Hlootoo's Art

silentstep:

setnet:

silentstep:

ok but

as a writer

90% of the time, when I’m trying to research x or y, what I actually need to know is what daily life went like.  Daily life of a person living in x region from y class during z time period.  How does a barley farmer spend their day in late September?  What tools are they using?  What are they using them for?  How hard is each task?  How much does a cooper earn in a day, and what can it buy?  How about a spice merchant?  What’s the procedure for tanning hide in Scotland during the 1100s, from beginning to end?  What does an alpine shepherd spend their time doing, when it’s not lambing or shearing time?  What do they spend their time doing when it is lambing season?  What sort of medical knowledge would they have?  How many people is a reasonable number for a minor lord to employ in this kind of castle, or in that kind of manor house, and how much food would they eat in a day, and how much would it cost?  How long would it take to build a house?  A palisade?  A wagon?  A brick wall?  A stone wall?  A road?  How many workers would you need for each?  How many people in a given town would know how to play the flute?  How many would know to make one?  How long would making one take?  How much would it cost to buy one?  How many could afford that?  For how long would the meat from each different animal feed a subsistence hunter?  How successful can they expect to be on any given day?  With a dog?  With traps?  In the rain?  In the snow?  In the autumn?  In the summer?  How far would they range?  How many chickens would a peasant own in medieval Brittany?  In Viking age Iceland?  In Roman Britain?  What would they have to do to care for the chickens each day?  If you’re travelling on horseback across the Eurasian steppe in the mid-1000s, what would you need to do to care for your horse over the course of a multi-day journey?  How much time would your horse have to spend grazing?  What would you carry and eat?  What would you forage?  How easy would it be, assuming you’d grown up being taught how, to find wild onions while travelling in unfamiliar country?  How long would it delay you to do so?  How would you carry water?  What sort of vessel would you cook in?  How heavy would it be?  How would you carry it?  How much weight could your horse carry?  For how long each day?  How did they carve stone in the ancient world?  In the medieval world?  In the early modern world?  Did cowhands in Europe ride ponies?  Wouldn’t that have made their jobs easier?  WHAT WERE THEIR JOBS EVEN, WHAT DID THEY DO ALL DAY, WHAT DID THEIR DAYS LOOK LIKE

but NO all the research that’s easy to find is about Big Important Events and Great Men and “FUN FACT DID U KNOW: maize and potatoes are both from the New World!!”  Ok great did they eat egrets.  How long does it take to pluck and clean and cook an egret.  What tools would you need to get an egret from point a.) “minding its own business in a swamp” to point b.) “fit for human consumption.”  How many people would one egret feed.  Do egrets live in Poland.  What color egret lives in Poland.  “Henwardric the XIVIVI conquered the—”  WHAT WAS HIS ARMY’S RANK STRUCTURE LIKE.  HOW EASY WAS IT TO GET PROMOTED.  HOW DID HE KEEP THEM SUPPLIED.  WHAT DID HIS FORAGERS’ JOBS ACTUALLY ENTAIL, DAY TO DAY AND HOUR TO HOUR.  HOW DID THEY DO THEIR LAUNDRY.  WHAT DID EACH SOLDIER CARRY ON THEIR PERSON AND WHAT WOULD GO IN A SUPPLY WAGON.  WHAT KIND OF ANIMAL DREW THE SUPPLY WAGONS.  WHAT DID YOU NEED TO DO TO TAKE CARE OF THE ANIMALS.  HOW MUCH OF YOUR DAY WOULD BE SPENT ON IT.  WHAT ABOUT A CENTURY EARLIER.  WHAT ABOUT A CENTURY LATER.  WHAT KIND OF SHOES DID THEY WEAR.  HOW OFTEN DID THEY NEED TO BUY NEW SHOES.  HOW LONG DID IT TAKE A SHOEMAKER TO MAKE A PAIR OF SHOES.  HOW MUCH WOULD THEY COST.  HOW MANY DAYS’ WAGES WAS THAT FOR A SOLDIER IN HENWARDRIC’S ARMY.

& I just don’t know where to find these sorts of answers & it’s driving me up the entire wall

These days historians really are trying as a discipline to move away
from great men and great events. That said, there are several reasons why these sorts of details are hard to find:

When training as an historian, so much emphasis is put on
making an argument. This technology was important because. That event was important because. What were the causes of x? What were the consequences of
y? And we’re also trained to look at detail and say, “So what? How does that
advance my argument?” And if the answer is “It doesn’t, I just thought it was
interesting,” that’s what gets cut when we go over wordcount (we always go over
wordcount).

