Last week, Josie, Catriona and I had our first official project meeting in Exeter. This was the first time we have been able to meet in person since we first met at the AHRC Lived Environment workshop, and it was really good to see them both. I had some spare time before the meeting, so I walked around Exeter seeing the Cathedral, castle and the Roman wall. There are some photos below, but sadly I forgot to take photos of us in the meeting itself!
The main things we needed to talk about were the workshop and the conference. In terms of the first workshop, I had prepared for the meeting by looking for as many isotopic studies on slave remains as I could find. I found ten sites, not many, but more than I expected. One of the things we discussed was which of these sites we should focus on, and how many individuals we want to discuss. We need to have a fair number of individuals in order to capture the diversity of human experience – men, women, children, migrants, locally born and so on. We also talked a bit about the structure of the day, making sure that there is a lot of time for discussion. I have to admit that I am a bit nervous about meeting the writers – the things we can say with archaeological science are, in many ways, quite limited… How many of their questions will we be able to answer? What if they are just disappointed by the kind of things that I can say about the enslaved individuals?
In some ways, the academic conference is much more within my comfort zone – I pretty much know what to expect. We talked about the scope of the conference, and when and where to hold it. One of the interesting (or should I say difficult…?) things about the conference, is that what we are calling ‘Literary Archaeology’ is actually quite unusual (see Josie’s blog post from 15th Feb). Obviously, archaeologists who work in historic periods can and do use literature to inform their research, but what we are doing is somewhat unusual in academic circles. Nevertheless, I think its really important – I spend so much time treating the people I investigate as samples*, rather than real human beings with their own lives, hopes and fears, that I hope to gain a far more personal picture of the past from this project. What was it actually like to be a slave, taken from your home across the ocean to a completely new environment, with new people, new rules and new language? Hopefully by the end of the project I will be able to discuss this properly.
Emma Lightfoot
*Literally – most of the time I interact with the people I am analyzing they are about half a gram of bone in a test tube