 10, 2025 by Claire_M

This feels like a brag but my book is now in print, and there is little point in writing it a book if nobody is going to read it so I thought I’d post about it.

This is an academic book – it does have some stories in it, biographies really, that can be picked out and enjoyed as stories but mostly it’s part of a conversation with nerds past and present who want to deal with the intricacies of arguments about Roman army life and what it looks like from different perspectives. It’s also an argument about evidence and how it’s collected and what that means for the stories we tell ourselves. But that’s for the reviewers now. If there are any left after the axe is taken to humanities departments.

Whatever they think, the reviewers certainly won’t act like the men who definitely loathe what I research and say because they all told me loudly in the tabloids and on Twitter when I wrote about the British Museum’s ‘Legion’ exhibition last year. Going by the amount of abuse I got after that blogpost and tweet, I think they mostly hate that women get to say anything, which is their bad luck. Sorry guys, I only skim-read your uninventive insults about witches and women’s anatomy that were so stereotypical they were strangely impersonal – Ovid they certainly weren’t.

I do think it’s important how we think and talk about the Roman army in a modern context where research is being pulled because it has shocking, bannable words like ‘women’ and ‘gender’ and ‘race’ in it and major political leaders flirt with so-called ‘Roman’ salutes. It’s taken an academic timescale to be (or about to be) published, but my review of the British Museum’s ‘Legion’ and St Alban museum’s ‘Women Everywhere’, for the European Journal of Archaeology, is a contribution to this ongoing conversation.

Anyway ‘Military Households’ is now available from BAR publishing as well as the usual bookshops and websites, and I’m feeling pretty happy about that.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged academia, books, latin-inscriptions, roman, roman-archaeology, roman-forts, roman-military, roman-studies, vindolanda | 2 Comments

To green knights and men

Posted on January 1, 2025 by Claire_M

Shortened days and storm-blown power cuts call for stories, and the loss of my uncle, my mum’s step-brother, echoing the loss last year of Steve’s dad has put me out of tune for the familiar schmaltz of Christmas Victoriana. But stories demand nothing but that I read with them; no need to rouse from sugar-slugged exhaustion to pin lights or wrestle the plastic tree down from the loft. Deeply in need of rest I am restless; returning to see friends in my hometown I revisited St Chad’s church, and find solace in Gawain’s new year’s tale, another Midlands story.

St Chad’s, Stafford. Stephen Pearce CC BY-SA 2.0

St Chad’s was built in the twelfth century and is now rather overwhelmed by its thoroughly ugly modern neighbours on Stafford’s Greengate St. Behind its pretty Romanesque front, the work of George Gilbert Scott, it is filled with exquisite Norman stone-carving that after the church’s ruination was preserved by being plastered over in the seventeenth century, the plaster then being removed in restorations a hundred years later. So well preserved is this carving from the ‘ruined church’ in fact that my curmudgeonly archaeologist’s suspicion is that some of it was re-cut by the Victorians. On checking, I find I’m not the first to suspect this, although I’m happy to accept the opinions that the designs remain genuine enough.

Over these stones dragons chase, twisting wyrms that call attention to the name of the church’s founder, Orm, whose inscription sits above a pillar.

“‘Orm Vocatur Qui Me Condidit’ The man called Orm built me.

Orm is probably the local landowner, Orm le Guidon, about whom local myths have sprung up including that he was a knightly crusader, although the facts do not seem to fit and perhaps should get in the way of embroidering a good story.

The extraordinary stone cutting however goes on and on around the church – the font, voissoirs with wonderful ‘beakheads,’ the ‘mouth-puller,’ a strange figure akin to a Sheela Na Gig, and two carvings of a ‘green man.’

These carvings are beardless; they do not remind me much of Gawain’s Green Knight, whose account I read a little before New Year through Simon Armitage’s meaty translation. This man’s verdant hair and beard are so alliteratively depicted:

“fine flowing locks which fanned across his back,

plus a green beard growing down to his breast,

and his face-hair along with the hair of his head

was lopped in a line at elbow-length

so half his arms were gowned in green growth,

crimped at the collar, like a king’s cape.”

The poem’s author is unknown; a man or woman from the Cheshire-Staffordshire-Derbyshire border, going by the linguistic analysis, probably in the 1400s. A later voice than that of Orm, calling for the church to be built, and more northern too; the landscape it evokes is that of the roaches up in Staffordshire’s moorlands, where Lud’s Church is a plausible setting for events.

My gorgeous folio edition that I found in a charity shop.

The poem is set at Christmas in ye olden times of Rome where at Camelot, Arthur’s knights are feasting, stuffing themselves. Plenty there is for all, and leisure too, boredom even creeping in as Arthur pledges:

“…to take no portion from his plate

on such a special day until a story was told:

some far-fetched yarn or outrageous fable,

the tallest of tales, yet one ringing with truth,

like the action-packed epics of old.

Or till some chancer had challenged his chosen knight,

dared him, with a lance, to lay life on the line…”

Of course the story takes this dare: into the hall comes the green knight and challenges all there to take one swing at him, and find him a year’s hence and take one swing in return. A fair exchange. Or a faery one, because of course although Gawain takes up the blow and “cleaved through the spinal cord and parted the fat and the flesh” the knight catches up his head by the hair and rides off swinging it from his fist. After lingering as long as he can at Camelot, Gawain eventually seeks his honourable appointment with death. He cheats a little though, as on the way he is hosted by the green knight in disguise and in exchanging fairly the kisses granted by the knight’s wife for the spoils of three hunts, he keeps to himself the secret gift of the lady’s girdle enwoven as it is with protections against death. The knight spares his life, but with the edge of his blade he nicks Gawain’s neck, for his cowardice.

The tale is fantastical, a ghost story that familiarises death and in some way also forgives the extremes people will go to to avoid it. A mid-winter tale for when the old year must die and birth the new, bleary-eyed in winter’s greyness. Spring is coming, but not yet, not yet. We are not out of those woods yet. It’s a story of survival, as St Chad’s church with its miraculously (and suspiciously) well preserved carvings also tells. It’s also as twisty as Orm’s wyrms as it wriggles away from simple summations. This year, it’s what I needed.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Archaeology, dragons, fantasy, gawain, green-man, inscription, king-arthur, luds-church, norman, orm, romanesque, st-chads, stafford, staffordshire, stone-carving | Leave a comment

Original words.

Posted on December 12, 2024 by Claire_M

My head is full of thoughts that are not my own. Since I could first understand words and language people have shared thoughts with me – in conversation, on the telly and radio, and most of all through writing. These thoughts are carried by words, as learning to become a researcher emphasises – plagiarism, not acknowledging the thoughts you engage with, has a moral wrongness, it’s a sin.

Some of the most powerful of these thoughts come from the books I read as a child. These were territories policed by no adult other than the author, from which I could savour and take freely what I would. They were mostly short books, short enough to be re-read endlessly, until I knew their phrases by heart. Words to shore me up when I needed them, thoughts to think about for myself.

Those were days I remember that I could concentrate. Lying down on an old piece of carpet on the grass in our back garden, or on the floor inside. On my bed or my grandparents’ sofa, a dark bottle green thing of scratchy nylon, satisfying to run a fingernail along its nubbly fabric while I read. Simply sitting and concentrating on a book now seems much harder; there is a constant white noise of words that also blots out my thoughts like a blizzard. The blast from social media, messaging notifications, email. All of it seemingly preferable than just to sit and read or let my own thoughts bubble up like a spring, as thoughts do. Or to talk with friends – mostly now too busy – and hear what they think.

This avalanche of intrusive thoughts isn’t the viewpoint of a single person, who I could engage with and think about in my own time. It’s a concerted effort made by (mostly) men who recognise and seize its power to overwhelm, loosing bots and misinformation for their own ends. Or bombarding you with advertising hoping you succumb and hand over your money. They’ve stolen your time and attention, either way, and given you a story that suits them.

It’s not new to think about how this ever-connectedness is harming us; I doubt I’m saying anything original at all. It’s not the originality of it though that matters, I think, but needing to articulate it for myself; this is what it is for me, this is my experience. I am impatient with books that take too long – Zoulfa Katouh’s otherwise wonderful ‘As long as the lemon trees grow’ I found wishing had been edited as some of it was repetitious.* The books I read as a child gained power from concision. This book was so powerful and yet I thought it could have been more; what it said was so important I wish it had had more editing.

My frazzled attention is also not entirely the result of constant connectivity. This year started with the loss of my father-in-law a little before last Christmas, which took away all rest that we needed after losing my mother-in-law last spring. For months at my husband’s firm there were creeping death-style job losses, until in October he finally lost his. And other, smaller losses, like losing power for most of last weekend, and some larger, ongoing concerns are making me feel unfestive. There have been good things though too; my Roman army households book will be out soon, and Steve has after all found new employment relatively quickly despite a difficult job market.

Still, if my brain won’t cope with novels or Christmas just now, I can choose to read more short stories and novellas – M R James I’ve never read and have a lovely edition. Three stories in and I want to read more. I have Simon Armitage’s ‘Gawain and the Green Knight’, a secondhand folio edition that I bought last year and intended to read last December. Things that just now I can read and think about with due care, and renewed attention.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged attention, attention-span, book-review, book-reviews, books, childhood, originality, reading, writing | Leave a comment

The auriga in my head at conferences.

Posted on November 24, 2024 by Claire_M

Recuperating today after going to a great conference yesterday in Chester, which is objectively one of the UK’s prettiest cities. I grew up not far away in Stafford and my heart always relaxes a little at the sight of black and white timbered buildings; somehow it still feels like home.

But conferences. In theory I love them. And I sort of do: it’s chance to meet lots of other people who are interested in similar things to you, and to hear what they’re working on. And see colleagues that I like, and go out and explore new places (thank you Chester). But I also find them difficult in all sorts of ways. Sensorially they are overwhelm. People everywhere, having to navigate through unfamiliar spaces, wondering if the technology will work and your slides will display or the failing tech will be the distraction that makes it hard for people to focus on what you’re actually saying. Poor public transport, noisy and unfamiliar rooms (shout out for the unadvertised live music gig and lumpy mattress) that nibble away and fray everyone’s energy levels.

Iunius Bassus, patron of a basilica on the Esquiline Hill in Rome, portrayed driving his own Biga.

Then there are the voices.* Maybe you don’t have them, but they hiss in my ear. Maybe what I’ve got to say is wrong, I’ve not prepared enough, the people in the room are experts and they will know what you’ve got wrong. Maybe my personal praetorian guard against hubris, or auriga, ‘respice post te. mulierem te memento’.** They’re not helpful though. It makes it hard for me to relax and talk properly with the people in the auditorium, my eyes glued instead to my talk. And why is it at this point that I realise that even though I now need reading glasses, I’ve not accommodated myself with a nice large print printout of it? I don’t know. I also don’t know – because I looked at the paper and not the audience – what people made of it. Did I get it right? Pass. The format of quick papers meant there wasn’t much opportunity for questions, not getting any always makes me dubious. I didn’t die out there, my paper ran to time, it was probably ok.

The mythical train journey experience: good cafe, hot tea, nice people.

The train journey back was miserable – too many changes, standing (again), too many drunk football fans (I have had enough bad experiences with drunk football fans on trains that just seeing them now sets my teeth on edge). The men limited themselves to shoving their way up and down the crowded carriage pointlessly, each man excessively polite in asking me to squash myself into the train corridor wall so he could get past and each discover for himself what his mates had already told him: there were no working loos. Four and a half hours of trains and I was glad to be home. I do like conferences, really I do, they are important. I just wish I liked them better.

*Today’s soundtrack: Taylor Swift ‘anti-hero’. It’s me. I’m the problem it’s me.

**This is one of those bits of Latin that’s entered myth. Tertullian writes about the voice that accompanied a Roman general in his triumphal procession. (https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0570%3Achapter%3D33%3Asection%3D3) In modern tellings the voice has become that of either a two-horse-chariot-driving slave (auriga) or your conscience. The original Latin – as far as we have it through the various manuscripts that have come down to us – obviously refers to a man, I’ve swapped this out for ‘woman’, which isn’t quite the straight swap as women are generally heard less as experts but that’s not what I wanted to discuss here really.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged auriga, chariot, chester, conference, lifestyle, memento-mori, neurodiversity, public-speaking, roman, tertullian, travel, uk | Leave a comment

Book proofs – and women as authors of their own words at the British Library

Posted on November 2, 2024 by Claire_M

They’ve arrived! The proofs of ‘Military Households of Roman Auxiliary Officers’ have arrived from the publisher and I’ve got a week to go through them and send any corrections I need to make before the printing presses will roll (if that what they still do?). Maybe a bit of to-ing and fro-ing but very soon my words will be fixed on that page and after reading to check them, I will quite literally authorise them. It’s both exciting, and little unnerving to see my words turning into a physical book.

