The year, the decade
I love the end of the year. I’m not really one for new year’s resolutions, but I can’t get enough of year-end lists and reflections, both my own and other people’s. I like having a chance to pause and think about what I actually did. Working from home as a writer makes time and my memory of it move in a strange way. I tend to experience and remember it in uneven chunks, depending on the story I was working on. Sometimes a chunk lasts for five intense days or less; sometimes it encompasses months. 2019’s time chunks tended to be on the shorter side, as I wrote more news stories and fewer features. (I was expecting this balance to result in more money, but it actually seems to have brought in slightly less, while making me feel like I was working more than ever. I’ll be rethinking my workload in 2020 with that in mind.)
Here are a few of my favorite stories of the year in no particular order. Some of them I’ve already shared here; others were published before I started the newsletter. (Some of these are the print headlines and some of them are online, depending on which one I liked better.)
1. “In Search of Sac Balam.” This is maybe my favorite story I’ve ever written and will definitely be what I remember most about 2019. Getting ready for it, going to the jungle to report it, and writing it defined so much of my year. It turned out just as I hoped—maybe better.
2. “Unearthing the Reality of Slavery.” The other feature I published this year, about the archaeology of slavery in the Caribbean. This is one that existed in my head as a topic long before I found the right project to cover, and I’m happy I finally did.
3. SAA harassment scandal. I was there when a sexual harassment scandal broke out at the Society for American Archaeology’s annual meeting, and thus I was inducted into the world of #MeToo reporting. I’ve never really thought of myself as a great reporter—I like writing much more—but I’m proud of how I jumped on this one and pushed the issue forward. Parts one, two, and three, and likely more to come in 2020.
4. “Believe in Atlantis? These archaeologists want to win you back to science.” Sometimes I feel like there could be nothing less urgent or important in 2019 than writing about the human past, how scientists study it, and how we all imagine it. And then sometimes I write about archaeologists getting death threats for pointing out that not only white people lived in Roman Britain, or white supremacists latching onto the idea of ancient aliens or white Altantians seeding all non-Western cultures, and I keep going.
5. “New species of ancient human unearthed in the Philippines.” It’s not every day you get to write about the discovery of a new human species, and let me tell you, it is really fun! In anthropology, the 2010s will be remembered as the decade the deep human past got really interesting in entirely unexpected ways, and despite my occasional doubts referenced above, I feel very lucky to have stumbled into this beat.
6. “Airport construction threatens Inca heartland.” I was one of the first foreign reporters to cover scientific objections to the construction of a new international airport near Cusco. It gave me so much to think about in terms of the intersection of archaeology, cultural heritage, and tourism, which I’m still working out and hope to write about more in the future. Stay tuned!
7. “Did the Black Death strike sub-Saharan Africa?” No scientific hypothesis I covered this year surprised me more than the idea that the plague could have devastated sub-Saharan Africa in the 1300s, just as it did Europe, and that historians and archaeologists have just…missed it. The past, it’s full of surprises!
Those are some of the articles that paid me. But of course I also started this newsletter this year, and it’s been one of my favorite parts of 2019. It’s done everything I hoped, from creating a space where writing could be fun again to connecting me more deeply to people I don’t get to see very often. Thank you all for reading.
And now, the decade. Sometimes I feel like I haven’t moved very far from where I was 10 years ago. I mean that literally, in part—I live just a little more than a mile away from where I lived then. I have the same dog, which means key parts of my daily routine have stayed shockingly, sometimes suffocatingly, consistent for the last 10 years. My life now feels like the logical and intended consequence of seeds I planted then. But of course, back then, I had no idea whether those seeds were going to grow or not.
During the 2010s, professionally and personally, I went forward, then backward, then a little bit forward with a whole lot of effort, and then a tremendous amount forward almost without realizing it was happening. I created my dream job. I became an official permanent resident of Mexico. I met my husband and got married. I saved enough money to not feel panicked about my future. (That’s the part that felt most impossible 10 years ago, honestly.) It was the first decade for which I was an adult all the way through.
Thinking about the decade this week, I realized that if you had asked me 10 years ago to describe my dream life, I wouldn’t have come up with anything as good as what I have now. That doesn’t mean I’m fully content or comfortable in this life. I’ve had to do a lot of work in therapy to learn to inhabit and appreciate it, and I’m still not totally there. But it’s truly still so much better than anything I could have imagined, and that’s worth remembering.
And because I love lists, here are some cultural objects, experiences, etc. that have meant a lot to me over the last ten years. (Written quickly and without any forcing, because I think that’s the best way of getting at the truth.)
Movie: Frances Ha
Book: Station Eleven
TV show: Mad Men
Song: “The Lion’s Roar” by First Aid Kit
Government program: Fulbright grant
Yoga studio/exercise experience: Uno Yoga
Party: My wedding
Ecosystem visited: The Andes
Runner-up ecosystem visited: Dartmoor
Article I wrote: “In Search of Sac Balam”
Article someone else wrote: “League of Men” in n+1. (Please read this if you haven’t, it’s so good.)
This is my last newsletter of the year, as I’ll be taking a break over the holidays. I’ll be back in your inboxes sometime in January. Happy hibernating!