Tag Archives | PhD

A day: Professional Service, the Dissertation, and Happy Hour

By on July 29, 2011 in Day of Archaeology, DayofArch2011, Education

What this archaeologist will not be doing today: digging.

A day in my life, as a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at Michigan State University (but residing in the historical archaeology mecca of Williamsburg, Virginia), is often a a struggle between writing my dissertation and taking care of other archaeologically related business that seems to pop up throughout the day. For example, my morning today started with taking care of some professional service responsibilities. As a graduate student, I have been doing my part to make sure I can weasel my way into making an impact on how my discipline works professionally. Often, this is a difficult task for a grad student, but, I consider it important. This morning (after a bit of sleeping in because I was up late grading for my online introduction to archaeology course) I sat down to a number of emails and tasks relating to professional organizational business. I have managed to find a niche within my organization, the Society for Historical Archaeology: social media. Part of my responsibilities has been running the Facebook and Twitter pages for the upcoming conference in Baltimore. Additionally, I have been working closely with other members to develop an action plan to get the entire organization to use social media in a comprehensive and effective way. We are making solid progress.

 

My afternoon, however, will be much different. This afternoon, I write.  I swear. I will write and write and write. And not just any writing: dissertation writing. At 1 pm ET, I will sit in my chair, and work on my dissertation. This is probably the hardest part of being a graduate student, archaeology or otherwise, is writing every day. Today’s subject will be outlining a theory section, which makes it even more painful to think about. The subject of my dissertation are two slave quarters in Southern Maryland, one of which was occupied until the 1950s.The theory is a look at communities, agency, and social relations. It will be loads of fun…

The GreenLeafe: Local Archaeologist watering hole since....well, forever.

Fortunately, my day ends with every archaeologist’s favorite past time: Happy Hour (I am convinced that Day of Archaeology was scheduled on a Friday to ensure that there would be blog posts about beer). This evening is a special happy hour, in fact. Not only will I visit the local bar to share a beverage with my friends from the Colonial Williamsburg Digital History Center (the majority of whom are archaeologists, in fact), but this evening I will be saying goodbye to a fellow field tech from the James River Institute for Archaeology, a local CRM firm that I have been working part time for over the past few months (grad students need to pay the bills). He is heading off to graduate school, himself, and there is no better send-off then some beers with archaeologists at the GreenLeafe.

Happy Day of Archaeology everybody!

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Stock check

By on July 29, 2011 in Day of Archaeology, DayofArch2011

I should probably start by introducing myself – I’m Joe Williams, and I’m a PhD student.  I started my research about three months ago, at the University of Kent. My PhD is part of a larger project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, run by Drs Luke Lavan and Ellen Swift. This project is The Visualisation of the Late Antique City, and my contribution will be study of everyday urban artefact assemblages. If this project interests you, keep an eye on its website - at the moment all you’ll see is an “under construction” notice, but I’m gradually putting pages together in breaks from research so there should be more on there in the coming weeks.

Unfortunately for anyone who chooses to read this, the Day of Archaeology happens to correspond with my own “Day of Filing”, so there won’t be any news of fascinating ritual deposits, or any nice pictures (unless anyone really wants to look at a photo of a messy desk, in which case I’ll take one and send it to them). Earlier in the week I was helping out with organising and putting together an inventory of all the equipment stored in university buildings that belongs to the Late Antique Ostia field project, now in its fourth season; today I’m working at home doing a similar thing with the journal articles and other resources that I have on my computer (and as paper copies in folders, laptop bag, rucksacks, left in the printer and anywhere else you care to look). The main task of these first few months has been the literature review, so the hulking mass of things to read constantly threatens to overwhelm me! I’ve built up an extensive bibliography, organised thematically, but now I need to split most of it into two in order to keep works that present data and those that analyse data in separate parts of the essay – which will involve hundreds of quick checks, hence the filing.

The Institute of Classical Studies Library and the internet have been invaluable resources. So far it’s been a case of reading hundreds of abstracts, skim-reading tens of articles, and reading a select few articles in full, in order to have an overview of the relevant scholarship available. A lot of this has already been covered in the bibliographic essays included in Late Antique Archaeology volumes 3.2 and 5, so most of the work I’ve been looking at has been published since 2007. It’s incredible how much of this there is -if I could give one piece of advice to anyone about to start a research degree in September, it would be to pick a logical filing system as early as possible and stick to it! Endnote helps, but it has a few quirks so I find it helpful to arrange everything in such a way that I can find it without having to think up search terms that may or may not lead me to the right thing. Ideally this would be something I do on a daily basis, but of course it isn’t, so I need days like this once in a while to recover articles from the hiding places that seemed perfectly logical when I put them there. Speaking of which, I must get back to doing that.

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Pass – no corrections!

By on July 29, 2011 in Day of Archaeology, DayofArch2011

Hello again. Well, let’s start with the basics: I passed with no corrections required. This is pretty much the best possible outcome from a PhD viva. First of all a few words about the process, then onto the flavour of our discussions.

I met with my PhD supervisor ten minutes before the scheduled start of the viva, we had a general chat about how the viva might pan out and he was kind enough to drop some heavy hints that things were likely to turn out well. I was quite nervous as I entered the exam room and introduced myself to the examiners. I knew their identities in advance and I knew one of them fairly well as he is an academic at the same department where I was studying. Their opening gambit was not “what do you think you have achieved?” or “what do you think is your original contribution to the field?” but “let’s start by saying that you have passed and we will not be asking you to make any further corrections”. What a relief! This instantly put me at ease and the rest of the viva was then a vigorous discussion about my research, my conclusions and the nature of archaeology and government. This might sound dull to some of you but I promise it is all really important stuff.

