Hello, I’m Crystal and I stare at walls. No really, I spend hours in small buildings shining light on walls and recording what I see – I’m an archaeologist who specializes in medieval graffiti. I didn’t plan to be an archaeologist; I just kind of ended up here and happen to love it.
I first learned of medieval graffiti when I was visiting old churches on a study break during my MA in London. Initially, I was drawn to the scavenger hunt aspect of graffiti – that I could find some cool things that no one else had noticed, or if their existence was posted somewhere that I could follow the directions, see them for myself, and check them off my personal list. Eventually, this gave way to a deeper interest in the reasons behind the graffiti and inscriptions I was finding. I wanted to understand their role in medieval society and be able to take that knowledge to breathe life into the distant past. I started to look past the big beautiful inscriptions and focus on the more common and mundane – understanding that sometimes a scratch was just a scratch, but that other time a scratch on the wall had a meaningful purpose like protection or remembrance.
Graffiti became a doorway to understanding and tangibly connecting with the average person of late medieval and early modern society – the more marginalized and forgotten individuals who only show up as a blip on the historical records’ radar if they’re lucky. While staring at a stone, I’ve witnessed a whole culture–gossip in Latin on the walls, pleas for remembrance during a plague, a whole host of animals and faces, staves of music carefully laid out, building plans, and even reminders to pray.
My time at Hope set the foundation for the work I do today. While much of what I do starts out in the field with observing, recording, and cataloging graffiti, the real work takes place behind the scenes when I get back from site visits and have to ‘do something’ with the data. Researching building histories through primary sources, finding corresponding secondary sources, and of course writing all make up the part of my work that people actually see – publications and presentations. Not to sound like a cliché, but HIST 140 (the class where Turabian, editing, rewriting, and source selection is taught) has ended up being my life-saving toolkit all too often. I still have Turabian on my shelf. I still read my papers out loud and edit them viciously. I still get notoriously picky about what I submit.
Hope also prepared me for the odd blend of history and technology that I use to document, sort, and analyze my finds. My minor in computer science – where I learned basic database construction and design – has been crucial to storage and analysis of my graffiti data as I have thousands of images that need to be organized and easily accessed. At the time I wasn’t sure if having a history major and computer science minor would really be useful and it turns out the blend of humanities and science education I received has been perfect for my career in archaeology.
When I graduated with my history degree I never thought I would end up an archaeologist, much less a specialist in historic graffiti. There was no grand plan there I must admit–I just found something I loved and used the tools I had to make it work. My work has taken me to some amazing places like behind the scenes at the Tower of London and the roof of Southwark Cathedral in search of inscriptions and their stories. It’s hard work, and in some cases, I’ve had to play catch up in terms of archaeological education, but at the end of the day if you want to do something badly enough, I’ve learned you can figure it out, make it work and excel.
After spending nine weeks in Europe researching churches and cathedrals this summer, I’m looking forward to a number of new projects. Next year I’ve been booked to speak for the second year in a row in central London, and following that I will begin projects on graffiti in two Hertfordshire churches. I’m hoping that a proposed project in Finland will also be on my list next year. Finally, the beginnings of a PhD in the UK are on the horizon for next autumn. I never thought I’d get this far but I’m excited to see where I end up going.
The Historian’s Craft
As students of history invariably find out by experience, research proposals often need to be modified in the course of a project. I had several surprises once we started going through the first notebook. First, I had envisioned neat, print-like handwriting that I could skim quickly to get the gist of each journal entry. The reality was far different, and especially challenging for a non-alphabetical language such as Chinese. Second, I had approached it as a project, but it was much more personal for my cousin. I wanted to be systematic; my cousin wanted to have an entire entry translated when we came upon an entry that mentioned him or his two sisters. My “research proposal” had to be modified: we made bullet points of most entries and translated the entries for which my cousin wanted translations. In the end, we got through only one notebook. Third, I had to give up my perfectionism; finding the best expression in English for a certain Chinese term really didn’t matter as long as I got the meaning across. Fourth, and the greatest surprise, was the various effects the translation of the first notebook had on the family. A flurry of emails ensued after my cousin sent off the translation to his sisters and father. My uncle, who had wanted to throw away the journals, thanked me for my labors. Each person in the family remembered different details in the journal entries, and the same material evoked varied reactions. Should I have been surprised? Haven’t I always known that history is about people, who always have different perspectives, emotions, and responses to circumstances and events? I was humbled by the reminder that when we write history, we’re dealing with people and telling their stories. We owe it to our subjects to be truthful, not only to events and sources, but also to their perspectives. It was an “Annales” moment for me.
Across the desk my adviser told me, “You will never get a history job if you don’t pursue the social studies composite major. You won’t be marketable.” I distinctly remember this conversation from my sophomore year and the frustration I felt trying to explain to the adviser that my passion is history. I saw the social studies major as a mile wide and an inch deep. If there was one thing I had learned already in my history classes at Hope College, it was that history is about depth. So instead of listening to this advice, I decided to pursue a Secondary Teaching Degree with a history major and English minor. After seven years of teaching history, I am glad I went with my instincts and pursued the history major. The skills I developed obtaining that degree have made me the teacher I am today.
Most history classes emphasize the impact of wars. This class will shift the focus of United States history and examine those who tried to prevent war and ensure peace. We will do a survey of peace movements that emerged during different contexts in the 20th-century United States with particular focus on the following: the Women’s Peace Party of the World War I Era, the labor movement of the 1930s, the labor movement of the 1930s, the Civil Rights Movement that emerged in the 1950s, the Vietnam-era peace protests, and the late 20th-century anti-nuclear movement.
Now, having written a book titled Creative Historical Thinking, I can reflect on what makes a creative environment. Creativity, it seems clear, can only develop when people feel comfortable in asking questions and “playing” with ideas. In his famous 1938 study Homo Ludens (playing man), Dutch historian Johan Huizinga explained that play was the cessation of formal rules, which could be set aside for a short period of time, so that we can experiment with new ideas. Play is not disorder and lack of seriousness; it is precisely what we must do if we are to discover new kinds of order, as well as new and serious bits of information. Play, Huizinga wrote, was at the core of culture.