One of the things that I write about in the book is the process that the letter writers – including women – at the first century Roman fort of Vindolanda go through to produce letters. This involves using a scribe, and then either reading the letter over themselves, or having it read to them, and writing at least their name and in the case of the officers wives, somewhat longer post-scripts. One of the reasons they do this, is to authorise the text and show that the words written down by the scribe are their own. In that sense, it’s not that dissimilar to what I’m doing right now.

Being able to read it themselves, as at least some of these women could – given they could write short phrases competently – is a decided advantage over having to rely on someone to read it out to them. In ancient Rome, enslaved women and men acted as readers to wealthy owners, who whether or not they could read and write themselves (and they generally could), preferred to have someone to read their correspondence for them. We know about some of these reading women from a handful of epitaphs at Rome, such as Derceto, who was reader to the Vestal Virgin Aurelia, and died aged not quite 20. Or a servant, probably called Sulpicia Petale, who was also commemorated at Rome who may be a former (or still) slave. Derceto herself having only a single name was likely to be enslaved, and next to her commemoration on the plaque is one for a 16 year old freedwoman, Sabina Helena. It’s difficult to know if the two inscriptions were carved at the same time or if they are unconnected but some of the letter forms do look similar and perhaps they were commemorated at a similar time. Some tablets found at Vindolanda look suspiciously like reading and writing exercises for children. These are often assumed to be the officers’ sons, but are as likely to be enslaved boys, and perhaps girls, being educated for roles as secretaries and readers.

Squeeze taken of Derceto’s commemoration CIL 06, 33473 (p 3853)

Whether women could read and write (including using a scribe) is always an important question in social history because women who can read and write can have some power – they get to use their own words. Being able to read gave you some power whether or not you could use a pen yourself. Books and materials intended for girls’ educations were important. Much later than the letters at Vindolanda are the books and letters in the British Library’s Medieval Women’s exhibition but these are equally fascinating for the glimpse they give us of women reading and using writing (even through a scribe) for all sorts of reasons. I loved this primer, which came probably from Bruges around 1445 and shows a woman teaching two girls to read, with two alphabets on the facing page. The woman holds a paddle – corporal punishment is threatened!

This book would have been an expensive object for wealthy young girls to use – as can be seen in the picture also. It is also exquisite and if not a story book for children (it also contained Latin prayers the children were expected to learn) then it is a very beautiful thing to use. I started to wonder whether the letters were there to be copied, if the children were expected to be able to read the Latin prayers, the alphabet seemed a little simple. Or maybe it was used in some other way, there will almost certainly be research into this if I have time to go down that rabbit hole.

Almost at the same time as this book was probably being used to teach young girls how to behave properly and read their prayers, Margaret Paston was writing to her husband. The Pastons were Norfolk gentry with many letters sent in the 15th to 17th century still surviving. When Margaret writes, enemies had seized their manor house, and while her husband John was in London pursuing this through the courts, Margaret takes practical action. “Send me crossbows, arrows, poleaxes, and armour for the servants” she instructed her scribe to write to her husband before requesting he send fancy goods such as almonds and sugar, and cloth for clothing for herself and her children – presumably better quality fabric than she could have had made locally.

The letters of the Pastons show that they don’t use their own handwriting – the women were probably mostly unable to write – unlike the ladies at Vindolanda. Even so, the ability to read and dictate to a scribe, was fundamentally important to them and to the households they ran. Their writing gave them an authority they otherwise simply could not have had. The exhibition traces the link between writing and women’s power, and lets their words speak for themselves – as mine must also once my book is published.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged book-review, book-reviews, books, reading, writing | Leave a comment

Losing yourself in a museum of stories

Posted on October 1, 2024 by Claire_M

Last Wednesday I was feeling stressed out by onrushing book deadlines and went to the Story Museum at Oxford. I felt quite silly and self-conscious as a grown-up going by myself into a museum that is clearly ‘for kids.’ Never mind, I told myself as I marshalled my excuses. No. 1. I have a very good friend with a lovely little girl who will very soon be old enough for this museum. So it’s research. (I’m an academic; if you’re not seeking funding, research requires little justification.) No. 2. I write for children. So it’s market research. (Capitalism also seems to get by without much need for justification.) So I’m even probably starting this post all wrong; reader, if you’re a time-harried parent looking for info about important things like toilets (they’re excellent) there’s loads of great blogs that will tell you all you need to know but this isn’t one. You’re still here? Excellent. Thank you for staying with me, maybe we’ve time to sit comfortably -and even get ourselves a pot of tea as there is nothing quite as good as tea* when you’re stressed out. At least take some time to let go of our inner adults and lose ourselves thinking about stories.

This is a museum I’d wanted to go to for some time and was lured in by the ‘Here be Dragons’ exhibition co-designed by Cressida Cowell. I never could resist a good dragon. But as anyone who is or once was a child knows, you do not simply waltz up to a sleeping wyrm. In this case, you must first traverse the whispering wood of folklore with trees that tell stories from all around the world. I liked the fairness of trying to have the whole world in the wood – as any child instinctively knows and is ready to point out, unfairness is one of life’s great evils and everyone should have their turn and equal portions of the important things like stories and great sticky marmalade rolls.

This gallery acts as an introduction to stories, which people told, before as one of the curator-guides** put it, they were trapped in books. It was very quiet when I visited and I stopped to listen to a tale from India about a hat seller and some monkeys and trickery. I won’t spoil it by telling it here – if you are in the museum it has a deliciously satisfying twist to it and if you are not in the museum then there is Google or if you are lucky, one of your aunties and uncles. The trees had some animatronics and doors to open and scenes to peek at, which were probably delightful if you’re a real boy or girl but I was impatient to meet with dragons and moved on.

For as you can see, everywhere be dragons. Stories of dragons that join up the world. This gallery was a tour through a world of dragons that was stuffed with things to see and do – boxes to sniff with smells of dragons from different places (Chinese dragons smell like biscuits in case you were wondering.)

There were lots of things to pick up and play with, places to write your own poems and entries for a dragon bestiary, as well as dragon-story books to read. The museum being in Oxford it also has a letter from Tolkien confessing he had never seen a dragon nor wished to!

However, I signally failed to capture the delights of this gallery with my pictures that are of the more boringly grown-up orientated bits of the display that captivated me – a roof tile dragon tile from north China and a glorious pickled dragon in a jar that was probably my favorite thing in this room.

Regretfully I sloughed off thoughts of dragons, to go to the final gallery….

Storybooks – so many stories in this gallery. Also more dragons…

This was my favorite. It was like stepping into a fantastical library, with exhibits that brought out the life contained in a good book’s pages and took me straight back into remembering how I read as a child (and how rarely do I read like that now).

I am confessing to nobody how many times I’ve scrolled through eBay hoping to find one of the plates from Alan Garner’s ‘Owl Service’.

Throughout the gallery were rooms to enter including through War Drobe to the absolutely magical Lantern Waste. This was the closest I’ll ever get to Narnia and was where I had the only slightly jarring moment here. I am fat and children’s books until very recently (and even now) are not kind to fat adults or to fat children, and seeing myself in this room’s mirrors made me again self-conscious. I turned away from the mirrors and enjoyed instead the recreation of a childhood favorite book. I have on my tbr pile though, Sarah Moss’ memoir ‘My Good Bright Wolf’, which talks about her eating disorders and children’s ‘literature.’ Stereotypical role models of heroes and villains are powerful and unwholesome teachers of children.

Thankfully, since I was little, excellent children’s books are being written with exciting stories and characters where seeing yourself feels ok, and these were also rooms for these in the gallery – Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses being one.***

The room for Lisa Williamson’s ‘The Art of Being Normal,’ has put a book on my radar that I probably ‘should’ have heard of but hadn’t (I’ve not read much YA for some time). I was glad to find out about it and will now read it.

There was more in the museum – including a ‘choose your own adventure’ with boxes to open to make things more adventurous – but my time had run out. As I left though, I wasn’t feeling so unwelcomely grown-up, and I had managed to escape for a little the stresses of my own book deadlines (a thoroughly academic archaeology book about the military households of Roman army commanders, now in press), which is what I think a good story museum should do.

*it’s too early for gin or whisky and definitely never time for any of those ‘live laugh lobotomise’ signs advertising ‘wine-o-clock’.

**I indulged my worst habit of talking at the curator/guides about what I’m writing about and I probably owe them an apology. They were great though and I did really enjoy talking about children’s books with them. If they happen to read this: thank you.

***I’m white. Black children deserve to see themselves as central characters in books too, is what I mean.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged books, dragons, fantasy, museum, museum-review, stories | Leave a comment

Romans and more at Bloxham Village Museum

Posted on August 6, 2024 by Claire_M

I have been meaning to visit Bloxham Village Museum for quite some time but life and work always seem to push it down to the ‘would be nice to’ end of the priority list. However, news that the museum was putting on a temporary exhibition ‘Romans in Bloxham’ meant I just had to visit.

The museum is in a former court house and firestation, which building dates mostly to the 1680s, although some elements are said to be fourteenth century. It used to have a doorway through to a village school and in the nineteenth century was used as a soup-kitchen, with two coppers for its soup still in situ – I didn’t get a good picture of those but there’s one on its website.

It’s tiny, run entirely by volunteers, and so open only on weekend and Bank Holiday Monday afternoons from Easter until October. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect and was impressed.

The museum is nicely laid out with cases containing objects related to the history of the village. Printed materials such as shop advertisements and tickets were effectively displayed in the kind of swinging panel case more often used to display posters on sale. This gathered together material that might have seemed a bit underwhelming in a case, but collected together in this way helped bring to life stories about the village.

It also had a good reconstruction of a shop, which visitors were invited to peer through the windows into, making the most of what is a small space. I’m always a bit of a sucker for reconstructions of shops and houses and this one is lovely.

But what about the Romans? The exhibition I think covers this quite well. A TV screen has a simple slide display of maps with known sites on it added chronologically from pre-history almost to the present, and an A-4 folder held printouts of the slides if you wanted a closer look. It wasn’t clear to me where the information came from, although I suspect that the museum has good connections to the County Archaeologist as well knowledgeable volunteers.

A bit more info about where the info about the sites came from would be good, especially as sites can acquire myths, which are interesting in their own right, and often the result of earlier work that later comes to be seen as a bit unreliable. I’m going to take the opportunity to plug here the excellent, free-access Rural Settlements of Roman Britain. This searchable map brings together different types of archaeological evidence for Roman activity, including sites. This shows that at Bloxham a cemetery was excavated – the square greyish blob to the left of ‘Bloxham’.

The map links to the information about the site, in this case coming from an excavation published in 1938 by W F J Knight in Oxoniensia. Knight, then Master at All Saints School, Bloxham, tells us that ironstone workers at the quarry had discovered a burial, and more discoveries followed and he decided to organise excavations.

These excavations produced most of the material that was on display in the museum, as the case display explains, giving a history of the excavations and information about the burials found.

I loved the imaginative reconstruction drawing – based as the artist says on the history books of his childhood – alongside a bracelet found in one of the graves.

Not everything Roman in Bloxham came from these excavations – this terracotta head of a statuette is said to have been “found digging allotment in Milton”. Not an exact record by archaeological standards but as with the excavation history, gives a sense of the circumstance of the find. I think that’s what I particularly enjoyed about the exhibition and museum – it brought together the objects with the circumstances of their finding in a clear and interesting way. More exhibitions like this please!

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Behind the tweets at the British Museum

Posted on March 4, 2024 by Claire_M

Why is the Roman Empire like a carrot? Cause men need vegetables five times a day.

That joke’s not particularly good but it is mine, and riffs on the now well-known meme that men, and particularly men struggling with modernity, think about the Roman Empire five times a day.

It was probably in some similar spirit then that the British Museum posted a version of it on Instagram. This originated on Tiktok and satirised the exhibition as being somewhere where sad and lonely girlies might go and suffer a bit of mansplaining in their quest for a husband. Apologies to the originator of the meme for not crediting you – it wasn’t easy to find a credit for you on the BM’s post and I can’t your original meme now. This is the BM’s now-deleted (thank you) version.

The problem is really in the exhibition and its evocation of a Roman Army that is almost exclusively about the soldiers, as I’ve written before. So, when the BM posts a meme that satirises what its exhibition is about, the satire gets lost in the new context. Cue an unsurprising slew of misogynistic posts on the BM’s Instagram feed.

