Two new stories
I published two print stories in this week’s issue of Science. (That’s a lot, for those of you not in the biz.) One is a feature that I’ve been working on, on and off, for nearly a year, and one is a news story I put together quickly in the rush of also finishing the feature. I probably should have said no to my editor’s request to do the news story, because I promptly got sick after closing both of them. But both could piss off the alt-right in their own ways, and I can almost always be talked into writing a story like that, no matter how overworked I am.
The first is a story about archaeologists studying slavery in the Caribbean. Wait, you might be thinking. Don’t we have history for that? Many people think that archaeology is all about solving ancient mysteries, and that once you get to the period where things are written down in a way contemporary scholars can understand, you don’t need archaeology any more. But as I say in the piece, the daily lives and experiences of enslaved Africans are some of the most enigmatic in modern history. That’s not an accident. Slavery tried to erase enslaved Africans’ individuality and humanity in the service of white supremacy and unchecked capitalism. But of course it didn’t succeed. For centuries and across generations, enslaved Africans held onto their agency and identities in the most oppressive and horrific of circumstances. And now, archaeology is really the only way to look at how they did that and what their daily lives were like.
I starting researching this piece last December, because I knew I wanted to travel for it and I needed to find the right project to visit during the summer fieldwork season. (I wrote a bit about the trip in a previous issue.) I was delighted to learn about the Estate Little Princess project on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Logistically it was at the perfect point to write about: On its third field season out of five, so they have some results but are still discovering new things. Colonial St. Croix was itself a surprising but also representative place. It was a colony of Denmark, which honestly I didn’t even know had colonies until I started researching this piece. But the estate was a sugar plantation, the crop most tied to the institution of slavery in the Caribbean, so I could make connections to other islands. And finally, it was important to me to highlight the work and voices of black archaeologists studying sites of slavery. I’ve done plenty of stories about white men studying cultures and experiences they have no connection to, and I’m sure I’ll do a lot more. I didn’t want this to be one of them.
I was grateful to be able to do the bulk of work on this piece after Science was called out for insensitive language and a Eurocentric perspective in another story about slavery. Neither my editor nor I worked on that other story, and I had pitched mine months before it was published—though no one outside the magazine cares about that, and they shouldn’t. I know my editor and I would have been extra careful with the language and tone of my story even if that hadn’t happened, but the fact is that we are both white, as are most of the people who work at Science. Having that public reminder of our possible blind spots and how not doing the work to be aware of them can hurt people was really helpful, both for me personally and for how seriously the magazine takes these issues. I hope I didn’t make the same mistakes, and that if I did, someone will tell me.
The second story is about an ancient DNA study of people buried in and around Rome over the past 12,000 years. It found that while the region’s genetic history more or less tracked with northern and central Europe for most of its history, during the Roman empire most city residents had Eastern Mediterranean (Greece, Turkey, Cyprus) and Middle Eastern ancestry. Now, I don’t love how seemingly the only way we can talk about ancestry in the past is to map it onto to a very modern vision of continental “races” (European, African, Asian, etc). Imperial Romans would not have considered themselves of a piece with what we now think of as “Europe.” Instead, the Mediterranean Sea was the organizing geography of their world. So to them this finding wouldn’t necessarily be surprising. They might be shocked that we, 2,000 years later, would be more inclined to lump them in with the rural “barbarians” in France and Germany than with the residents of other huge, cosmopolitan cities like Athens, Alexandria, and Constantinople.
However. The alt-right has recently adopted ancient Rome (and ancient Greece) as a sort of white, patriarchal Eden. There are many reasons why this is ridiculous, and genetics is only one. But the more I can write about a different, more inclusive, and more accurate way of seeing the ancient world, the better. That’s why I wrote this story even though it resulted in objectively too much work. I hope you like the results.
Recommendations
Give Me Your Hand by Meagan Abbott. Only one recommendation this week because of the aforementioned illness. This is the book I devoured while recuperating in bed. It’s a psychological thriller that takes place in a lab studying PMDD, otherwise known as PMS from hell. Meagan Abbott is really good at plot, and at female rage. Put it on your sick day/beach vacation/long flight list.