Writing Wednesday: Narrating the Afterlife of a Roman Bath

One of the more interesting conundrums that I’m encountering this summer is how to write about the afterlife of the Roman bath at Isthmia without getting dragged into endless detail (and the kind of fine grain arguments that archaeological knowledge requires). These kind of small arguments at the core of archaeological knowledge tend to be time consuming to write and have the ability to take up a lot of space in an article length publication. The one solution to this problem is to find ways to collapse many of the fiddly little phasing arguments into broader patterns across a structure. For the Roman Bath at Isthmia, this involves identifying four main contexts for the building and making broad arguments for the processes that created these contexts. Of course, this runs the risk of conflating myriad different processes together. At the same time, it is often the best way to compartmentalize archaeological arguments to keep the reader from getting lost in the details. 1. The Surface…