#hardknott

Yes, I really am just coming out swinging at all of my own interests and potential career opportunities. These thoughts are all interrelated ideas that have been floating around recently during a few of my classes.

Recently, a professor poised the question, “are we [historians] good at our jobs?” Which then sent me into a long, impassioned speech about how the role of a historian is inherently flawed and the work will always be done badly, but we do the best we can with the knowledge and backgrounds that we have. Even a week later, with further ruminating on the question and my answer, I have not changed my mind. 

(I thought this photo of our visiting anthropologist at Vindolanda looking very done with me as I asked a question was fitting for this post)

The role of historians is to encourage constructive thought and a better understanding of one another through the studying and writing of history. Seems simple enough, but then you have to consider that when we study a person, event, time period, etc., there is always something missing, be it an event that was unrecorded, an artifact that was destroyed, or an account that was misconstrued previously. Then with writing, it is impossible to include every perspective (even if we had them) while also making it accessible to every level of interested parties and coherent as a written work in its own right. Going even further, the role of a Public Historian (to interact with the public and help in education and advancement of historical understanding) is a job that is already complicated by the aforementioned problems in studying and writing. 

Historians are bad at our jobs. Because we don’t have the tools to be good at our jobs. Those tools just don’t exist. But we do the best we can with what we have, and we are better than we were before. In the future, those historians will hopefully be better than us, but still bad, because it is a flaw inherent to our discipline.

But this failure can also be humbling, because if we recognize that we are always going to be doing an imperfect job, then we are motivated to try to do as perfect of an imperfect job as we can. Then future historians will have a stronger base to work from. I know especially as a grad student that a lot of us get hung up on the idea that any research we do has to be original, but nothing in research is completely original. We are always standing on the shoulders of our predecessors, as shaky as they may be. 

With a shaky foundation though, the metaphor continues that eventually the discipline will collapse in on itself. So why hasn’t it yet? My thoughts on why it hasn’t extend into why I think conservation is often a fruitless enterprise. One of the only guarantees that we have in life is that we will die. That knowledge, whether we can pinpoint it or not, is what motivates us to do anything with our time, because we know that time is finite. That impermanence applies to the material objects that we create too. Humans spend millions of dollars a year on embalming dead bodies in vain attempts to prevent the inevitable and ignore the reality that we will decay. Museums and archives do the same thing. We want to matter on a grand scale. Archaeology does the same thing, but in a destructive way. We go to great lengths to make our past matter, so that we matter in the present and will matter in the future. Even if we recognize that eventually everything will no longer matter, we prop up the institutions that allow for us to feel like we matter in the now, and fulfill our belief that we will matter in the future.

That got a little bit nihilistic. 

I am a Historian. I am a Public Historian. I am an Archaeologist. I participate in all the things that I just spent 500+ words saying are bad. Because wanting to matter is what it means to be human. And in my opinion, wanting to let other people know that they matter is what it means to be a Public Historian. There is a difference between telling someone that they matter and working with someone to prove that you believe that they matter, and that difference is what I like to explore. 

Hardknott Roman Fort Photoset 2, Hardknott Pass, Lake District, 22.6.19.