A few – mostly women – on Instagram asked the BM to take it down. The BM replied with a sorry-not-sorry non apology that ‘splained to the humourless women that they had misunderstood. There’s an irony there that the BM comms was ‘splaining to women the meme satirised the idea that women are easily confused and also ‘splaining to archaeologists the importance of contexts but nm we puke and move on. The misogyny sewage on the BM’s Instagram continued.

By now quite a lot of women archaeologists including me were independently getting pretty fed up that whatever the BM’s initial intentions had predictably turned into a sexism-fest. We posted this on social media. It’s not a co-ordinated thing, but it does create a pile-on and there is quite likely a junior comms officer who is having a rubbish day as a result. It is poor handling by the museum but to say it’s only their comms department’s fault is a cop-out. The choices the exhibition makes present a picture of an army almost exclusively of combatants. The exhibition has no reception element to discuss modern uses of Roman military, the most impactful of which comes from Nazi Germany, where their ideas about the Roman army were used as part of their ideologies. It chose to present Roman standards in a way that draws on the long hanging banners on buildings that were used in Nazi pageantry and ceremonies. There’s a good account of Nazi use of this imagery in Life magazine here: https://www.life.com/history/a-brutal-pageantry-the-third-reichs-myth-making-machinery-in-color

Normally when there’s an important modern reception history, an exhibition will discuss this, as the British Museum did in its ‘Celtic’ exhibition, where ideas of nationality and sectarianism were discussed as an integral part of the exhibition. In fact I’ve since learned that they did two versions of the reception element of that exhibition – one for its National Museums of Scotland showing and one for in London, to factor in the different visitors. Not so here. Nor did the exhibition choose to e.g., focus on the importance of the Rosalia festival, which also disrupts the mimeographic representation of the banners and humanises Roman soldiers too; as men who grieved their dead. There’s a great blog about the Rosalia here: https://www.vindolanda.com/blog/rosaliae-signorum-rose-festivals-of-the-standards

The BM’s exhibition priorities are combatants, and everyone else, including probably its comms department, has in the process been trodden on. This is what is underneath it all. The BM has deleted its stupid Instagram post and o no, I don’t want some junior comms person to carry the can for this one. Yes, the comms handling was bad, but the problems happened fundamentally because of the exhibition itself.

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Party on dudes in the British Museum’s Legion

Posted on February 14, 2024 by Claire_M

Been to meet academic girlfriends for a museum day and really enjoyed it. This Christmas has been hard, and now things are picking up a little I badly need to enjoy myself a bit. I’ve treated myself to a new sweatshirt – it’s pale blue and has ‘Reading for Pleasure’ embroidered on it. There’s a constant refrain of self-improvement about at this time of year and I’m reacting badly to that. Sometimes what you need is actual pleasure – whether it’s as trivial as meeting friends, a new jumper, time to read a good book or to go to a museum.

When I went last week to the British Museum’s Legions: Roman Army museum exhibition most of the visitors did in fact seem to be enjoying themselves. It wasn’t very busy and I stepped out of the way of a youngish white couple who were politely waiting for me to finish looking so he could take a selfie of himself with a bust of Emperor Augustus near the entrance of the exhibition. No shade on them – we had a pleasant chat and we all politely agreed there was quite a resemblance between him and Augustus. While he took his selfie however I asked his partner if she thought she’d be taking a selfie too.

Head from a statue of Emperor Augustus found at Meroë, Sudan

“Well if I find someone who looks like me,” she paused. “But that’s not very likely is it really?” and we laughed, agreeing that it was not. Our laughter had a slightly uncomfortable note as we both recognized who the exhibition was about and that it wasn’t us. She had in fact the expression of a partner who was happy to accompany but was herself perhaps not so interested. They both seemed lovely and I am sure none of us harboured any illusions that he was actually anything like a Roman emperor; that he wasn’t was part of our shared joke. There seemed to be plenty of humour in the museum to engage children’s imagination too – Rattus, a supposed recruit (and annoyingly obvious derivative of Minimus, the well-known Roman Army mouse) told his story with panels and costumes to try on and fun things to do.

The exhibition had many absolutely stunning exhibits that I did ooh and ahh over. But I’m an archaeologist and as I walked round this means I noticed very much the demographic of the visitors – they were mostly middle-aged white men. I visited during the day, which might explain the visitor age but not in a city as diverse as London, the maleness and whiteness. I found myself thinking about my conversation with the young woman and how the exhibition’s portrayals of women made it not the same fun experience that it clearly was for most of the men there.

Most glaring was the lack of perspective on the few women who were included in the exhibition. Arguments about things being ‘just how it was’, don’t wash when you highlight Terentianus’ request for familial consent to buy an enslaved woman and don’t include anything about the woman herself. How things were for her is a part of ‘just how it was’ in the Roman army.

On a more than technical point Terentianus is most probably intending to purchase an enslaved woman in order to free her to become his wife. This is what the Palmyrene Barates probably did with Regina at South Shields, whose tombstone is in the exhibition but the parallels were more hinted at rather than examined. On an accuracy point the exhibition claims Barates is a ‘soldier’; he could have been but as scholars and museums have repeatedly pointed out, the inscription does not say that. There was a Roman soldier called Barates at Hadrian’s Wall who put up an inscription at Corbridge – but it’s a common Palmyrene name and they’re probably not the same man.*

I was expecting to enjoy more the display about the women known from around Hadrian’s Wall, in particular finding some solidarity with Claudia Severa, whose insistence on the importance of her own pleasure was something I was in the mood for. Claudia Severa probably had little choice when she accompanied her husband, a Roman auxiliary unit commander, at the end of the first century to a fort somewhere near the later Hadrian’s wall. Faced with the religious solemnities of her birthday however she writes to invite the commander at Vindolanda fort and his wife, Sulpicia Lepidina to visit her and her husband.

ad diem sollemnem natalem meum rogó libenter faciás ut uenias ad nos iucundiorem mihi

“for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make [the day] more enjoyable for me.”

*Tab.Vindol.* 291. Birthday Invitation of Sulpicia Lepidina

The exhibition label said that it’s the earliest woman’s Latin handwriting known, suggesting that it was rare for a woman to be writing at this time. This is not true. It is the earliest Latin handwriting by a woman TO WHICH WE CAN ASSIGN A DATE BECAUSE IT CAME FROM A MODERN EXCAVATION. One of the most important things about this letter is that it suggests how mundane it was for these officers’ wives to be writing letters, including some ability to use an ink pen. The Empress Julia Domna (whose militaristic wig choices were discussed in the exhibition) was in fact said by Dio to have managed her son the Emperor Caracalla’s letters and petitions. Dio says that when writing to the senate, Caracalla included Domna’s name along with his own and the names of the legions, stating that she was well. Not very different perhaps to the greetings and invitations being conveyed between officer households by their wives. Other Vindolanda women’s letters could have been included too – Paterna wrote to Lepidina promising to bring either enslaved girls free from fever or a remedy for fever, again saying something about these women’s roles.

The museum labelled Severa’s letter a ‘Birthday party invite’ and emphasized the party element. This isn’t actually quite what the Latin says, which uses sollemnis, and as Judy Hallett notes in her critical edition of this letter, implies a religious celebration. A couple of men reading the museum’s explanation however sniggered rather nastily as they spluttered at the idea of these silly women’s ‘birthday party.’ Their rampant misogyny didn’t really give me a good time, and the exhibition context felt more supportive of them than me. This isn’t a formal academic review – there’s much more I want to discuss about non-combatants, legionary bases (strangely absent), migration and reception especially of the red hanging banner imagery and fascist history – but sometimes you need to say what you want to say, including how you feel. Severa thought her pleasure was important enough to use as a reason to persuade an officer and his wife to visit. I think mine counts too when it comes to visiting a museum.

Oh and go say ‘hi’ to Minimus. He seems a bit left out to me. www.minimuslatin.co.uk

* https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/1171

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Hello agents, my genre is archaeologist.

Posted on February 2, 2024 by Claire_M

This week I’ve cracked open the champagne because – drumroll – I’ve signed with a publisher for my first academic book. ‘Military Households of Roman Auxiliary Commanders in Western Europe and North Africa: Latin inscriptions, Vindolanda letters and praetorium archaeology.’ A bit of a mouthful that tells a reader what they’re going to get.

It feels huge to be signed with BAR, whose publications have supported me since I was a just-starting out-in-classics mature student right through to my PhD, and because they issue relatively quickly (in academic publishing terms) my research will be on library shelves before too long. The enthusiastic responses I’m getting to my new-book related thread,* well that’s just put extra bubbles in the fizz.

But signing has also added to the fluttering anxieties I have about the fact that I write in different genres and am looking for a literary agent. The advice I’ve received for writers seeking agents is don’t be a butterfly, pick a genre and stick to it. Or use pen names. That certainly works for many writers – I don’t need to name the massive names you can reel off the top of your head who write in the same genre year after year. I’m also hyperaware that agents are busy people who want to immediately grasp what is in the tin you’re asking them to sell.

To me this is simple: I’m an archaeologist. Material girl writing a material world. Whether I’m writing for children or adults, fiction or non-fiction, or academic writing, these genres are only different ways of writing the stories I have to tell. The kind of stories that right now people have been liking and sharing on Twitter and giving their approval via peer review. The only genre I won’t write in is a genre that I don’t read – and I read voraciously across genres, always have. I read as an archaeologist too.

Three books that I rate for using material culture to worldbuild.

Books that appeal to me are, for example, Pip Williams ‘The Dictionary of Lost Words,’ where the paper slips on which new dictionary entries are written almost become a character in the book. Their vulnerability – to theft, to loss, to censorship – is a major theme and part of the book’s success:

“He held the bundles towards me. There were several tied with string, and each slip and top-slip was numbered in case the order was disturbed. I grasped them in my funny fingers, but Dr Murray did not let go. He looked over his spectacles.

‘Until these are set in type, Esme, these are the only copies,’ he said. ‘Every one of them is precious’.

Kate Atkinson too, in ‘Shrines of Gaiety’, tells of the “variety of intricately patterned cardigans and sweaters and three piece outfits with pleated skirts and Shetland tammies,” the paper patterns for hand-knitted garments that can only belong to the “dispiriting church halls, and mostly to an audience of women still worn out and raw from the bereavements of war. Her books are inextricable from their time and place, as is archaeology.

Even more precisely dated is Katherine Brigg’s Hobberdy Dick**which is set in 1652 and could not belong to any other year. Her accuracy in the material world of her novel is in large part why it is so convincing:

“This was the oldest part of the stable, which had been added to in Elizabeth’s reign. George Batchford’s loft was above the newer part, but this was unceiled, and a ray of sunlight came down from a small, unglazed window.”

Yes, she is absolutely right. I went to an amazing online lecture day about medieval buildings recently*** and an Elizabethan outbuilding would not have had a ceiling in it, but an addition nearer to 1652 quite probably would have. When her characters discover a treasure-hoard she doesn’t get quite right how the coins could be used to date it. She gets the principle of using coins to date spot on, and the arguments that could be made against the dating have been developed since 1955, when she wrote the book.

None of these three women write only in one genre. Pip Williams is a travel writer and historical novelist. Kate Atkinson writes alternate history and crime and ‘literary fiction’. Katherine Briggs is best known as a folklorist. Me, I’m an archaeologist and writer. My children’s adventure story is set in London 2018 and in Pompeii in AD 79, and I’m writing a historical fantasy set in an alternate 1688. If you want baked beans, I’m not that tin.

*On Melon Husk’s hellsite. It’s about the British Museum’s new Roman legions exhibition reportedly being almost only about the soldiers.

**Yes, I know, that title doesn’t wear well does it? Book does though: https://www.isegoria.net/2012/02/hobberdy-dick

*** By James Wright at Triskele. Highly recommended. https://triskeleheritage.triskelepublishing.com/2023/11/21/one-man-conference-understanding-ancient-buildings

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Death came early for Christmas

Posted on December 25, 2023 by Claire_M

Death came early for Christmas. My father-in-law, in hospital, had assessed his chances and agreed with the professionals: no resuscitation, please. Midwinter’s eve he spoke on the telephone to his son, my husband. He promised another visit, tomorrow; an hour later his heart stopped, giving up at 18 years since the heart attack he’d had 18 years before. Solstice came; then to register his death, register that there would not be another Christmas meal eaten as our tradition mid-December, register the slipperiness of time, overlaying already the loss in March of his separated wife, my husband’s mother. The enfolding nature of grief. Through exhaustion memory leaps jagged as hilltops; meetings shine beacon bright, telephone wire carries us like tesseracts over the dark valleys between. Was that a month ago or six? The year circles, will become another, another six. Now though there is nothing. After long days visiting and hoping there’s nothing now can happen; the funeral is fixed and we pause time on its axis.

