elanya

I'm all arrived safely chez skjaere, all is well. There are cookies and oranges and a kitty :)

This semester, I am doing three direct studies courses in order to finish up all the courses on my degree plan, and prepare for my prelims/comprehensive exams/big scary tests of doom. I have to write four of them, and I’m terrified :V

All three courses are with people on my committee. One is directly related to my thesis stuff, another is more or less related, and the third is less so, but will be focusing on holes in my education that I’ll need filled to pass the prelims. And I *might* be able to make it fit I there somewhere. Let’s examine them in a little more detail then, shall we?

The first is a directed study of general historical archaeological topics and techniques, to help me both get more acquainted to various movements and theories current in the field and, the thesis-y bit, find some good comparative sites to use for my thesis. I’ll talk more about that in a minute. I haven’t committed to produce anything for this study directly, but if I can get a head start on making catalogues and data tables for the thesis, I’ll be happy. And read a ton of stuff on using artefact categories and inter-site comparisons, and so forth. It should be useful, and hopefully fairly interesting.

The second directed study is in Atlantic history. The main purpose is for me to get a good grounding in what exactly this historic sbfied is, how it is being tackled, some of the problems and questions inside the field, what sort of work is being done, etc. Atlantic history is *like* maritime history in some ways, but also not. It is more about how the Atlantic created connections between groups and what those connections meant for people living in any particular area of the (mainly colonial) world. I’ve already got a list of books to look at, and some articles about the nature of the field to get through. I’m supposed to have as much of this done by March as possible. So…. Lots of work ahead of me. I plan to get through a bunch of my articles maybe this week depending on how my vacation goes (I seem to recall being more of a morning person than Mary, at least, but I dunno about Dustin/others ;), or over the weekend otherwise. I also have a really exciting book with me, that is on my list but probably not something I’m meant to tackle just yet…. Only I have it and not the other books, so hey! It is Seascapes: Maritime Histories, littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, a volume edited my Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen. It makes me excited – I read through the introduction today, and it only reinforced that this kind of interdisciplinary investigation of maritime peoples and connections is really just right up my alley. It even has an article on ships, by Hans van Tilberg (an ECU alumni I’ve met once or twice). Also more on pirates by Marcus Rediker, and lots of things in between, from all over the world. I’m very excited for this directed study because it will help me contextualize my research both historically (looking in to how what is going on in the Colonial Bahamas is a part of this broader Atlantic world), and theoretically (examining how the questions I am asking intersect with this interdisciplinary context – is it a useful approach, what can it tell us, etc). *Very* interesting, hopefully useful, but has the potential to make more problems rather than provide any answers.

The final directed study is probably the most formalized, and it is with my thesis chair. I need to look more directly at ships for my prelims, and there are a lot of “New World” ships that I know nothing about, which is kind of a big hole considering my focus in the program. But because I’m still more interested in social questions, I am steering things in that direction again. I want to look more at spatial analysis and social hierarchy, which is really my favourite thing about ships. This is, I fact, the second time I have looked at this in the context of 18th century stuff, but I’m broadening here time wise a but, and also narrowing my focus to the archaeology, as oppose to looking also at the (much richer) historical record. As well as reading about lots of ships, I am hopefully going to look at other ways people have used spatial analysis archaeologically in general. I’d like to get some kind of publication out of this research, since it isn’t *directly* related to my thesis work. We’ll see how it goes.

So, then, the thesis. I don’t know if I have actually talked a whole lot about what it is I actually plan to do for my dissertation (I know I keep calling it a thesis, but that’s just force of habit. I really am working towards my PhD, honest!) in here, but why not now? I‘m sure those who have been paying attention and/or care already know that I’m planning to do some work (excavation, that is) at Harbour Island this spring. But what does this mean, and what’s the point, and what am I hoping to achieve there?

I am interested in identity, and increasingly I’m interested in the concept of a ‘maritime identity’, and how the maritime physical environment impacts how individuals and communities think about themselves in this context (and even, *if* they do). Specifically, I’m interested in the Colonial period, because I got here from being interested in pirates. In my MA Thesis (yes really a thesis) at ECU, I was looking at whether or not you can really identify pirates in an archaeological context by looking at different categories of material culture. Essentially I was looking for patterns is the stuff dug up at sites where pirates were know to have operated.

There were a lot of problems with my thesis – I had a really small number of sites to work with, and obviously not everyone at the sites over the period of time they spanned was a pirate. The pirates who were there weren’t necessarily involved in any piratical acts where they were there. Oh the holes I could point out… Anyway, it isn’t important. What is important was the big hole that other people pointed out to me: whether or not I could identify any particular patterns at these sites, there was no way that I could distinguish pirates from any other maritime group. Some people don’t think there is a difference. I don’t believe that to be true – the historical accounts suggest that pirates had access to more diverse material culture, and distributed and used it differently, and in different contexts than the average Jack Tar. However, I can’t prove it because we don’t know what other maritime groups look like in the material record either.

So that’s where I stand, right now, and that’s what I want to see. What does a maritime material culture assemblage look like? This has its own problems. If we can’t distinguish pirates from other maritime groups, can we distinguish maritime groups from their broader cultural context? What even is a maritime group? Do they exist outside of specific working contexts?

…. Well it is 6:38 and we’re starting to board. So although I have many (many…. Many… many… Did I mention many?) more thoughts on this, you’re going to have to wait to hear about them until I have time to start another post! Ha!