One of the difficulties I encountered while conducting my research was attempting to reconstruct the actual history of how certain pieces of government policy were put together. I attempted to do this through interviewing key people in those processes, going through archives and reading about previous attempts by historians and archaeologists to do something similar. How was I supposed to differentiate fact from fiction and triangulate these various sources of data? Honestly, I’m not sure if I managed to do that sufficiently but I managed to convince my examiners that I had done the best that anyone could do. Another issue that we touched upon was whether I had been able to get a comprehensive picture of how and why certain government policies came into being. Had I varied my source material enough? This was something that I had been conscious of throughout my research. The formulation of public policy (and this is true in the case of archaeology policy) is a fairly opaque process which eludes critical examination. Nevertheless, I once again managed to explain my efforts to my examiners who made helpful suggestions for further sources of evidence that I might want to consult should I choose to publish my research. So, although my research was not about the archaeology of a particular place at a particular time, or about the emergence of farming or human evolution, it did exhibit the characteristics of all archaeological research: I was having to work with framgentory remains of past human experiences and reconstruct them into a coherent narrative that sought to explain something about our place in the modern world. That is what archaeology is all about.

Enough philosophising… back to the viva… after a full 75 minutes I left the exam room with congratulatory handshakes from my examiners and a hefty slap on the back from my supervisor. It’s great to be at the very end of my PhD research, it’s been a hard slog at times with some serious bouts of intellectual insecurity but it has also been an amazing journey through the intersecting worlds of politics and archaeology. I have discovered new things, met some amazing people and hopefully made a modest contribution to human knowledge (wow, that sounds heavy). My research activities have helped me to get a really interesting job with the Arts Council that looks more broadly at the development of cultural policy in England. I’ll try and write a post about that at the end of the day. In the meantime, it’s back to the day job…

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It’s viva day

By on July 29, 2011 in Community Archaeology, DayofArch2011, Education

Hello folks. This morning I have my PhD viva, so today is quite a significant day of archaeology for me.

A PhD is a postgraduate research degree that usually takes around three or four years to complete. In my case it has taken seven! (Mostly due to the fact that I have been working throughout that time.) The aim of a PhD is to produce a thesis of around 100,000 words in length that demonstrates the candidate’s ability to undertake independent critical research and makes an original contribution to knowledge in the field. The viva is the means by which PhD candidates and their work are examined. Today it’s my turn to go through this process. I have taken the morning off work (I am a researcher at the Arts Council) to come to the UCL Institute of Archaeology where I undertook my research.

I have been involved in archaeology since the mid 1990s and I came to London to do an undergraduate degree in archaeology in 1999. I haven’t stopped since! Over the years my research has moved from digging holes and examining artefacts to looking at the way in which archaeology connects with people’s everyday lives. My PhD research looked at government policy. Essentially, my thesis attempts to answer the question “why do we have laws that preserve some material remains of the past and not others?”.

The viva is at 10am and should last around an hour. There will be four people in the room: two examiners, my PhD supervisor and myself. I will have to defend the method, theory and findings in my research. The best kind of viva is a stimulating and challenging discussion between three researchers (the supervisor has to keep quiet!); the worst is an aggressive demolition of a new researcher by two senior academics with egos and reputations to protect. I expect that most vivas tend to resemble the former rather than the latter.

I will post again at lunchtime to let you know how I get on. Fingers crossed!

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A Day in the Life of… a PhD Student!

By on July 29, 2011 in DayofArch2011, Iron Age, Prehistory, Romano-British

Hi folks!

There are all kinds of contributors to the day of arch and I feel extremely proud to be one of them.  This is just an introduction to me and setting the scene for what I will actually be doing tomorrow.  My name is Rachael Reader and I am currently writing up my PhD thesis, hopefully handing in within the next three months.  My interest in archaeology began when I was eight (no, really!) when I was introduced to Time Team.  It seems a little cliched, but it is the God honest truth! My parents were more than happy to fuel my interest and let me dig up the back garden of my house in a little town, just outside of Barnsley (my best find to date is a 1980s ten pence piece…).  My parents found out where digs were happening and took me along to them, including one in York where I learnt the real truth about archaeology.  I had an illuminating conversation with someone working in the museum gardens who told me that archaeology was poorly paid, nothing like Time Team and definitely nothing like Indiana Jones (which meant little to me as even to this day, as I have still not seen the films!).  I asked the archaeologist why they still did it and they replied simply “because I love it”.  The enthusiasm he had, even when describing the negatives, sealed it for me and off I went to university to pursue my career.  I studied Ancient History and Archaeology at Birmingham University before doing my Masters at Cardiff, where I developed my current research interests in the later prehistoric period and particularly, the landscape approach to archaeology.

Whilst writing my Masters thesis I was pondering over what to do next.  I had spent several weeks here and there, excavating with the University but also community digs, including SHARP at Sedgeford in Norfolk.  I loved digging but had yet to know how commercial archaeology worked, so I began putting my CV together and waiting for jobs to come up at units.  However my supervisor directed me to an advert for a PhD position, at Bradford University and it involved two of my favourite things: Iron Age stuff and landscape! I could not resist and I eagerly put together my application, was offered an interview and ultimately the position, which I was thrilled to accept.  I began my current position in October 2008 and I feel a little sad that I am beginning to wind down and *gulp* hand in.

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