Time is a thing we order – a theory at best. Carlo Rovelli writes about the ideas we hold of time, the quanta slipping like individual particles of sand, grains flowing discontinuously through an hourglass. Or of time’s arrow, where time flows in a direction, becoming more disordered as it flows. The trajectory of death’s disorder has this week made time surreal; crying through editing a Morrison’s order, my husband helping my father-in-law cancel a Christmas delivery he won’t be home for. Times we’d hoped for will not be. This multitude of times is in my head always, and on archaeological sites where the layers can lie thickly, brings an impression of numinosity, traces of so many past lives still in the present. Another trick of time’s arrow. This sense of slipping and continuing between points in time is as sad and comforting as ghosts, as Lucy Boston wrote in her ethereal tale of a Christmas so gently haunted by the past:

“The sound came from Mrs Oldknow’s room, which opened out of the music room. A woman’s voice began to sing very softly a cradle song that Tolly had learnt and dearly loved:

Lully Lulla, Thou tiny little child
By by, Lully Lullay
O sisters too, how may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling
For whom we sing
By by, Lully Lullay

‘Who is it?’ he whispered.
‘It’s the grandmother rocking the cradle,’ said Mrs Oldknow, and her eyes were full of tears.
‘Why are you crying, Granny? It’s lovely.’
‘It is lovely, only it is such a long time ago. I don’t know why that should be sad, but sometimes it seems so.’
The singing began again.
‘Granny,’ whispered Tolly again with his arm through hers, ‘whose cradle is it? Linnet is as big as I am.’
‘My darling, this voice is much older than that. I hardly know whose it is. I heard it once before at Christmas.’
It was queer to hear the baby’s sleepy whimper only in the next room, now, and so long ago. ‘Come, we’ll sing it too,’ said Mrs Oldknow, going to the spinet. She played, but it was Tolly who sang alone, while, four hundred years ago, a baby went to sleep.”

Hemingford Grey, the house where Lucy Boston set her Green Knowe stories. Darwin CC BY 2.0.

As I write dark has already fallen, this short day has been got through. We ate the cockerel we carried home from the farm up the road and opened the presents that we wrapped before. Friends will visit soon, and better times must come.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged carlo-rovelli, christmas, ghosts, grief, poetry, time, timeslip | 1 Comment

Behind the labels at the museum

Posted on December 20, 2023 by Claire_M

I’m working on some new fiction (which it’s far too early to say much about) and part of my research was a visit to the History of Science Museum at Oxford to see their magical and alchemical objects. This marble copy of an engraving of John Dee’s Holy Table in particular caught my eye.

Marble copy of an engraving of John Dee’s Holy Table

Dee was an adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, and with his skryer Edward Kelley, claimed to have conjured a series of angels. This I know from the museum label, and the museum’s website.* Or at least the museum gives this information and I’ve no reason to doubt it. More interesting to me – and to my research, which is into the late seventeenth century – is that this is a marble copy of an engraving made in 1659 of Dee’s original wooden table, which is now lost.** The loss of the original object, and relying on a series of copies is wryly familiar to me, both as a classicist and an epigrapher. The museum concludes that this copy is part of the evidence for a continuing interest in the occult almost a hundred years after Dee. I tend to agree with this finding: it’s often hard to work out exactly why something was made, but this inscribed marble would have been an expensive commission. Realistically it suggests Dee’s work was popular in the latter part of the seventeenth century, at least among some educated and wealthy people. His portrait below was gifted to Oxford University by Elias Ashmole, sometime student at Brasenose College and another target for my research.***

Portrait of John Dee left by Elias Ashmole to Oxford University.

The museum information and the object it describes were satisfyingly cohesive to me on my casual visit, and if I wanted to do further research, I feel that it would be fairly easy to check the information offered and rationale for the curator’s conclusions and I could branch off into further questions to satisfy my interest in seventeenth century magic. The museum label and its webpage are clear and this functional presentation encourages a perspective of the object as evidence for history, as I’d expect.

A different perspective – a more exciting one, appealing both to my imagination and love of Phillip Pullman’s books – came from the ‘Lyra’s World’ exhibition. I’d dragged a friend along and we oohed and aahed, our imagination made real by seeing the gorgeous props from the BBC HBO series ‘His Dark Materials’, alongside the actual fact scientific objects that inspired Pullman.

The museum case labels were exquisite, and through their artistry they brought the props and scientific instruments into the compass of Pullman’s world. Their perspective encourages imagination and feeling, seemingly unlike the presentation of the marble copy of Dee’s table I saw above.

Museum labels in ‘Lyra’s World’ exhibition

These labels contribute to an exhibition context that imagines the room as Lyra’s study at Jordan College, drawing you into the truth of its world even as it marks it clearly as ‘fiction’. It’s only at the surface though that this is different to the presentation of the marble copy of the engraving of Dee’s table. This is also a story, factual but also partial (maybe a now uncontroversial truth within museums). The slightly bland museum label for the marble table almost discourages imagination and thinking about the context in which the object is displayed – unlike in the Pullman exhibition this label tells a story without pointing out it’s a story its telling. Case labels are important and interesting; the museum conserves its old labels and lists them in its catalogue. Imagination too can be a helpful critical faculty, and I don’t really have an answer to its place within ‘factual’ exhibitions but it makes me think that, for example, the artists impressions and reconstructions that seem to have somewhat fallen from favour could more generally have a greater space?

‘Lyra’s World’ is spread across three museums in Oxford and I definitely recommend trying to go to the History of Science Museum’s chapter (which is free) before it closes at the end of December (the Story Museum and Pitt Rivers museum chapters seem to have different closing dates).

*https://www.hsm.ox.ac.uk/marble-copy-of-john-dees-holy-table

**It is a truth that should be universally acknowledged that it matters if it’s a copy of a copy of a lost thing. This is a hill this archaeologist will die on.

***https://www.bnc.ox.ac.uk/about-brasenose/history/222-famous-brasenose-names/485-elias-ashmole-founder-of-the-ashmolean-museum

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Buttered eggs and spells to face the rising dark

Posted on December 11, 2023 by Claire_M

There is no glittering frost outside today and the lengthening nights shut me in earlier and earlier. To make it through such dark hours I want comfort and enchantment, and for this I turn to the books I read over and over as a child.

Some favourites, such as Susan Cooper’s ‘Dark is Rising,’ and John Masefield’s ‘Box of Delights’ are acknowledged public treasures, featuring in the British Library’s ‘Fantasy: Realms of the Imagination’ exhibition, which I hope to see soon. Others, such as Katherine Briggs ‘Hobberdy Dick’, are undeservedly less known. These books’ comforts have a firm grasp of the earthly, offering a reader vicarious meals of sticky marmalade pudding, buttered eggs, or even simple rolls of fresh bread, split and spread with honey, eaten standing in the snow. With food that nourishes body and spirit, readers and protagonists alike can face dangers as the stories unfold.

The books offer more than comfort eating though. They are powered by a lyricism that book jackets blurb as ‘evocative’ or ‘enchanting,’ words deriving from Latin that imply calling or singing into existence. It’s no surprise then that John Masefield is as famous a poet as he is a prose writer, or that prophecies, poems and spells feature heavily in these books.* Similarly Susan Cooper: ‘When the Dark is rising, six…’ if you’ve read this far you can probably complete that line yourself.

In my own writing I wanted to work with this lyrical tradition, and my children’s book Gemella Forever, set mainly in ancient Pompeii, includes a poem and a prophecy, both in Latin (the only Latin in the book) emphasising the gods’ alienness. Firstly, the household god, the Lar, calls on Apollo for help using a snippet of Tibullus:

‘Phoebe, faue: laus magna tibi tribuetur in uno corpore seruato restituisse duos.’

‘Bright Apollo, be gracious, great praise is your due – in saving one life you will restore two!’**

Bronze figurine of a Lar dancing. First century, probably from Campania. In Gäubodenmuseum, Straubing

Then an important prophecy is given by Apollo, which my 9-year old heroines Scarlett and Amica must figure out if they are to escape and survive. It explains that Amica is Scarlett’s gemella, her twin, which baffles both girls. In the end however they figure it out and in fact their twinship comes down to the choices they make. They end up in contemporary London, where I can imagine them calling to each other in school, or graffitiing their desks, with ‘Gemella Forever.’

*https://ies.sas.ac.uk/masefield-society

**Only the slightly loose translation is mine; the Latin is from Tibullus’ Elegies, book 3, poem 10 and is in fact a prayer for the health of Sulpicia.

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Predecessor of the more famous Aching? Rosemary Sutcliff’s Tudor witch Tiffany.

Posted on December 1, 2023 by Claire_M

All my book projects are waiting for other people to do various things before I get on with them so I’m back to working on my new fiction project and thinking about character names. This one’s a historical fantasy set in a version of seventeenth century England, and the names need to be convincing. So I’ve been perusing parish registers (really excellent sources of names and available online) and musing on Mercies and Marigolds, attracted to Amoses and Absaloms. Fine examples of names that evoke a sense of their time and sometimes their status also, such as Mercy Peak, traveller, who appears in the South Oxfordshire Baptismal Records collected by Anne Armstrong.[1]

Getting names right and getting them sounding right is an example of what Jo Walton calls the ‘Tiffany problem’: if something is so associated with a particular time readers won’t accept it in a different historical context even when it completely belongs there.[2] In her example, the name Tiffany doesn’t sound ancient although it derives from Theophania (epiphany) and has been fairly popular since antiquity.

In the case of Tiffany it was really Terry Pratchett who got there first, calling his big wee hag Tiffany Aching because it seemed such an amusingly unlikely name for a witch.[3] So, I was delighted this week to come across a Tiffany who is both from Tudor times and a Witch. This is Tiffany Simkin in Rosemary Sutcliff’s book ‘The Armourer’s House,’ in its wonderful recent reissue by Manderley Press.

Publicity photograph of Rosemary Sutcliff (1920–1992)

Sutcliff is so utterly confident in her world building that I absolutely believe in her Tiffany, a wise-woman witch in the model Pratchett later valorises, occupied with herbs and warts rather than ‘Magick’. In fact I actually wonder whether this is a coincidence or if Pratchett might have read Sutcliff’s book. I am not Sutcliff and it doesn’t exactly fix my Tiffany problem though. For my project I think I probably shall lean into names that are both of their time and we associate with that time. Both Pratchett and Sutcliff’s naming decisions though show that there are no hard and fast rules for writing!

[1] https://rtfhs.org.uk/the-oxfordshire-travellers-parish-register-collection.

[2] https://www.torforgeblog.com/2019/05/21/putting-the-historical-in-the-historical-fantasy

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/30/the-shepherds-crown-review-terry-pratchett-discworld-posthumous

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Uncareer advice and the thinginess of things

Posted on November 24, 2023 by Claire_M

So, this is it. It’s almost a year since my PhD was awarded and I’m branching out into my own uncareer – a hodgepodge of things that earn money and don’t, with the main nexus being creative writing, and archaeology.* It’s taken me a while to get my head around how creative writing and archaeology might work together and they’ve seemed like two essentially different things pulling in different directions. I interlaced a Birkbeck creative writing grad certificate with an OU classical studies MA,** then plumped for completing the MA and firmly set course with a PhD at King’s College London without any of this much connecting any threads between creative writing or archaeology.

Over the summer it’s started to seem much more possible to combine the writing with the archaeology in some very satisfying ways. My academic book has cleared peer review and I now need to respond and get on with getting that published, and I’ve agreed to a couple of chapters in academic books. More commercially, I’ve acquired an agent for two non-fiction picture books, the first of which is out with publishers and has some interest, and I’ve completed a children’s novel that I’m now ready to pitch. Time and again though all of my writing brings me back to what I love most, the materiality that is life – sorry Shakespeare we are not such stuff as dreams are made of, even if you are right about our little lives and death.

Pottery ink-well in buff ware with brown coating with deeply incised graffito IVCVNDI NDI with styli and fragments of wax-type ink tablets.. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 British Museum

In actual fact I love archaeology that has writing on it – the Vindolanda writing tablets, Latin inscriptions on stone. Curse tablets. Anything really with writing. That’s just what I personally like though. Maybe more important is that the books I still find most satisfying now are those that firmly ground themselves in things. If the objects – magical or mundane – are real, the world and the people in it are real too. These are real, the real things that I try to bring into my writing world. As one of my creative writing tutors said, quiddity itself is “the thinginess of things.” There no longer seems to be a conflict between writing creatively and archaeology because for me at least, the very essence of writing, fiction or not, is conjuring a material world, and it sits perfectly on that nexus point with archaeology.

