A Tale of Two Days

Wednesday was one of the least fun, most wretched trip days in Greece so far.  Upon disembarking from the bus in Piraeus, the ancient and modern port of Athens which is just a few kilometers away, we were told to watch our step and look out for "syringes and human excrement."  Our professor wasn't kidding - never, ever have I seen so much shit, in so many colors, textures, and sizes, in one day of my life.  I even considered taking a photo, but since I once unfriended someone on Facebook for posting photos of her baby's poopy diaper, I decided to spare you all.  But consider this a background theme of the day. 

Then the wind and the rain started.  Sheets and sheets, which would stop just long enough to instill hope for a rainless future, only to start again.

The low point was standing in the pouring rain looking at the very scanty foundations of the Arsenal of Philo (which, bizarrely, doesn't have a wikipedia entry for me to link you to) in the middle of a building plot, listening to a presentation...before we realized that not 20 feet away was a perfectly good roof to stand under.

From under the roof.

Wait, I take that back: the low point was during our lunch break, when we tried to have a picnic on the bus, and the bus driver kicked us off, at the high point of the rain, because he had to move the bus.  We huddled together in a doorway, passing around hunks of bread and jars of peanut butter. 

But, like most things in Greece, the discomforts were balanced by pretty incredible archaeology finds and spectacular views. 

Crashing waves, the ancient fortification wall, modern city; the island of Aegina comes into view at left as the clouds clear.

Block for standardized measurements such as a foot, a hand, and a cubit (because, you know, everyone's fingertip to elbow is a different length).  So cool!

The other bits were fairly normal, but the hand was HUGE!

But also, this.

And that was going to be the end of this post, but I had a pretty spectacular day today, as days in the library go, when several things I've been working on for a long time finally came together and could be crossed off the list, including submitting an abstract to a national conference next fall, completing the handout for my presentation on Crete next week, and getting preliminary permission to stay in Greece for the summer to complete a museum studies requirement and play around with glass (more on that, hopefully, in a bit, provided it works out). 

But the most exciting, scariest, and monumental was finally sending my first ever article for peer-review to a journal editor for publication consideration.  On my final read-through this morning, I was feeling nostalgic for the journey this piece of scholarship and I have gone through together, from my first playing around with the idea and collecting data early in Fall 2011, complete surprise at the structure which emerged from the data, the first seminar paper it generated, its submission and eventual acceptance at an international conference last March, playing with more charts and ideas, experimenting with various visualization softwares, the second seminar paper, a summer of figuring out images and phrasing which would be appropriate for other people to actually read...  And, holy cow, is that last one a scary step: it's a long jump from a seminar paper with an audience of one or even a conference paper, with an auditory delivery and a lifespan limited to 20 minutes, to conceiving an article which anyone, anywhere, at any point in the next several decades could read and even use in their own research.  This, of course, is the ultimate objective of the whole academic discipline - to produce the kind of work people will read, cite, and internalize, which will contribute to our overall understanding of and appreciation for the human condition - and for me, the culmination of many years of writing, learning, thinking, and training as a student to become a scholar.  I feel totally, completely, 100% ready to make this jump, and I am damned proud of the article I sent off into the world today.

Return of the Mack

Well.

It's no secret to many of you that I had a bit of a rough Fall. I attribute this to many things: the move and missing old friends and my old city, lack of enthusiasm about most of my classes, generally getting used to the pressures and politics of a new department, community, and peer group, and, perhaps most significantly, the lack of direction which follows the achievement of a long term goal. For years, getting to this point - namely matriculating in the PhD program at Michigan - has really been my motivating force, the goal to which I directed all my professional efforts. And, now that I'm here, now what? Not to mention the completely depressing thought that I am 27 years old and just beginning this long march toward a doctorate. After working so hard to get to this point, all it seemed I had gained in return was the opportunity to work even harder to get to the next point - and I was not at all sure what I wanted that point to be. Figure six years more of this, then the race toward tenure - when would it end? Thoroughly demoralizing.

So I would get home at the end of the day and feel totally uninspired to write or think more about archaeology. This blog is supposed to be about the love I have for my field, and love I could not find. The last thing I wanted to do was confront and complain about all these frustrations, and I was operating under the "if you can't say something nice..." premise.

