the state of me

[bedlamsbard]

I don't think I've been this quiet on my journal for a long time -- I mean, if you discount the Avengers not-really-fic and the to-do lists. Anyway. The term's winding down; I had my last class yesterday and I'm going back to the U.S. on Sunday with two 5K papers ("projects," they're technically called. Whatever, they're totally papers) to write over winter vacation and turn in during the exam period in January. Sadly, one is due January 14, which means I have to come back to the UK before my birthday on the 12th, because I might need to use the UoL library. I really dislike spending my birthday away from home (I've done it three of the last four years), and I'm not sure that my flatmate N. is going to be back by then either, so I may be spending it alone. Moping. Probably doing some serious retail therapy. (I have no idea how I'm going to get all these books home in September. Or August. If I get into graduate school. No, I haven't applied yet; I've already watched one deadline fly by.)

Leicester (both the city and the university) are nice. I live pretty close to City Centre, so I tend to go down there and bum around the shops and Highcross when I'm bored or stir-crazy. When I come back in January I'm going to have to expand my territory to Queens Road, since I was there for dinner with the cohort on Tuesday and I saw two used bookstores and a yarn shop. (It's on the other side of Victoria Park, on the other side of the university, so it's a bit out of my way.) The university is...I dunno, it's a university. I don't live on campus (well, no one does), so I don't spend a lot of time there; I go for class, for meetings with professors, or to use the library (which I don't study in, because I'd rather take out the books I need and haul them back to my flat, so I can mainline tea and make a mess and watch episodes of NCIS:LA in between articles and paragraphs). I like my department, which is great; I'm going to be very sad next term because I won't have my Households & Domesticity in the Ancient World class with my two awesome profs who are, have I mentioned, awesome? I love them. (That was an awesome class.) I wrote my essay on textile production in the Greek and Roman worlds, ranted about sexism in archaeology (I can expand, if anyone's interested), and started spinning again because, well, I kept reading about it.

I actually do like being a graduate student, because I get to geek out about things I find exciting and other people either (a) also find them exciting or (b) at least understand what I'm talking about. I mean, I'm probably not the most dedicated student in the department, or even in my course, but still -- it's nice being with people who get excited about the same, or at least similar, things as you. This is problematic, since my plan is still to go and do early modern history and part of my brain keeps going, "But...classics is kind of awesome..." THIS IS NOT CLASSICS. This is Roman (and Greek) archaeology and ancient history. Not the same thing. Related: but not the same thing. And classics fucked me up. (Need to remember that. This is actually a pretty big deal.)

Anyway: I now own a truly ridiculous amount of tea, because in my defense, it was (well, still is) on sale at Morrison's, and there's so much more variety of black tea in England and...uh...okay, so I have a whole lotta tea.

The weather...the weather is whatever. It's cold. I have a down jacket and a cashmere scarf and lambswool gloves and a handknitted wool hat, knee-high boots (one pair is even fleece-lined, though they also have a 2 1/2 inch-heel), and sweater tights to wear under my jeans if need be. My room has a heater and my duvet is surprisingly warm. I really wouldn't mind going back to the South, but at least it doesn't rain as much as I expected. Thankfully. (Now that I've said that, the entire month of January will probably be rain.) I have had my moments of really missing being able to wander around in shorts and a tanktop, or cleavage-y sundress. And sandals. I miss sandals. (And gumbo, and red beans and rice, and jambalaya, and beignets. What is New Orleans, a blood disease?)

My desk is a mess, and I would really like to at least put it in some semblance of order before I go home.

Also I got addicted to jelly babies. This stuff is like candy crack. Fortunately the store brand ones at Morrison's are cheap. Hopefully I don't give myself cavities.

In conclusion: I can't believe I forgot to go to Beowulf by Torchlight at the Jewry Wall (Roman ruins and museum, need to visit again) earlier this month and also, I have still never had mincemeat. Sometime in the spring I want to go visit Bath again, and I want to take this Celtic dyeing class at Flag Fen in January but I don't know how I'd get there from Leicester (take a train to Peterborough and a cab to Flag Fen, maybe?). (There's also Bronze Sword Casting and Roman Mosaics and Basket Weaving and Medieval Clothing, but I have a taste for fiber arts, plus there's a spindling addition.)

Comments

[deathsblood.livejournal.com]

I can expand, if anyone's interested. Please do (bearing in mind I know basically nothing about archaelogy).

[bedlamsbard]

Sure. When archaeologists are excavating, one of the things that they do is try and figure out who was at a site -- was it just men here, were there women, what about children, that sort of thing. In some cases, you have specifically gendered artifacts: spindle whorls are always, always associated with women (at least in the classical world), because we have no literary, epigraphic, or archaeological evidence that men ever span. Other fiber and textile production tools, like loom weights, are also associated with women because textile production was a female-oriented process. A lot of the time, jewelry like brooches, rings, and earrings (or what's left of them: sometimes this is just beads) is strongly associated with women too. Some archaeologists do a lot with shoes in order to determine whether they belonged to men, women, or children. (This is especially common while excavating Roman forts, because a major debate is on whether or not there were actually women within the forts or not.) All of this seems pretty straight-forward, right? If you have these artifacts, then there were probably women at that site.