*I have support from my partner and do some things, mostly social-media based/wfh consultancy, for an income while I try to get this going. These are based on things I did before my PhD, as is the house I live in and are where the obvious economic privileges I now have come from. I spent a large part of my earlier career trying to work out how people did the things I was interested in doing, while needing to pay the bread-and-butter bills, and realising other people were either doing other things too, or in lots of cases, had family money (we don’t). If you’re looking for a ‘how do you’: this is my ‘Act II’ and it’s taken me years to get to this starting point.

** I do not recommend doing this, especially not when you’re working fulltime as I was during the MA and Grad Cert; it’s exhausting, and you don’t get the most from your education. Postgraduate education was also cheaper when I started – my MA cost me about the same as a cheap gym membership.

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All sewers lead to Puteoli.

Posted on August 23, 2023 by Claire_M

I’m in that limbo between sending off a book draft – hurrah! – and the return of peer review – ouch! Or ouch it probably will be because it is highly unrealistic to expect that everything about the draft is marvellous and in no need of criticism. The review will help me to make the book better. But it’s hardly a painless process, by all accounts – this is my first formal peer review, although supervisorial feedback was routine during the PhD.

So in this meantime I’ve finished one of my side- projects, a chapter-book about two young girls escaping from slavery – and Vesuvius – in ancient Pompeii. In the cisterns under Pompeii they encounter a gigantic octopus, which I thought was my own re-working of the crocodiles in New York sewers myths. Except of course it’s not, the New York crocs are merely the latest iteration of semi-mythical somethings lurking nastily in the drains, and of course there is a classical antecedent. Aelian writes of an octopus with a taste for pickled fish who swam up a sewer to pilfer goods stored in a cellar in Puteoli. Not a million miles away from Pompeii then either.

Map showing relative positions of Puteoli (Pozzuoli) and Pompeii

Aelian’s octopus grabs the jars, wrapping them with its tentacles and crushing the earthenware to get at the delicacies inside. The development of the myth into terrifying modern sewer beasts has been tracked by the ethnologist Camilla Asplund Ingemark (www.jstor.org/stable/40206972) so I won’t add to that here except to wonder about the earthenware jar that appears in Aelian’s telling and the octopus motif that was so popular in Mycenean and Minoan marine ware ceramics.

Terracotta stirrup jar with octopus, c. 1200–1100 BCE, Helladic, Mycenaean. OA courtesy of Metropolitan Museum

These ceramics were made over a thousand years before Aelian’s tall tale and their motifs seem perhaps closer the octopuses that appear in Roman mosaics than to Aelian’s story – he mostly focuses on the cunning, strength and greed of octopuses. His text survives only in epitomised manuscripts so it’s difficult to be sure whether there is some connection between octopuses and pots. My modern version is a little different too; the cisterns of Pompeii were storm drains to collect rainwater run-off rather than sewers. Could an octopus survive in their brackish waters? Probably not, but I think like Aelian that it makes for a good story.

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Pastoral idyll or industrial landscape?

Posted on February 8, 2023 by Claire_M

Took a walk around this rather spectacular modern earthwork and quarry and of course had to head down the research rabbit hole it offered. It is a disused quarry with some form of track and what looks like an enclosure or paling.

A bit of investigation through old OS maps shows how the land use has changed. The earliest OS map freely availably online (https://maps.nls.uk) is this one from 1869. These earthworks are below the road that’s roughly in the middle of Hazleford Paper Mill and Fulling Mill – names that indicate their industries.

The OS map of 1900 shows that the paper mill has become another fulling mill, and the fulling mill has expanded to include a dye works

The next map update I can find is from 1923, by which time the fulling mill with dye works has gained a hydraulic ram. Also added to the map is what is described as an ‘old lime kiln’, which doesn’t appear as in-use on the earlier map. It’s difficult to know whether this is a feature that was missed on the earlier maps, or whether it was a short-lived addition to the local industries. It will have processed the limestone from the quarry into lime. This was used in fulling, and to amend the soil for agriculture. The remains of it are hidden in a patch of scrub and I will go back and have a look at what I can see on some future walk.

The reason for all this activity seems to have been the development in Oxfordshire of a plush industry. A history of the industry by Beckinsale was published in Oxoniensia in 1963 (https://oxoniensia.org/volumes/1963/beckinsale.pdf) . Beckinsale says that plush was being produced two miles away at Shutford from 1747, with the dyeing being done at the upper fulling mill here at Broughton. Fine plush in gorgeous colours was supplied via retail houses to almost every court in Europe for the adornment of household troops and retainers. Most of the cloth being finished would have been wool, but Beckinsale says that hand-shaved silk production was a considerable employer of local women.

Demand for this plush however dropped, and work was switched to power-woven, hand-finished plush for industrial purposes. Presumably the ‘hydraulic ram’ is connected to this change in plush production. The industry was already declining by the time the first world war put a stop to this demand, and it is likely that by 1923 that the ‘hydraulic ram’ may already have gone out of use.

Today the field is pasture and it is a peaceful place for a walk. The industrial monuments of the landscape though show that a little over a century ago it would have been filled with the noise of looms and the smell of dyeing, with carts carrying cloth for finishing and on to the markets in Europe. The industries – sheep and wool production, quarrying, lime production, cloth finishing and agriculture were intimately connected. Something to imagine the next time I walk along the grassy track!

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Archaeological recording: 3D models part one.

Posted on December 30, 2022 by Claire_M

One thing I’ve wanted to explore more this year are digital methods to record inscriptions on stone with their monuments. What I really want to do is practice recording inscriptions using Reflectance Transformation Imaging, but this needs some basic kit that I haven’t yet got. For the moment, in a rather lazy betwixtmas sort of way, I’m simply taking my phone out and trying out some free 3D modelling apps to see what they can produce.

I’m hoping to record the two corbels and graffiti in the porch of St Mary’s Broughton (as long as nobody objects – once I’m ready to do some formal recording I’ll check with the church).

At the moment much of the church porch graffiti and one of the corbels, a lady with a wimple, is behind a Christmas tree so this shall have to wait a while.

The first of the apps I wanted to try out was called Widar (https://www.widar.io). It says its main goal is to be easy to use, and it gives very little information about how it produces its 3D models. For recording inscriptions it is preferable to know what methods are being used, because very tiny variations in recording can result in a misleading reading. Widar is not really designed for scanning flat surfaces with low profiles such as inscriptions.

I decided to try it out on one of the corbels. This took two attempts because the app does not save the photographs before they are uploaded to its cloud storage. This is a problem where there is no wifi and either no phone signal (like here) so only one attempt can be made at a scan. In any case, uploading photos over a mobile network is data-heavy and can be slow. The app also failed to connect properly to my Google account and crashed, dumping my photos, so I needed to make a second visit.

The app is fairly straightforward to use, although there are no instructions. It seems to operate slightly differently depending on contextual factors it picks up. For the corbel it asked me to center the object in the oval frame the app gives you, then to move the camera along each side of the object while it takes 60 photographs.

When these were uploaded and processed it produced a reasonable model of the corbel although as you can see it didn’t pick up some of the detail of the face, and the images of the side aren’t very sharp, https://app.widar.io/yPc9TiCds1Dqwq9NA. This may be how the images are processed or could be the camera – the photographs are taken automatically so there is no option to adjust the focus at this point. I tried it out with my owl figurine, again with imperfect results – this time the app didn’t ask me to center the figurine and I simply moved the camera about until I was sure I’d captured all of it. https://app.widar.io/gz1YyQ571bnQ7AAK9

It is possible to download the model in a variety of file formats so that it can be imported e.g., into Blender or Unreal Engine for computer games but not in the free version of Widar app. For archaeological recording I am unsure that the level of detail captured is sufficient and out in the field what seems to be a requirement to upload data before it is reliably saved could be a problem.

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Review: David Kidd and Jean Stokes. 2020 The People’s Roman Remains Park, The Harton Village Press, South Shields £15.00 illustrated.

Posted on March 11, 2021 by Claire_M

This is a superb account of the 1875 excavations of the Roman fort at South Shields published by two locally based historians, David Kidd and Jean Stokes. It draws painstakingly on newspaper clippings, drawings and photographs collected by Robert Blair, excavation committee secretary, held in the local history collection of The Word, South Shields. Taking this evidence along with museum artefacts the book attempts to produce an ‘eye-witness’ account of the earliest excavations.

South Shields fort showing site in context of local housing. Image credit: Claire Millington

The result is both detailed sourcebook and a rich narrative history of the excavations at South Shields, with its perspectives sharply focused on the people who were involved in the dig in their various capacities.

Key source material is provided by the ‘scrapbook’ of Robert Blair, whose collection of contemporaneous news clippings and drawings of the excavations and finds – highly accurate to judge from the accompanying photographs – were posthumously indexed and conserved by local historian Amy Flagg, who deposited it in the town library as a resource for the people of South Shields.

The site was facing a probably rushed rescue dig ahead of development when the antiquarian Dr Robert Hooppell selected it for his attention. With his prodigy Robert Blair the two men campaigned for its better treatment, engaging the support of the Shields Gazette and Daily Telegraph, raising funds, and hosting well-attended public meetings. Excavations were carried out by workmen assigned to the dig by local landowner, naturalist and member of The Newcastle Society of Antiquaries, Mr Ralph Carr Ellison, with local volunteers supplementing work in the evenings and at weekends at least in the early part of the dig.

Stories of these men and probably women as well as – to judge from a photograph p.84 and back cover – children are lacking in the account, most probably due to the sources collected by Robert Blair. Seeking out their stories as a possible future project would be worthwhile. Kidd and Stokes discuss well the people of South Shields, from the pilots who volunteered on the excavation, to the Muslim seamen who came with the opening of the Suez canal.

The parallels drawn between the Yemenis intermarrying into local families and regiments at the fort being chapters in what is a long history of migration to the town are well made, as evidenced by (among others) the Syrian Barates whose now-famous tombstone for his wife and former slave Regina were unearthed during the excavations. A picture of Mohammed and Rosetta Muckble, proprietors of the Yemeni seamen’s boarding house in 1930 helps to round out this picture of the port. My hesitation over the description of Barates relationship with Regina as “a great love story in history” (we have only his view, for a start) is a quibble compared with the authors’ willingness to tackle head on the fact of Roman slavery being endemic, which is too often glossed in much writing about Roman antiquity. Similarly effective is the discussion of the lives of gladiators and the 1977 visit of Muhammed Ali to South Shields. A picture of a blue glass vase depicting the face of a black gladiator from Robert Blair’s collection makes an effective counterpoint to a photograph of Ali’s visit.

Barates tombstone for Regina, his freedwoman and wife. Image credit: Claire Millington

The book describes tussles over the future of the site and the reluctance of the local authority to fund a proper museum for the excavation finds which became increasingly a problem. In 1876, money raised by the excavation committee from local subscriptions and donations more widely, including from the Duke of Northumberland and John Clayton, ran out and excavations ceased. The permission for the dig granted by the landowners, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners had included that finds were to be placed in the Free Library, which had at that time a small room in the back serving as a public museum. The quality and quantity of finds however threatened to overwhelm the library, and new curators and premises to house the collection were found by the town Corporation. Somewhat reluctantly the excavation committee handed the finds over – two-weeks before the new museum opened.

The permission for excavations had not included the question of the site’s future, which it was assumed would be used for house-building, as had the land around its perimeter. A new campaign was launched for its preservation, garnering the support of the British Archaeological Association. Grudgingly, despite the gift to them of the site by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, the Corporation turned the site into what was to become, in 1881, Britain’s first publicly-owned archaeological park.

Throughout I was struck by the role of the local institutions, public and private -the detailed reporting of excavation findings by Shields Gazette and Daily Telegraph, the public lectures stipulated as a funding condition of the Marine School college, cheap public transport and the mixed role of the Corporation in helping and hindering various activities.

Particularly significant was the role of the Mechanics Institute in providing the night classes and lectures that continued Robert Blair’s somewhat modest education – a dame school followed by a small private school before becoming a solicitor. The recording of the excavations is better than many of its time – plans were drawn and photographs made, work proceeded systematically and Blair’s self-taught drawing abilities are evident. It is accurately described as “a model for its time”. The foundational importance of these institutions to the outcomes of the excavation and subsequent preservation and management of the site is skilfully wrought into the narrative and offers a case study in this respect.

At £15 the book is modestly priced and well illustrated – I can see it appealing to a wide readership. The profits from its sales go to benefit the site and its museum and I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of South Shields, Roman forts or public archaeology. It can be purchased by emailing its author Jean Stokes (jastokes@virginmedia.com).