The exception to this is the technique called ‘thick description,’ which I assume we stole from anthropology or possibly sociology. Thick description is a technique for historical writing that piles on all of the details, in the belief that you need as much context as possible in order to understand an historical event or decision.

If we have the sources—and a lot of the time we
do—historians can and often do go into great detail about the daily life of
people in whatever time at whatever place. But this sort of detail, while
commonly included in historical
writing, is not usually easy to find. It’s
supporting evidence for some other point, not the point itself, which means it
won’t be in the keywords or title. So, I know Peter Wilson’s doorstopper Europe’s Tragedy: A New History of the
Thirty Year’s War has quite a lot of information about the organisation,
weaponry, food, payment and clothing of the armies involved, and the occasions
on which they lost their shoes or resorted to cannibalism, but that’s because I’ve read
it. It’s not going to show up as the first result in a search for any
of those things.

Then there are the paywalls. There’s some great stuff stuck behind some hefty paywalls. Enough said on that one, though if you have a
university library account you might be in luck.

So.

• Rather than looking for histories and articles, try going to
  the sources. There are a lot of online databases with digitised sources and
  historical texts. Recipe books, household tips and travel writing are often
  very good for specific details. So are military intelligence reports, particularly for
  terrain and speed.
• Most university and research libraries have library
  guides—libguides—which are intended to point researchers in the right direction
  for sources.
• Add terms like ‘primary sources’ ‘database’ ‘libguides’ to
  your search strings: ‘primary sources recipe books’ or ‘historical travel
  writing database’ or ‘historical agricultural guidebooks’ or ‘libguides
  architectural history.’ 
• ‘Experimental archaeology’ is a subdiscipline dedicated to replicating historical crafting techniques.
• And of course gutenberg.org, hathitrust.org and archive.org
  have many digitised books, periodicals and pamphlets.
• If you are looking for scholarly articles, try

  scholar.google.com and academia.edu – the latter often has articles uploaded that you can read for free. It does have a search function but you can also do a google search ‘site:academia.edu [your keywords here]’

Then there’s search engine techniques. The first thing I’d
suggest is what I think of as ‘broaden and backstop.’ You break down the
question in bits. So for egrets:

‘Egret recipe’ gave me a recipe for ‘Heron Rosted’ from 15th century England which suggests roasting a heron in the same method as a crane (one
must look elsewhere for how to roast a crane) and serving with a sauce of
‘gynger, vynegre & Mustard.’ ‘Egret distribution’ gives me Wikipedia, which tells me
egrets migrate, so their availability in Poland will depend on the time of
year. ‘egret weight’ tells me the little egret is about 310g, so one egret
would probably only feed one person. And ‘taboo eating egret’ tells me that
eating egrets was taboo in Irish and Bantu culture, but brings me nothing
specifically about Poland, suggesting that it at least wouldn’t have been seen as sacrilege to eat an egret there.

‘Stonecarving tools archaeology’ gives me the website ‘The
Art of Making in Antiquity: Stoneworking in the Roman world’, with
many essays and videos on the processes involved.

‘Medieval soap
recipes’ led me to the works of Susan Verberg,
who has collected, tried and published a number of soap recipes, including medicinal,
cosmetic and laundry soap, explaining the purpose of each ingredient.

For my own fiction research, I’ve spent a lot of time on wikipedia looking up the geographic distribution and common names of various animals & plants. I spent a lot of time looking at anthropological texts from the nineteenth century about

Māori and Pasifika

myths, legends and cultural practices. A lot of it is written by terribly superior 19th century White Academica, but the information is still useful. The New Zealand Electronic Texts Collection–a database run by Victoria University–has an extensive collection of digitised texts. I’ve also looked at a lot of early twentieth century labour history, trying to develop a rhetoric for a fictional group of radical political activists, and here as well I’ve had more luck looking at pamphlets published by early twentieth century radicals than at history books.

Or some slightly more in-depth information about salt mining:

Keep reading

I am… so in awe & so grateful

ACTUAL SCENES TAKING PLACE IN SALT MINE, HERE WE GO