But, I now face a new semester and a new year. The dreaded first semester is over. Even better, I'm officially done with Greek! Any more Greek I do from this point forward will be of my own free will and I will have no one to blame but myself for the pain it causes. I'm genuinely excited about 3 of my 4 classes, and neutral on the fourth. (Compare last semester, when I was neutral at best on all 4, even from the onset.) I have several resolutions for myself to make this semester better. Many of them are personal and designed to help me get out of the departmental bubble of stress and anxiety in which I have resided for the last several months. But perhaps most significantly, I think I have found a new 'ultimate' goal, a new aspiration to define and direct my forward progress from this point.

I spent last weekend at the Archaeological Institute of America annual meeting in Anaheim. I had no real reason to go, beyond showing up to appear invested in the field and hopefully network a bit. I ended up being extremely glad I did, though. My old undergraduate department is hiring, so many of my old professors who don't typically attend the meetings were there. We had an impromptu reunion with a few other former students who happened to be around, and it was just brilliant. These are the people who originally inspired me to do this with my life, and they have always been supportive, encouraging, and just a joy to spend time with. Both of my graduate school departments have also been good, and I have no real complaints about them, but the atmosphere is just different. I'm a favored child of my undergrad department, and they have known me for a long time - a benefit of friendships I'm coming to appreciate more and more the older I get and more people I know.

There was also a great session about Career Strategies for graduate students in archaeology. The panelists were frank but also encouraging, and they made a lot of points which were nice to hear (not least of which is that being older, and having more life experiences, is all the better these days on the job market). And suddenly it dawned on me: my 'ultimate' goal is to have a tenured job at Macalester, or at least a similar institution. A high performing, liberal arts school in an urban environment that values scholarship and teaching, multicultural experiences, and has great departmental dynamics and support. Sure, a lot always depends on timing, what jobs open when I happen to need one, but as far as thinking about how I ultimately want to tailor and market myself goes, this is a pretty concrete and, I think, attainable goal.

So there it is. The next real, big goal of where I want to end up. I still hope to run my own field project one day, and want to keep some doors open toward working in non-profits or NGOs instead of the academic market (shhh, don't tell), but in all reality - who am I kidding - academia it will be.

I feel a spark of the love returning. Time to fan the flame.

I'm Back

I'm currently sitting in the Reference Room of the Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan, and for the first time in twelve days, I feel at home in Ann Arbor.

I had to come to the library to check some references for the ridiculous weaving tools paper that I started way back in January. When I got to DS110 (the call number for books on archaeology in Israel), I found myself in a wonderland of knowledge, books I'd only dreamed about or heard of or never knew existed. DS110 at the University of Minnesota was rather pitiful, about six or seven shelves in total, and spread out among regular size, quartos, and folios to save shelf space by putting the tall books only with other tall books. DS110 at Michigan is at least 3-4 times as big. Minnesota, annoyingly, stopped obtaining archaeology books around 1980, and had the habit of only acquiring one or two of a series, ie the book on lamps from the City of David but nothing else. Then, you had to engage in a big fight with the interlibrary loan system to convince it that you needed City of David IV, and the one in the collection was City of David II. Here at Hatcher, serials are prettily lined up in rows because they're all here! Plus all the Atiquots, Tel Avivs, Palestine Exploration Quarterlies... heaven. Just heaven. And that was before I turned around and discovered all the books on Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.

Granted, I could always ILL this stuff, and often did. But as great as the modern computerized card catalogue is, and as helpful as bibliographies are, sometimes visually perusing the shelves is necessary in order to find just the right source. For example, I found a 2008 book called Textile Production in Pre-Roman Italy (in GN799, not DS110, just to be clear) which looks to be relevant and beneficial to the weaving tools project.