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Sometimes it’s good to rewrite history especially when it involves typologies, whether for Roman forts or more importantly, coronavirus transmission.

Posted on August 31, 2020 by Claire_M

One of the things I’m finding more difficult in my PhD is a big chapter dealing with the archaeology of the houses of auxiliary Roman commanders at forts. It’s not that I’m exactly short of material – I’ve looked at excavation reports for upwards of 50 sites, each of which has varying numbers of forts, buildings, and rebuilds at each. In this I’m looking to define the sorts of features that these buildings had – the basic layouts, building materials, facilities (underfloor heating aka hypocausts, fancy baths, wall paintings?) from what are mostly the remains of foundations.

To not improve matters, many of these were excavated at the end of the C19 or the early C20, and so the records are of their time and can’t always answer my questions. Generally, I’m interested in what these structures can contribute to our views on their lives. This means firstly answering some pretty basic questions. Were there splendidly appointed bathing facilities? (Usually not.) Sumptuous mosaics? (Not at all.) A big water tank in the courtyard? (Yes often, I think so, and weirdly this point is controversial and much discussed in several papers that also try to define fort buildings.)

One thing that is clear is that there was not a standard build for these houses. A basic form, with some patterns I can identify and tentatively seek to explain is probably the limit of this approach. Trying to categorise material remains in some way is a standard archaeological approach and can show how things change over time or in different places. It’s something that archaeologists have been thinking about and doing for a long time, as this lovely (and I hope out of copyright) picture of Roman nails by the famous archaeological illustrator Beatrice Potter* shows.

Archaeologists have tended to interpret the remains of Roman forts as though they have a standard format. Part of the confusion comes from applying the descriptions of much earlier temporary marching camps from Polybius’ Historiae and Pseudo-Hygenus’ De munitionibus castrorum (C2 BC,) and the much later Vegetius’ Epitome rei militaris (probably late C4 or early C5 AD but relying on sources as early as the middle republic). This approach, along with preconceptions about what Roman military practice must have been, has been a bit misleading.

Fig.19, The principal features of an auxiliary fort. In Anne Johnson (1983) *Roman Forts*

I’m not suggesting that using typologies is a bad thing, but they can become quite rapidly outdated. With archaeology it’s not good but well, nobody dies. Unfortunately there seems to be a serious problem right now that really does matter. This is the method of typologising droplets by size, and then assigning risk of Sars- CoV-2 transmission on the basis of how far each type travels. However, the research is based on late C19 and early C20 papers.** Which frankly has horrified me since the first month of lockdown when I looked it up. So I’m really happy that actual relevant serious and senior experts (which I’m definitely not) are delineating better what we need to know about stopping transmission both of this virus – and others we should expect to come. This is the paper. I think it’s well worth reading. BMJ 2020;370:m3223 https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3223#ref-3

“Typologies, subsisting usually on the frontiers of research, are less durable than classifications in that their descriptions are accepted only to the degree that they continue to provide solutions to problems.”
https://www.britannica.com/science/typology

*Mostly famous for other things. But her scientific work ought to be better known. Some day I want to visit this museum: http://armitt.com/armitt_website/beatrix-potter

**i.e., about the time many of those Roman forts I’m studying were being excavated.

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Braving face: how not to talk on Twitter or on first century Roman frontiers either.

Posted on August 20, 2020 by Claire_M

Since I’m stuck mostly at home and avoiding like the plague (hah!) the normally normal chats and catch ups I enjoy, I’ve been spending an awful lot of time on social media. Which is no substitute at all for actually seeing people. And it’s horrible. Discombobulating. We are all experiencing huge disruption and know – if we’re lucky, only from the news – that terrible things have been happening. Nothing is normal any more and the future looks more uncharted, our assumptions do not hold.

Gone in the disruption are many of the quiet, private chats. The ones where you can show different faces that at least feel less ‘authored’ than those we present on Twitter and Facebook. I’m not suggesting that our more private faces are somehow more authentic – just that there are differences. We all know (don’t we) that how we present ourselves matters, even if it took a sociologist to say it in so many (a lot) of words:

“Face is an image of self, delineated in terms of approved social attributes – albeit an image that others may share, as when a person makes a good showing for his profession or his religion by making a good showing for himself .”
Goffman 1967

This is what I’m finding tough I think. I know that life is disrupted for everyone in lots of different ways. But at the personal level that’s not what I’m seeing discussed. Where can I say (repeatedly) that I’ve had a bad couple of weeks, that it’s getting to me, the uncertainty, the grief, the fear and disappointment of this year? That I’d been home for so long with illness last year and my health’s improved so much that I was looking forward so so much to doing some ordinary things, coffees with friends, working in the library? That even though I’m pretty fortunate this year is tough? That I’m around to give and also need to get some support? Phone calls with friends and conversations at home have become the absolute mainstay of keeping afloat. I wish though that the professional dumbshow that social media demands didn’t demand quite so much silence about real problems, about mental health or financial difficulties. Or any of the many things that mostly go unspoken.

Back though to Goffman – he’s still my go-to sociologist (even if that quote’s a bit old and I don’t really have much to do with sociologists, sorry) because he’s quite useful in thinking through some sources I’m using for my PhD. These are a series of letters sent between Claudia Severa and Sulpicia Lepidina, two wives of commanders stationed at forts up by Hadrian’s wall in the first century (i.e., before that wall was built).

View of present-day Vindolanda. CC BY-SA 3.0 Nilfanion

The women write not exactly lively accounts of their lives to each other, more a sort of polite filling in the gaps between the in-person conversations they mention in their letters and they obviously had on a frequent basis. Or at least we know what Severa writes about –Lepidina clearly wrote back but her letters are long lost. Severa’s letters are not entirely complete but you can clearly get the gist.

“… greetings. Just as I had spoken with you, sister, and promised that I would ask Brocchus and would come to you, I asked him and he gave me the following reply, that it was always readily (?) permitted to me, together with …. to come to you in whatever way I can. For there are certain essential things which …. you will receive my letters by which you will know what I am going to do …. I was … and will remain at Briga. Greet your Cerialis from me. Farewell my sister, my dearest and most longed-for soul. “
Tab.Vindol. 292 (trans. Bowman)

Most of the text is written out by a military scribe, probably at Severa’s dictation although Severa could write and in fact did handwrite herself.

This is actually Tab. Vindol 291, a birthday invitation from Severa. Her distinctive handwriting is at the bottom right. CC BY-SA 3.0 Victuallers

Once you get over boggling at the survival of writing on thin slips of wood about the size of postcards (the basic science: they were excavated from muddy, anaerobic contexts where things don’t rot) they are still fascinating. They are somewhat frustrating in that the women don’t talk in their letters directly about what – compared with their normal posh lives – must have been privations and extraordinary events. Almost certainly these women will have travelled – commanders wives seem mostly to be from similar backgrounds to their husbands – before being stationed in frontier forts a long way from their regular friends and family. They do however write with a sharp focus on the pleasure that each others visits will bring. These meetings, these conversations were important and to be savoured.

Now though we’re not talking about that are we? In the professionalised, highly-mediated contexts of social media we’re not saying how much we miss these meetings, those conversations that we have. I don’t really know why, but I think it’s making things harder.

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Choose risk, choose life.

Posted on August 11, 2020 by Claire_M

DnD dice, writer’s own. Rolling a natural 20 is only a 5% chance. It happens a lot.

I’ve been ultra-cautious with SARS-CoV-2 floating around* not because I’m a timid little mouse, but because I’ve already had experience of having my life ripped up in the aftermath of infections for months and months and months. Lockdown? It went on for what, seven weeks and then was lifted a bit and now everyone is now customising the rules – or laws, it’s hard to tell anymore – to suit.

Life has risk, we all take risks, weighing up when to cross the road or happily catching the night bus (as I frequently used to). Why is this any different? It’s at my own risk. No such thing in a pandemic though is there? Your risk is my risk is my granny’s risk is my 44-year old friend-having-chemo-to-survive-cancer’s risk. It’s the cleaner in the ICU’s risk. This is the problem. Actually, it’s not only that. Leaving aside the pond-slime who post that it’s ‘only fatties’ and ‘underlying health problems’ who die, it’s clear that most people don’t grasp that this is a novel virus that can do more than kill you, even though it is slowly trickling out that there can be long-term post viral health problems from Covid 19. The type of problems that disable you and don’t care if you’re in your twenties, or the most self-importantly elite of professionals, or have a PhD to write up (me). In my experience these are exactly the people who seem to have some sort of fantasy about what being chronically ill is like. That they can sort of write their own rules. That it couldn’t happen to them, that they’re too busy. Or have responsibilities. So they just can’t be ill. Push on through. Mind over matter.

That’s faulty thinking (for the CBT crowd at the back). If you get a virus like SARS-CoV-2 (or many others though the risk is greater with SARS-CoV-2) even quite mildly, there are a good number of people who simply don’t recover. Whose life is put on lockdown, house or bed-bound and they are effectively expected to put up with it, because there are minimally effective treatments and no cures. Even if you escape organ damage (lung, heart, kidney, brain common) there are other sequelae. There are various not very good names and diagnoses – post viral fatigue syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, and myalgic encephalitis for what amounts to a set of core, disabling symptoms. You might recover, particularly if (like me) you are lucky enough to have an early diagnosis and the financial and practical support so you can rest as much as you need to and pace out the tiny amounts of activity that you can still do. Most people improve a bit. Some people get entirely better (fingers crossed). Many don’t improve at all. That’s a long-term lockdown that you cannot customise to suit.

So choose your risks carefully. It’s not like crossing the road where you keep on crossing roads and unless you’re really unlucky you learn that it’s a pretty safe thing to do. The risks of catching covid 19 from ignoring the public health rules are much higher. It’s more like a dice roll. Keep rolling and your number will come up. But eventually the pandemic will be over, even if it’s a year or more away. Choose that life.

* yes, it seems increasingly clear that does float around, just like my microbiologist dad said as well as every credible scientific paper this nerd read. It is transmitted within tiny aerosolised droplets that hang about for at least a few hours in the air, so if someone in the ~~pub~~ ~~restaurant~~ ~~office~~ ~~gym lecture-theatre~~ room with you is puffing them out every time they breathe, the concentration of droplets and virus is continually increasing. Good luck.

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History lessons from the statue of Clodia Anthianilla, that most splendid girl

Posted on June 15, 2020 by Claire_M

Much has been written about statues of late and whether they should stay up or be taken down or, in the case of the notorious slave trader Colston, be pitched into the Bristol Channel. Reading the demands from people of both ‘sides’, what people seem to care most about is whether the person portrayed deserves a spot in our streets and town squares. Few people have called for the statues to be destroyed – even Colston was only graffitied and thrown down, although the footage looked as though there was some damage done in the process. His statue has been retrieved already and is undergoing conservation. What matters is where the statues are put – and who gets to decide this.

This strongly reminds me of a statue that I have been researching recently. It is of Clodia Anthianilla, whose parents commissioned a funerary cenotaph at Brindisi to remember her after she died in AD144. This is her, or at least we think it is, because the statue was found next to the base, and is of a young girl dressed appropriately for the rich young lady she clearly was.

This sculpted head found next to the statue is probably of her too.

On the base of the statue is quite a long inscription:

Clodiae L(uci) f(iliae) / Anthianillae / M(arci) Coccei Gemini praef(ecti) ala[e] / L(ucio) Lolliano Avito T(ito) Statilio Maximo co(n)s(ulibus) X K(alendas) April(es) in schola Poll(ia) / q(uod) v(erba) f(acta) s(unt) de honoranda morte Clodiae Anthianillae q(uid) d(e) e(a) r(e) f(ieri) p(laceret) d(e) e(a) r(e) i(ta) c(ensuerunt) / cum Clodia Anthianilla splendidissima puella et cuius in/crementa etiam supra aetatem florentia inter ornamen/ta municipi n(ostri) sperabantur acervissima morte rapta sit paren/tibus suis Clodio Pollioni patrono municipi n(ostri) spl(endidissimo) eq(uiti) R(omano) et bene / de re p(ublica) n(ostra) merito et Seiae Quintil(l)iae matri ornatae feminae quo/rum dolori publica municipi n(ostri) tristitia consentit placere / decur(iones) et in illorum solacium et in memoriam honestissimae / puellae locum posteritatis dari item statuam quam frequentis/simo loco publice poni cens(uit) / L(ucius) Clodius L(uci) f(ilius) Pollio / pater piissimae filiae / h(onore) a(ccepto) i(mpensam) r(emisit)

(AE 1910, 203 = AE 2003, 352)

It is the inscription that tells us all we really know about Anthianilla, which is very little. She is described as a puella, which means a girl of between about 12 years old and her first motherhood. Her husband commanded an auxiliary cavalry wing and probably in his forties or older, judging by the typical norms of his job. Anthianilla is described as splendidissima, which is an absolutely bog-standard description of a girl of equestrian status. And that is all that we can learn about her from either inscription or the statue.

