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.

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.

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.

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.