Writing In Place

Someone once recommended to me that as an academic, you should always have three projects going: one is a project that is almost done (or deep in the writing phase), one is a project that is just getting started, but has a clear outcome in mind and trajectory, and one project that is speculative and emergent without a clear goal, trajectory, or tidy research focus. This summer at Polis, I’m working on a writing project (and with any luck, I’ll have something to share on Writing Wednesday) that focuses on the draft of the article on the kiln that I worked on over the winter. Most of what this is right now is integrating the catalogue with the arguments that we’re making. As part of this, we need to expand the catalogue by adding the analysis of a few objects that we hadn’t formally described. Of particular interest to us are the handful of pot stands found in contexts associated with the kiln and the later pool. These stands probably supported vessels that were “leather hard” and…