Well. Not exactly. Let's start with jewelry: men also wore brooches, rings, and even earrings. Brooches (specifically the Roman fibula) were in fact the normal method of fastening clothing for both genders for centuries. You can make some assumptions based on type, but even that's not foolproof. One problem is that when excavating graves, it used to be fairly common for archaeologists to just note down "fibula" and not add details, and sometimes you can't tell if the extant skeletal remains are male or female. With rings you can (again) make guesses based on the size of the ring, but some men have small hands and some women have large hands. Roman Italian men generally didn't wear earrings, but eastern men (who would have served in the Roman army) did. While jet is associated with women, there are cases of jet jewelry being found on male skeletons. And yet the automatic response of a lot of archaeologists is to see bling and say, "Aha! Women were here!" when in fact it's not that straightforward.

Now, when it comes to textile production tools, you kind of have the opposite problem. Only women span wool, so spindle whorls always mean women, but, at least in the Roman world, there were also male weavers, so loom weights don't always mean women. This is complicated by the fact that most of the instruments of textile production, including the end product, the cloth itself, almost never survive down to the present day because they're perishable. We get loom weights and now and then other bits and pieces. We almost never get a full set of loom weights (about 60-100). This is relevant, because strangely among archaeologists, having enough loom weights to actually count as a full set (about 50+) somehow translates to "male weavers working in a workshop setting producing cloth for commercial purposes" and fewer loom weights means "female weavers working in a domestic setting producing cloth for household purposes," even though what it actually means is just that not all the loom weights survived. This despite the fact we have epigraphic evidence that says that female workers (probably slaves) worked in workshops as well, and also that there's this strange idea of a big difference between domestic and commercial.

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE. One major thing with loom weights and spindle whorls is where in the Greek or Roman house they're found. With Greek houses, there's this idea of the "women's quarters", as attributed in Xenophon and a bunch of law court speeches. This has led to archaeologists trying to divide up the Greek house into "men's space" and "women's space," with the assumption that this metaphorical wall was never breached. (Which is to say: there is a gendered male space in fancier Greek houses called the andron, the dining room used for male symposia, but it's still difficult to say this was just male. Respectable women didn't attend symposia, but hetaerae (courtesans) and female musicians and dancers (who could also be prostitutes) certainly did. So even that isn't all male.) One reason that trying to divide up the Greek house is difficult is because in quite a few cases, there were actually (at least) two floors, but the second floor never survives, so basically all archaeologists can look at is the ground plan. So some archaeologists just relegate women to the upper stories (there is some textual evidence for this as well, but it's...mixed). But because of the idea of the "women's quarters", there's also the (modern) idea that women must have stayed inside all the time! Therefore: was the courtyard (and many Greek houses did have courtyards) male space or female space? Could it have been, gasp, both? SURELY NOT. Women did their textile production inside, where prying eyes couldn't have seen them! Oh, wait, have we found archaeological evidence of textile production in the courtyard? Where there would have been...light? So women could see what they're weaving? Oh...well, that must just be...a mistake...or have fallen down from the collapsed upper stories...or something. (Say the male archaeologists.)

Now, with Roman houses, you don't have men's and women's space attributed in the sources, and archaeologically you don't either. (Again, many of these houses would have had upper stories: they do not now, even in Pompeii and Herculaneum.) What you do have are loom weights and spindle whorls that are found in the atrium (basically, the big room that you see when you first walk into the Roman house; there is a giant hole in the roof to let in rainwater (the compluvium) which falls into a pool just beneath (the impluvium)), the peristyle (the decorative garden in the back of the Roman atrium house -- this is a problematic term, but I won't get into that), and in small rooms off the peristyle and the atrium (cubicula). Male archaeologists tend to assume that women would have been doing their weaving and spinning in the small dark cubicula, and men would have been doing their weaving in the atrium to sell commercially. Because that makes sense. Female archaeologists (some of whom actually have experience with handcrafting) suggest that extra loom weights and spindles were actually stored in the cubicula, but the work was done in the atrium and the peristyle garden, where there would have been enough light and space to work comfortably. (I generalize, but my "male archaeologists think this and female archaeologists think that" thing is actually borne out by my research, which is a little alarming.

I can go on and on, but I think I might stop now...

[lady_songsmith]

Sounds like you have the basis for an excellent and publishable paper here...

[bedlamsbard]

Somehow I suspect that publishing a paper criticizing a bunch of well-known established archaeologists might not be the best start to my academic career...