Dr. Claire Millington

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.   

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!

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.

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.

“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.”

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

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.

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

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!’**

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.

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.

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  

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

*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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

[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/

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?

*working assumption.

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.

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.

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’,¹  which 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.

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.

1. https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2017.1285798
2. https://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/eoghan-harris/eoghan-harris-brave-mayo-mandarin-who-kept-katyn-in-focus-26650728.html
3. See No.2 and https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1928/apr/25/foreign-office-mr-omalley
4. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48939821
5. https://history.blog.gov.uk/2014/12/08/administrators-of-the-british-empire

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.

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