The move has been overwhelming in many ways, full of "we're not in Minnesota anymore, Toto" moments. With three and a half weeks between my arrival and the start of classes, I've had a fair amount of time to think about just what I'm getting myself into, not just for the next 5-7 years, but conceivably for the rest of my life. And I've had some doubts, to be honest. But my little sojourn this morning reawakened some passion and excitement, like a little reminder ribbon of who I am and why I'm here. I'm not in Michigan to sit at the DMV for three hours, or to discover the local grocery stores don't carry Rosetto tortellini or the small size of frozen pizza or Mrs Renfro's black bean salsa, or even to go visit my sister only four hours away. The reason I'm here is to utilize the books in DS110 and elsewhere to learn new things and discover new ways to think about those things. And maybe, just maybe, influence the way others perceive and interpret those things as well.

Speaking of, I suppose I should get started on just that.

Defended

Claire has sufficiently shamed me into a new post, even though (I promise!) I'd been meaning to get around to it since, as she pointed out, it has been a month.

I passed my written and oral defenses over a week ago. Overall, they went fairly well. I had a written slide exam, with 4 minutes each to identify and discuss 15 images and 10 minutes each for another 3. The only thing that worried me after completing it was if I had, in such a short time, provided the information my adviser would be looking for in my answers, as I generally didn't have time to write down everything I knew about any given image. We discussed my exam at a dinner party later that week, and she laughed about how she'd had fun making up the exam, including several controversial or curious images, that we'd discussed in several contexts, just to see what I'd say about them. (One of them was the Cave of Pan, which is the alternate site for the temple Herod built to Augustus προς Paneion, as opposed to Omrit. I skirted the issue by talking about the cave itself, rather than any temple that may or may not have been there...) She further observed upon looking at my exam that I had taken it a bit more seriously in the writing than she did in the grading.

My oral exam was more pleasant, mainly casual discussion about both my Herod paper and an earlier version of my beads paper, which is still very much a work in progress. My committee members asked me some questions, some of which I had never considered an answer to or was completely ignorant of, but that was ok. My advisor was glowing in praise of my work, suggesting that I consider working up a version of Herod for an article in Near Eastern Archaeology (a semi-scholarly journal), although the two others were less effervescent, I suppose. They sent me out of the room for about five minutes, brought me back in, said cursory congratulations, and left. It was rather anticlimactic, as I found myself gathering up my things in the emptied room, looking around, not sure what to do next. Didn't anyone want to take me out for a drink???

Silly me, I had expected it to be more like my Honors project defense when heaps of laud and praise would be poured over my head as a slave (in the form of Rosamund Rodman) sat behind me saying "Remember you are only a man" (and God is not gendered). Even my current advisor is usually very complementary, but no real support or encouragement from my other committee members. I suppose, in reality, the goal of my time at Minnesota was not to complete a Master's degree, although that was a necessary by-product of the actual goal, which was to get into a program like Michigan. So the real triumph of my education here occured a month ago, and my defense was of course anticlimactic.

I've had a difficult time keeping motivation and spirits up post-defense, so I have taken today off completely from work and school. Oddly, when I woke up this morning, I was possessed by a desire to catch up on the pile of journals and articles that have been sitting on my coffee table, waiting to be read, for months. On my day off, what I wanted to do more than anything, was read archaeological articles. So I did (in between making blueberry muffins and reading the New York Times). And I remembered: I really, really, really love my field, and I am proud and excited to be a part of it. One day, I'll have articles in these journals, and they'll review my books, and I'll have an array of issues lined up on the floor to ceiling bookshelves of my tenure-track office.

20 days to Israel.

Go Blue!

Aside from several airport delays getting in and out of Chicago on Sunday (into Monday), my Michigan trip went very well. I had a moderate freak out when I got there Thursday night, however, as I realized that I had not made UPenn's first cut. (Other people had heard from them, and were scheduled to go to a similar visit weekend in Philadelphia.) Ultimately, that put much more pressure on the Michigan visit, as it was officially became the only program in play. Compounding this nerve-racking state of affairs was that it seemed everyone else visiting had several other visit weekends lined up at places like Penn, Brown, Berkeley... and I just had this one. Granted, I didn't apply to most of those places, because I didn't want to go there and I felt that I could get into a place I actually did want to go, so why bother, but it didn't help the nerves every time someone asked "So what other programs are you visiting?" for me to say "None."

