It may seem as if 2014 for me, as a researcher was an uneventful ‘in-between-year’, where nothing really happened, and everything stayed the same. It wasn’t. Not at all. I mean, yes, true, there were just a few papers and conferences, and if you take away the review articles and some very short popularizing publications, my publication record is spectacularly unimpressive – there is a chapter on the Roman Textile economy, and an encyclopedia entry on the Roman economy. But that’s just the surface. If 2013 – with the OUP monograph, and the JRA article – was a year of harvesting, 2014 was a year of planting seeds, and of making things grow.
There was a bit of an echo of 2013, of course, with the first reviews of The World of the Fullo appearing. I can only say that I am amazed by the positive responses to what I did. Sure, there was a little bit of criticism, and there undoubtedly will be more of that in the future, but the general picture seems to be that The World of the Fullo is a relevant contribution to the field, and one that settles some debates definitively – particularly regarding what fullers did, the technicalities of the process, and the spatial position of fulling in the urban environment. Some reviewers seem to be a bit less enthusiastic about the two chapters about the social lives of fullers – in the workshop, and in the community – but I have not yet read anything that makes me realize that I have inavertently made a terrible interpretative mistake. So far, so good.
But what did I actually do, in 2014?
The importance of 2014 lies in the fact that this was the first year in which I really devoted substantial amounts of time to the Building Tabernae project. Besides setting up a project blog, I made a field trip to Italy, which brought me to an array of sites that I hadn’t seen before, but that will play a role in the later stages of the project. It was good to familiarize myself with them now already. I also returned to Pompeii, for two weeks, finishing the survey that I had started in 2011, and looking at several complexes that I thought relevant to discuss to greater length in the project monograph. At Pompeii, most work for the project is done, though I might need to go back shortly to check some things after I have written it up. I also did work on Ostia, especially for the conference in Rome, in September, where I gave a paper on the commercial history of the western decumanus. It was an important year for the project, and it will show, I hope in 2015, when I will start to write the first chapters.
Miko Flohr, 06/01/2015