The inscription goes on to say that the town has been deprived of this very splendid girl who it is hoped would in her lifetime have become a credit to the town. Then we come to the reason why it gets its spot – which it says has been selected because it’s well-frequented. The town council has decided that a statue of her can be put up in such a public place to console her grieving parents and in her memory. Her Dad happens of course to be the town patron, and so deserving of (and paying for) this honour, and her Mum is a femina ornata – a nice touch emphasising the sort of woman it was hoped Anthianilla would have become. It says much more about the feelings and importance of the people – her parents and the town council – who decided a statue of her was needed than it does about Anthianilla or anything else.

This means that as a biography the inscription isn’t much help. It does though give some insight into the sorts of decision-making that led to the honour of a statue for such a young girl being put up in such a public place. Poor Anthianilla wasn’t a Greta Thunberg, or a Malala Yousafzai. She was a young girl married off to a much older man at what to us is an obscenely young age. Most people at the time who might have objected to this little rich girl being given such an undeserved honour would have had no say. Our reasons would be different, but we definitely wouldn’t choose to put up a statue honoring this girl and her marriage, and a museum seems to be a good place for this statue to reside and be studied.

The importance of a rationale for a statue, and the decision-making over who is honoured, and where, are as evident in this statue as they are in the protests and discussions in the Black Lives Matter debate. On their own, statues usually say very little about biography, or even history. But they can tell us a lot about power, and right now that is why they matter.

There’s more about the statue and the inscriptions and some pictures here: http://www.brundarte.it/2016/07/18/clodia-anthianilla/

The images of the statue come from https://arachne.uni-koeln.de/arachne/index.php?view[layout]=objekt_item&search[constraints][objekt][searchSeriennummer]=3014

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Writing and thriving on through

Posted on May 28, 2020 by Claire_M

It’s a little over two weeks since I finally sent my extensively re-written and somewhat lengthened chapter off in the likely vain hope that it might lead to a post-doc. This has obviously taken me far longer than I anticipated, unsurprisingly given that the pandemic landed in the middle of my plans and things jumped up the priority list ahead of the PhD. The process did underscore some useful things though.

Firstly that I can’t continually put my health on hold and do the PhD first. No matter whether it’s making sure I’m in good shape in case I get covid19 or managing existing fubars. Taking a walk, taking a break, these are things that are never urgent but are always important. So in figuring out a schedule that is manageable these things get done. This isn’t how the Eisenhower matrix works, but screw that, I don’t have anyone to delegate things to and research tends to sit a lot in that not urgent/important quadrant and can be planned. Having spent a lot of time on quadrant 1 stuff (if that’s how you want to characterise the ‘prioritise survival of self and friends/family’) it’s good to be dealing with this stuff again.

This sounds like a luxury doesn’t it? Deciding what I will and won’t prioritise, and putting a walk (“How lovely!”) or a nap (“Wish I could!) into the schedule. But it’s actually a question of productivity as much as anything. Unless you have small children afoot and no equal partner there are in fact a minority of people who can’t do some activity and/or take some rest in order to support their health. (And those who can’t are not the ones telling me “How lovely! Wish I could!”). In fact they sound suspiciously like the people in this piece, who “hope to buckle down for a short stint until things get back to normal.” I join the author in wishing anyone who pursues that path the very best of luck and health and point again at the piece as being the only one I’ve read that actually gives sound advice from someone who has been there when the world changes.

So it was with some semblance of a plan and schedule already in place that I went yesterday to an online training course in building resilience. I wasn’t exactly sure I needed it but I was curious and thought it might be useful.

It did do what it said was on the tin, considered how you can use your strengths to cope in the crisis. But I think it needed to be franker. The world is changing rapidly and our old lives cannot be reached. Dealing with the basics in Maslow’s hierarchy has been necessary and may be again.

Only one of the models offered in the course seemd to me to sit well both with Maslow’s hierarchy and Aisha S. Ahmad’s piece in the Chronicle. The idea that you function (survive), overcome (mental shift) and adapt (a new normal). The number of new normals I’ve had in life is maybe unusual, maybe not – career changes, country moves, stints at home caring for family and serious disruptive ill-health seems more than a typical load at my point in a lifespan. In any case, I’ve certainly not arrived in my discipline through what is a supposedly standard route. But I have been here before, and know that the mental shift will happen, fight it as I may because who wouldn’t want their life to return to normal? And it is horrid, the unexpected death last weekend of a relative both from covid19 and not from covid19 (undiclosed and terminal cancer) shook me. The loss of the old seems to need to be acknowledged and mourned and models can’t reach. So I’ll finish with a poem ‘One Art’ by Elizabeth Bishop. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47536/one-art

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Self-centering in a time of coronavirus

Posted on March 16, 2020 by Claire_M

Today I feel so much worse than I have for some weeks, dismayingly so. I’m worried. Mostly about friends and family but also the amount of unknowns. What does this mean if I get the virus? Will it push back my recovery, when I’d started to hope that I might be someone who recovered? Will it push it into the severe form, where you cannot get out of bed, or read, or even have the curtains open? This can last for years. The advice from the ME Association is do all you can to not get it. Thankfully I am lucky enough to feel safe and secure enough financially, to live in a village where I can go out with little risk, and a garden I love large enough for me to potter around (and a gardener to maintain what I no longer can). My husband works from home and is very caring. He has taken on virtually all chores and we have a weekly cleaner. I’m also well-practiced at ‘social isolation’, and socialise online, not only FB and Twitter and WhatsApp, but voice chat while gaming, and telephone calls, and Skype and many online tools that keep me in close contact with friends who I’ve known in many cases for years.

ME/CFS crashed through my life early last year and has changed it beyond my own recognition. For months I could only get out of bed and sit in a chair and doze, perhaps send one, two emails. Then sleep all afternoon. Sometimes I forced myself to do things, such as memorably going into London to the library, or for a meeting, which was a mistake. I was also anaemic (iron deficiency, and vitamin D) and my GPs had nothing to offer beyond iron tablets, antibiotics for recurrent infections, a diagnosis and several months of waiting to see a specialist (actually, this is among the best-case scenarios for CFS/ME). Rest and be patient, or exercise and lose weight I was told, depending on who I saw. It quickly became apparent that there was no real help on offer for the CFS/ME in any reasonable timescale so, with my PhD on hold, I tried between naps and dizziness, brain fog and flu-like fatigue to find and work my way through the medical literature. Instead of clear advice I found an enormous amount of very heated debate. This has been written extensively about online and in medical and scientific journals if you want to look it the exact details and form your own view as I’ve had to.

The crux of the debate is what are the underlying causes in the continuation of the disease, and connected to that, whether it is several conditions that produce similar symptoms. It is classified as a multi-system neurological disorder and its prevalence in women is at least double that of it in men, once factors like women being more likely to visit a doctor are added in. Its recent diagnosis and treatment have roots in psychiatry, and little to no attention has been given to its relationship to the history of women’s medicine, although it seems to have been once considered an organic disease called neurasthenia and predominantly diagnosed in white men of professional status.[i] It is presently considered “medically unexplained”, which is a euphemism for medically inexplicable, and a risk factor for having a medically unexplained conditions is being female or from a lower socio-economic background.[ii] So we’re part-way back to hysteria. Recent research has however been finding biological abnormalities, and links to auto-immune conditions, in particular Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Auto-immune diseases are found much more frequently in women than men, which is probably because women’s immune systems differ to allow carriage of a pregnancy. The problem once again seems to be the relationship between medical models predicated on men, and insufficient knowledge about women’s bodies.

This scrappy research I’ve had to do is not like my PhD. I claim no expertise whatsoever in medicine. Humanities research training however is useful to me in dealing with such a contested area. Humanities focus on your own relationship to your research – what are your biases, perspectives, weaknesses – and shows that you have no neutral place to stand. In the absence of effective treatments or evidence for the underlying aetiology of the disease progression all I can really do is try to keep an open mind and find something that works for me.

There are only two ‘available’ (postcode lottery) treatments on the NHS –CBT and graded exercise therapy, neither of which are much help and in fact surveys by patient associations say they cause harm. Both assume that continuing CFS/ME is a perceptual problem and straightening out your faulty thinking will help. The idea of women being irrational, unreliable witnesses is such a trope that well, google it. The US CDC no longer recommends these treatments and defines CFS/ME as a neurological condition. A review of the NHS treatment recommendations is due at the end of the year. There is little other evidence for treatments such as various supplements, although there are some reasonably good studies, and research is now looking for a straightforward biological diagnostics and treatment. There isn’t enough research yet into these, most probably because huge quantities of research funding went on the funders assumption that it was largely made up in (female, low economic status) patients’ heads.

The absence of evidence being used to construct a model that doesn’t stand up under scrutiny chimes with my own research which considers how the absence of (much) evidence has been used to construct an absence of women in Roman military buildings. Archaeologists only find what they actually look for and have tended to dismiss or explain away evidence. Absence is then created. In the case of CFS/ME, now that medicine is starting to look more closely at the biological abnormalities that are found in patients, it seems likely a better understanding of the disease processes should emerge.

But this is CFS/ME and it’s tricky. The relationship of these researchers to their research has been negatively highlighted. Most of these clinicians and medical researchers have themselves CFS/ME and this is used to undermine their reliability as researchers. There can indeed be a desire to avoid the stigma – and consequences – of a diagnosis that involves the mind and mental health. On the other hand, much money has been spent, and reputations built, on research grounded on ME/CFS being a problem of the mind: this equally raises issues of cognitive bias, and conflicts of interest.[iii] [iv] In summarising the criticisms so briefly I’ve tried to take the people out of it, because some of the criticism has been outright and threatening abuse. In fact I’m not sure we have good mechanisms for handling abuse and reasonable criticism when it is all mixed up like this – other examples of this pattern seem to include MPs (including Jo Cox) and Mary Beard – with the abuse always seeming to follow particularly predictable and nasty lines such as misogyny, racism, antisemitism and the like. Abuse stops effective criticism and puts off researchers and then we all lose.

However, the relationship of the mind to the brain does seem pretty fundamental in a neurological condition, which is what CFS/ME does appear to be. There is no clear separation between the two, which is explored by Jo Marchant in ‘Cure: a journey into the science of mind over body’, primarily the placebo and nocebo effects. The one thing that she finds to be consistently important to survival rates and improved functioning in almost every type of illness is that “if we feel safe, cared for and in control – in a critical moment during injury or disease, or generally throughout our lives – we do better. We feel less pain, less fatigue, less sickness. Our immune system works with us instead of against us. Our bodies ease off on emergency defences and can focus on repair and growth.” It’s not only the drugs we need for this condition. The support I’ve had has a lot to do with why I am so much better. And it does fuck with your psyche; I used to see myself as semi-indestructable, unstoppable. I can’t any more.

When I started thinking about this blog, I was mostly thinking about myself, my research and how this fits with CFS/ME. Since then covid19 has torn holes in our lives and my concerns seem almost a useless thing to write and post. But I think that last thing is important. It’s the caring and focusing concern on other people that will improve our own survival rates and reduce post-viral complications such as CFS/ME. We’re all in the middle with this.

[i] http://www.simonwessely.com/Downloads/Other/OldWine.pdf

Click to access 2.pdf

[ii] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11448704

[iii] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC479220/pdf/jmedeth00004-0041.pdf

[iv] https://blogs.plos.org/absolutely-maybe/2019/02/08/consumer-contested-evidence-why-the-me-cfs-exercise-dispute-matters-so-much/

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Like a Trojan…

Posted on March 6, 2020 by Claire_M

This doesn’t exactly count as work, and needed a tiresome amount of energy-planning, but I did manage to get to the Troy exhibition before it closed or got corona-infested.* Hurrah. Although the exhibition was very crowded there were some lovely things to see, and I think it told well some of the different stories relating to the Trojan war, with roughly two-thirds of the material coming from ‘antiquity’ and around a third being modern reception.

Possibly my favorite objects were these two paintings by Evelyn de Morgan.

I also really liked this cup with Circe welcoming Odysseus into her home, presented with the ultimate icon of ancient female respectability: a loom. (OK, if you’re Roman, you’ll probably get a wool-basket with drop spindle. The point is you supposedly do wool-working and don’t just hive it all off to your slaves.)

This Roman marble relief was another high point. There are often names added to the characters, even though the stories were clearly well-known. Here Paris is being lured by Eros, while Helen is being coaxed by Aphrodite and Peitho. I don’t think this is the version of the tale where Helen is abducted away to Egypt by the gods, and therefore held entirely blameless.

