End of the Season Work

There’s this perennial issue with archaeology (at least how I practice it): writing mostly happens toward the end of a field or study season and this is exactly when my energy and motivation is lowest. As a result, writing final reports tends to be a slog not because I don’t enjoy writing about archaeology, but because they come at the very time when my energy levels are low and I’m starting to look forward to going home. Compounding this more is that I use writing as both a way to think through problems (and build testable hypotheses) and as a way to produce arguments. This means that I have to write to think through a problem properly as well as to produce an argument. (As an aside, I’ve always admired scholars who can produce an argument and hold it in their head rather than have to work it out on the page.) The problem with this is that as I work out the argument, I often diagnose problems with it or come to recognize that I need additional evidence to make it effective. By the…