But that was Thursday, and by Friday and Saturday I had calmed down somewhat. I was able to spend some time with people I know from Kedesh - a huge boon in such a stressful and odd scenario - and I had lovely conversations with several professors. I never felt like I was particularly being grilled or evaluated; it was all very informal receptions, dinners, tours, and so on. I was most impressed with the library resources (one librarian assigned just to archaeology and Classics, who buys books specifically related to what students and faculty are working on! A book-generating machine!) and the collegial atmosphere among graduate students and faculty. The people all seemed to genuinely like and respect each other. Unlike Minnesota, where professors are all "Professor", professors at Michigan were universally called by their first names. I take this as a very strong sign of the suitability of a department to my personal style and preferences - and I'm not a girl who stands on formality. This is all on top of what I already knew about the program: that it is one of the top three in reputation and training in the country, that it encourages museum research and offers a museum studies certificate, and that students are competitive for research fellowships and international programs.

Today, I officially found out that I would receive full funding - tuition and fees, health insurance, and a modest but adequate living stipend - for the 5-6 years it will take me to finish my PhD. Finally, finally, after years of hard work and dreaming, my future in this field is at least somewhat assured. I will earn a PhD in Classical Art and Archaeology, from the University of Michigan no less. This will be my career, this will be my life.

PhD, University of Michigan, 2015!

Michigan and other excitement

I've been a little frantic the last couple days, between Rhys' visit to the Twin Cities and my impeding departure to the University of Michigan for four days starting tomorrow, and blogging tends to fall to the bottom of the list when I have basically three work days over a two week period during Midterms.

I scheduled my MA Defense today. I'm pretty excited about it, actually. From my understanding, the three members of my committee and I will just discuss my two thesis papers, both of which I like and am proud of the work I did for them. I also like all my committee members, so really, it's just an opportunity to talk about things I'm interested in with intelligent, knowledgeable people for two hours. I say this now.

Michigan this weekend will determine my funding, and thus my ability to go there. It'll also be nice to see the department and meet more people in the program. This will all help me be able to begin to visualize my life post-Minnesota. Crazy. Still no word from Penn yet. I really wish they would just get moving; it will help to have all the information at hand when decision making time comes.

Also have dates for Israel this summer. Once again, I'll be there from about Memorial Day to the middle of July. Told you there was much excitement afoot!

And, finally, my friend Casey, fellow archaeologist, sent me this link for to discuss here. Alas, time does not permit the analysis this deserves, but I post for your general amusement:
Do these mysterious stones mark the site of the Garden of Eden?

I will admit to being genuinely perplexed at several statements made therein, particularly since the article appeared to quote *real* archaeologists in support of this wackjob theory. (Ian Hodder, hello!) But then I found a discussion of the same site in Smithsonian Magazine, and it all made sense:
Gobekli Tepe: The World's First Temple

So, there you have it, personal life and professional world updates all wrapped into one post! Tada!

"I am very pleased to tell you..."

It's been an exciting week so far in the life of this archaeologist. I gave my talk on "Beads and Beadmaking in the Ancient World" to the Upper Midwest Bead Society on Monday night, and it went fantastically. I was marginally nervous about it because their talks generally consist of how-to-make-jewelry sorts of things and mine was certainly much more "academic." Also, they paid me $50, so I felt some compunction to not completely suck. But they laughed at my jokes, asked lots of questions, and gave me some really great ideas about a couple pieces. One lady came up to me afterward and said "I'm an engineer, and it was so nice to actually have a talk with actual scientific sorts of information." They've already asked me if I can return next year, but....

I won't be here, because I found out today that I was admitted to the University of Michigan Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology! Michigan has been a beacon of archaeological achievement to me for years. It's been my dream program and my first choice. Two years ago, they rejected me. But today, today, they accepted me. The one downside is that this admittance comes with the slight caveat of no financial aid. They determine packages after an "informal" interview and visit process the first weekend of March. And, no money would mean no PhD for Kate. But I'm feeling really good about it, and the most difficult part has certainly been surmounted. (My chances now increase from the 1 in 16 they admitted to probably something like 5 in 8 who will recieve financial aid.) It also bodes really well for the University of Pennsylvannia, which does give aid to everyone admitted. Months ago, my advisor assured me that I'd get into Penn but she wasn't sure about Michigan. Yeah baby!