Tag Archives: archaeology

dimitri

New Year’s resolutions

This past semester has been a transition. I started a new job at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Classics department. I acted (and am acting until the end of the academic year) as director of graduate studies, I taught a new and challenging class (even if it involved very familiar material), and got used to operating in a new administrative and educational environment. My family also had health problems that made it hard to think about much besides keeping ourselves alive and our heads above water.

My New Year’s resolution, then, is get back to basics: to read more and to write more. Research involves writing, and I need to practice my craft in different forms: short and long, formal and informal, online and offline. I also need to get to reading. Despite coming off of a sabbatical, I feel impossibly behind in all of my reading. Here’s what’s on my reading list, in no particular order:

  1. Shannon Lee Dawdy, Patina: A Profane Archaeology (Chicago 2016)
  2. Daniel Jew, Robin Osborne and Michael Scott (eds.), M.I. Finley: An Ancient Historian and his Impact (Cambridge 2016)
  3. Brian Epstein, The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences (Oxford 2015)
  4. Erin Walcek Averett, Jody Michael Gordon, and Derek B. Counts (eds.), Mobilizing the Past for a Digital Future: The Potential of Digital Archaeology (Grand Forks 2016)
  5. Maurizio del Freo and Massimo Perna (eds.), Manuale di epigrafia micenea: Introduzione allo studio dei testi in lineare B, 2 vols. (Padova 2016)
  6. Mario Liverani, Imagining Babylon: The Modern Story of an Ancient City (Berlin 2016) 
  7. Eva Von Dassow, State and Society in the Late Bronze Age: Alalah Under the Mitanni Empire (Bethesda 2008)
  8. Bruce Routledge, Archaeology and State Theory: Subjects and Objects of Power (London 2014)
  9. Margaretha Kramer-Hajos, Mycenaean Greece and the Aegean World: Palace and Province in the Late Bronze Age (Cambridge 2016)
  10. Justin Jennings, Killing Civilization: A Reassessment of Early Urbanism and Its Consequences (Albuquerque 2016)
  11. Nicholas Postgate, Bronze Age Bureaucracy: Writing and the Practice of Government in Assyria (Cambridge 2014)
  12. Evi Gorogianni, Peter Pavuk, and Luca Girella (eds.)., Beyond Thalassocracies: Understanding Processes of Minoanisation and Mycenaeanisation in the Aegean (Oxford 2016)
  13. David Pettegrew, The Isthmus of Corinth: Crossroads of the Mediterranean World (Ann Arbor 2016)

Plus all the ones I’m forgetting about because they’re sitting in my office on campus…

dimitri

Time to degree and the 10,000 hour “rule”

This morning over coffee I was describing the enormous amount of work that went into a mutual friend’s dissertation that I happened to be reading for professional reasons, and it reminded me of the 10,000 hour “rule” that originates from research written by Anders Ericsson and popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell summarizes the rule as follows:

…  excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice … In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

Of course, Gladwell’s summary is simply not true. Ericsson made a much more limited claim:

Our research on expert music performance focused on objectively measurable performance and claimed that this type [of] performance is improved gradually by deliberate practice (defined as the engagement with full concentration in a training activity designed to improve a particular aspect of performance with immediate feedback, opportunities for gradual refinement by repetition and problem solving) and by maturation (responsible for increases in height and body size). …

Our main point was that the best group of violinists had spent significantly more hours practising than the two groups of less accomplished groups of expert violinists, and vastly more time than amateur musicians. There is nothing magical about exactly 10 000 h.

It occurred to me that in my little corner of the Academy, 10k hours is indeed often necessary to research and write a really good dissertation. My wife’s dissertation is based on 4.5 metric tons of pottery from ancient Corinth, which, she estimated for me, probably took her about 10,000 hours to study.

This means that if you work 10 hours a day, every day (and she worked much harder than that!), it will take you 2.74 years to write your dissertation. That seems about right; the PhD in Archaeology at UCL, for example, is a three-year degree. But this is a research degree. In North America, we require more than just a Ph.D. from our Mediterranean archaeologists and historians in Ph.D. programs: we require them to be expert at both Greek and Latin language (or at least one of the two), literature, history, and culture.

How long does it take to become an expert in the ancient languages? (We’ll set aside all the other material we require students to master, like history and literary analysis). A long time. The average undergraduate course in Greek/Latin will consume at least 180 hours of “deliberate practice” (15 week semester * (3 hours of class per week + 9 hours of work outside of class per week)) and it is wonderful if students applying to Ph.D. programs in Classics have four years of each language. So, by the time a student gets to graduate school, s/he will have logged about 1500 hours in Greek and another 1500 hours in Latin. Once in graduate school, s/he’ll need to refine her skills and increase her reading speed to get through the reading lists that are required for all Ph.D. programs. I’d guess that a good graduate student spends about 1000 hours per year on each language (25 hours per language a week * 40 weeks per year), normally for 3 years. That means that after three years of graduate school, our hypothetical student will have 4,500 hours of practice in each ancient language.