Finally, the star piece. Who can resist this pretty boy Achilles dying slowly from that famous arrow?

Filippo Albacini ‘The wounded Achilles’ 1825

*working assumption.

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Generation brain game

Posted on February 28, 2020 by Claire_M

There are some bits in research that you know in the best of times are going to make your brain hurt. These are not the best of times and I decided I may as well get on with it anyway and tackle one of them right now.

Gates of Apulum (Codrinb / CC BY-SA 3.0 RO)

So over the past couple of days I’ve been mostly polishing a draft chapter (which I need to send to someone – that super-exciting post-PhD possibility) where I’d found a great snarl-up.

My argument was unclear and didn’t convey what I was trying to say. In this part of the chapter I’m looking at a Roman family tree that has been reconstructed before but I don’t think it’s quite right, or at least it’s not as certain as has been argued. So I needed to tease out again the familial relationships within several Latin inscriptions put up at Apulum.

In this family tree are either two or three generations of men who have the same name and I am trying to settle the number. What I have are five inscriptions which variously state the men’s names, their father’s names, sons and daughters and a wife, an adoptive father, and different positions that the men held.

Crucially to my argument, is the fact that the inscriptions were all put up by people during their lifetimes so none of them sums up a life in the way that an epitaph often does. This means the inscriptions that were put up later can have roles added to them that don’t appear in the earlier inscriptions. The roles might also be presented differently – grouped and in reverse chronology, or summarised. Oh and because it’s not complicated enough, there are no dates on any of the inscriptions, although there is contextual information that helps, such as when the army units they commanded changed their names.

Marble_inscribed_statue_base_MET_DP165551

Example of an inscribed Roman-era statue base. The big holes would have had attached a bronze statue to the base. (Roman Metropolitan Museum of Art / CC0)

The inscriptions are mostly cut into statue bases, and the whole thing looks very much like a series of PR exercises for an opportunistic family on the make. What I’m looking at is some good Roman social climbing.

So I went through the inscriptions again, teasing out the whole who’s who and then started to try to explain my reasoning more carefully. I need to get hold of a couple of publications to check again the previous work on this family and make sure I’m representing its arguments fairly, and then finish explaining my argument.

What’s left to do is among the easier things though, for me at least. Other people’s mileage may differ but it’s the crunchy and complex primary material that is the tough and interesting stuff. Having untangled this particular knot I am feeling a bit more confident about returning to writing up too.

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More than twittle-tattle: diplomatic histories and research angles

Posted on February 23, 2020 by Claire_M

Day of sofa sitting yesterday as clearly I did ‘too much’ last week. I hate this. Walked as far as the garden shed and back and that was it.

Better though this morning and following the lure of a paper found via Twitter: Steiner (2017) ‘Beyond the Foreign Office Papers: The Making of an International Historian’,¹which has some quarry in at least nine wives mentioned in connection with their husband’s work. Perhaps the most notable is the wife of Owen O’Malley, himself in 1943 appointed ambassador to the Polish government and asked to report on the responsibility for the mass graves of Polish officers which advancing German troops had just discovered at Katyn, near Smolensk.² Asked in effect to choose between writing the truth as he knew it to be, and the answer required by the government, he opted for the former and came very close to losing his job entirely. In the end he was downgraded and his career progression curtailed. ³ Plus ça change. ⁴

Steiner writes however of “the prodigious efforts of his wife – who sought interviews with Sir Warren Fisher, the head of the civil service and one of O’Malley’s judges, but also with many of the senior Foreign Office figures, Labour leaders, lawyers and friends with influence – that the verdict that O’Malley should resign from the service was dropped. The full story is told in her book, in Permission to Resign: Goings on in the Corridors of Power.” The interrelationship between the clear impact that these diplomats’ wives had and the unofficial and uneasy position that they held in relation to the Foreign Office (as it then was) is resonant with the positions and roles of the wives that I research within the imperial Roman army. Another book for me to find then.

Her paper reminds me of something else too, that I knew from my own work as a diplomat but irritatingly had drifted out of focus. The Foreign Office and the Colonial Office used to be different beasts, and the FCO building on King Charles Street used to be four separate buildings around one quad housing the Foreign Office, the India Office, the Colonial Office, and the Home Office.

Foreign_and_India_Offices,_London,_1866_ILN

These were not connected internally, and rumour put about during my training had it that this was to stop junior civil servants wasting time chattering. This proved impractical however, and as part of the changing usages doorways still referred to as ‘holes in the wall’ were inserted. A nice analogy to consider with my analysis of spatial usage in forts.

The histories of the Colonial Office and the Foreign Office are quite distinct, although obviously part of the same imperialist system.⁵ Steiner writes that the men “who staffed the three consular services, still separately recruited by exam before the introduction of the 1943 reforms, trained in languages, not at a special establishment in England but through local teachers when taking up their posts. They were, with but a few exceptions, second class citizens, badly paid, rarely received by their ambassadors abroad and ignored when they returned to London.” Another lense then to use in considering the roles of the auxiliaries within Rome’s imperial expansion and maintenance.

Final thoughts: Steiner situates her paper somewhere between memoir and academic paper. It is a descriptive account of her relationship to her subject, told through her methods and foregrounding her relationships with the people whose papers and memories she used as her material. I’ve not entirely settled yet how I deal with my own interests that are inextricable from perspective on my research. All researchers I think have this to deal with and in some ways my task is perhaps easier because it was my perspective on the material that in part attracted me to this material. It’s really helpful though to have papers like this one to be able to think this through with.

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Good days

Posted on February 21, 2020 by Claire_M

I’ve had a spate of good days and am hoping that these continue. This means that last week I was able to give a talk – the first in a year. It was for the Banbury Historical Society and proved to be a really good way of getting back into my PhD. Although doing it also pushed me to the edge of what I can do physically right now. So between now and 1 April, when I shall be formally re-enrolling to complete writing up, I need to figure out what I can do on an average day, how many average days a working week holds, and what support I will need.

I’m thinking about this last first, as it’s more calculable. The next few weeks are going to be suck it and see what I can do for a working day. I am really looking forward to having some sort of schedule again. When the CFS/ME was really bad and I could hardly get out of bed, most everything ‘to do’ slid into endless tomorrows. It’s nowhere near that bad now. Today I have had a half-hour Skype call, eaten lunch, put on make-up and gone into town, been to two shops and am now in a cafe where I have sent an email to disability services and am writing this. I’m supposed to keep activity levels constant, and I’m using steps as a crude measure. Currently this is 5,000 steps a day, although this has slid, perhaps due to ‘overdoing’ it with academic work, perhaps just I’ve been doing academic work and not had enough energy for both. It’s a masterclass in prioritisation, something I’ve never been good at, tending instead just to pile everything on and somehow do it all.

So far as far as I can see, I’m going to mostly need more time to complete writing up. If I can manage four hours of concentration a day, that is enough to get a lot of work done. The other thing I shall need is to have minimal trips to the library. Walking from Oxford station to the Sackler and back is definitely too much of a stretch (and it is so painful to admit that; it’s really such a short distance). Maybe further down the line it will be possible though. There are no buses that go that way, although there is one that goes back from near Waterstones, so a taxi there, and a walk-and-bus back might be ok. As long as I can definitely get a seat on the train. Mostly though, I’m going to need digital scans and helpful librarians. I’m pretty optimistic about this – mostly it will be libraries and librarians I already know and they are helpful so it seems realistic.

And I got a huge boost as someone contacted me about my research with ideas for something post PhD, possibly a post-doc. It’s strictly in-confidence and full of ifs, buts, and maybe’s, so I can’t say more. Still though, it’s another step forward.

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Re. starting this blog

Posted on February 15, 2020 by Claire_M

Spoons from Hoxne Hoard. Mike Peel CC-BY-SA-4.0

It’s four years since I last wrote this blog. A lot has happened in those four years and I wanted to get back to blog writing. But one of those things was serious illness* last year – serious to me, in that it’s chronic, and odds-on permanent, even if it will probably not kill me. So it’s in some ways a fresh start, and in some ways not.

Why not start a new blog then? Why continue this, which is old, and in blogging terms, discarded. There is the illness and that’s reason enough. Everything I do is stripped to bare essentials. My energy is like a sand timer, and it runs out, quickly. I must think about the basics, how much will a shower cost, have I enough for a bath, to hang out laundry. Setting up a new blog, deciding, designing, that carries a cost. If I do this, then I do not do that. Try to do too much, and my legs fold under me, I end up on the ground. On my bedroom floor. In a bus queue. It’s not a choice.

There is a reason, another reason why I am choosing not to pay this cost and instead just to pick up and continue. And this is that although I might look back a little embarrassed about what I’ve said once, or something I was trying out I think now doesn’t work or fit, it’s still part of who I am and what I did and what I do.

Mostly I think I shall be writing about working to complete the PhD. The doubts and questions I have and what happens on the way. If all goes to plan – hah! life laughs at plans! – I shall be formally re-enrolling to finish writing up come April. So the next few weeks I will be looking at what accommodations I need, what’s realistic, figuring out what a working day can be and what it cannot. I’ve been on a trajectory of recovery, a slow getting-better, and maybe I will be one of the people – the specialist said 1 in 3 – that this will go away and that has to be a factor. So, the blog is back, and I am too.

*This. https://www.cdc.gov/me-cfs/about/index.html

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Experimental epigraphy: the Greenwich inscription revisited

Posted on November 29, 2015 by Claire_M

This gallery contains 6 photos.

Life and PhD and general priorities have interrupted plans to go and properly record the Greenwich riverwall inscription – I’m now thinking that RTI might be the best way to go, although the wooden brace in front of part of … Continue reading →

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An original Oresteia?

Posted on September 21, 2015 by Claire_M

This gallery contains 1 photo.

A peculiarity in staging classical tragedies is that they are too frequently judged by how close the performance is to how it would have (supposedly) been in antiquity. The risk is that this critique consigns these works to connoisseurship, or … Continue reading →

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Gathering Momentum

Posted on June 10, 2015 by Claire_M

HARN Weblog

[Just as a by the way, I was going to call this post ‘snowballing’ but on checking the spelling I discovered that while I think of snowballing as meaning either throwing snow around or corporate speak for increasing speed and mass there’s a section of the interwebs that think of it very differently! Who knew? I’m still stunned!]

Anyway, moving swiftly on – I had an email from Claire this week. Remember her Wikipedia editathon? Following on from her involvement with the TrowelBlazers editathon to tackle the absence of entries about women archaeologists on Wikipedia, Claire highlighted on her blog how there was the same masculist problem for women classicists and she decided to hold her own editathon. The session was hugely productive with editing of the Wiki entries for Eugénie Sellers Strong, Anna Maria van Schurman, Gisela Richter, Betty Radice, Virginia Grace and

View original post 521 more words

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‘Experimental epigraphy’ at Greenwich riverwall

Posted on April 28, 2015 by Claire_M

This gallery contains 6 photos.

There’s an especially fun-sounding area of archaeology termed ‘experimental‘, which pretty much means actually trying things out to see if your ideas about how things might have worked might actually be right. I don’t get to play though, as my PhD … Continue reading →

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Re-reading these childish things

Posted on February 15, 2015 by Claire_M

Again and it seems I’m writing anything but my thesis. Although that’s not quite true – I’ve about double the amount of words I’m allowed for the upgrade hurdle that all PhD candidates must clear to get from MPhil to … Continue reading →

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A jocular and political tale in which a blogger may be digressing out of her depth

Posted on November 30, 2014 by Claire_M

As I continue to study for a doctorate, I’m uncomfortably aware of how little I know about most things outside my field. So much so that it feels almost wrong to stray away from my subject and write about three … Continue reading →

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Edit-on dudes: #ClassicsWomen are into Wikipedia

Posted on September 28, 2014 by Claire_M

This gallery contains 1 photo.

This week, after a lot of planning and persuading people to get involved, I ran a Wikipedia editathon to create and improve the pages of women who have been important to classics disciplines. (And I mean disciplines – philology, archaeology, … Continue reading →

More Galleries | Tagged Archaeology, Classics, wikipedia | 8 Comments

Escaping the heat? Kenwood House’s dairy

Posted on July 22, 2014 by Claire_M

This gallery contains 4 photos.

On Sunday, wanting to escape both research and the furnace-blast of London’s heat-wave, I walked through the woods at Kenwood House, recently of Hollywood fame as home to Dido Belle, daughter of a slave, Maria – and niece of the … Continue reading →

More Galleries | Tagged history, London, Rome | 3 Comments

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