Adding those together gets us pretty close to our (wholly arbitrary) 10,000 hours, and we’re working graduate students at the languages alone 50 hours a week! Then, once they’ve passed their exams proving that they’ve read, understood, read about, and thought about these texts, we ask them to write a brilliant dissertation, which may (depending on the project, of course) require another 10,000 hours of work to become expert. (Reading Homer doesn’t help you to identify pottery, after all!)

This is why I am skeptical when I read about proposals to shorten time to degree at humanities Ph.D. programs. The “time to degree” issue has gotten a lot of press, including this 2007 piece in the New York Times (featuring, I’d add, a Classicist who planned to finish his Ph.D. at Princeton in 2008, which would have been a time-to-degree of 5 years; he actually finished in 2010, so seven years, and now he’s a lawyer). The MLA released a report in May of last year suggesting that

Departments should design programs that can be completed in five years from entry into a doctoral program with a bachelor’s degree as the highest degree attained.  If departments change the structure of the curriculum and examinations, articulate and monitor a reasonable scope and time frame for the dissertation project, design a careful mentoring process, and provide sufficient financial support to allow students to progress appropriately, a five-year doctorate ought to be achievable.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) they didn’t tell anyone how to achieve this goal.

I have a hard time seeing many departments in my area improving this situation, since I don’t see the number of expertises we expect from our students decreasing over time. Archaeology is increasingly requiring less and less of the languages in research (but graduate students need to be able to teach the languages if they want to have access to the widest pool of jobs once they graduate). On the other hand, archaeology requires more from graduate students in respect to non-Classics skills: GIS, database management, working with techniques for digital imaging, understanding (and/or making use of) archaeological science, and so on.

It took me eight years to get the Ph.D.: two years doing the M.A. and another six doing the Ph.D. One of those Ph.D. years was spent doing the regular program at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. My year in Athens was formative, personally, professionally, and intellectually, but it slowed down my time to degree. I took a long time to actually write the Ph.D.: about three years. Again, that time was well-spent, I suspect. It meant, among other things, that I could publish articles out of the dissertation while I was swamped with the work of teaching full-time for the first time at a series of one-year positions (an increasingly common experience for most Ph.D.s) while applying for tenure-track jobs.

The 10,000 hour “rule” isn’t a rule, of course. But it does point at something meaningful. How can we expect to reduce time to degree without reducing the expertise of the students who graduate on the other end? I see no substitute for spending lots and lots of time reading Greek and Latin, learning GIS and other software programs that are increasingly necessary for graduate students to learn, and sorting through 4.5 metric tons of pottery. Not if we plan to produce students that are well-trained Classicists and have done the requisite work to make an original contribution to knowledge about the ancient world.

dimitri

Gender disparities in archaeology

The blog Doug’s Archaeology recently had a great post about the disparities in NSF archaeology grants between men and women. Briefly, he showed that about 70% of all applications for NSF grants in archaeology are held by men. But this figure is even less than the proportion of all applications for NSF grants in archaeology that are made by men (75%). So there is a gender disparity between the proportion of applicants, but not in acceptance rates.

A separate issue is the composition of panels at conferences. One study of the annual meetings of the American Society for Microbiology found that the number of women invited to speak at organized panels correlated with the number of women involved in the organization of those panels. Thus, panels organized by men invited mostly male speakers (75%), whereas the representation of women increased (from 25% to 43%) on panels whose organizers included at least one woman.

Curious, I ran a quick analysis of the last annual meetings of my professional association, the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA). I found that in panels organized by one or more men (and no women), 66% of the speakers were male; in panels organized by one man and one woman, the speakers were 50% male; and in panels organized by one or more women, 47% of the speakers were male. [Disclosure: I organized a panel at the 2014 annual meeting of the AIA with two other men; we invited two women and three men to present papers.]

Most panel organizers were men (24, compared to 14 women) and most invited speakers were men (69, compared to 53) women, so that in sum, 57% of all invited speakers at the AIA were men. (Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to run the numbers on the open panels, to see what proportion of speakers are male and female.)

Of course, my “study” hardly qualifies as such, since it only included one annual meeting and I didn’t control for anything at all. Even so, it seems plausible that we have a problem similar to the NSF: more organizers are male, resulting in gender disparities among speakers. Likewise, in the NSF study, it seems that more men are PIs of projects, resulting in many more applications by men. I have no solutions to this problem, although I can think of at least one potential solution that I’m entirely opposed to.