Modelling History
John Steer is an independent researcher based in Herefordshire.
Interest in history began as a youth living at the time in York and being involved in the City’s post war archaeology. From there, as much by fortune as design, the interest widened and deepened, living in several other places - north, south, east and west; rural and urban. I had what was called a liberal education, that is a wide and not narrow curriculum, of both academic and practical subjects, though I was deemed to be technical, the sciences and mathematics. The family is also artistic, that included the Keys family of expert gilders, modellers and painters at the Derby porcelain factory.
Professionally I worked for Reuters, having started my career in computing and the then nascent 3D graphics, after graduating. Early retirement, some twenty and more years ago, enabled me to concentrate full time on history. Studying law (with the Open University) greatly assisted an understanding of historical contexts.
My upbringing was Roman Catholic but the more I understood of the institution of that Church the more it was evident that its theology was hand in glove with its politics; it is a political organisation. I would have agreed with the sixteenth-century Reformation criticisms of the Roman Church, but the then, and still on-going, fragmentation of the Christian denominations was inevitable. My interest now in these faiths is historical as Christianity is a very major part of the DNA of British and European history, though my inside understanding of the Church is beneficial.
History is researched for the same reasons that people do jigsaws. They are puzzles with the aim of finding pieces that fit together. For historians the pieces are old documents, images and structures, archaeological reports and the landscape, but there is not the helpful picture found on the lid of a jigsaw puzzle box. Modern history can have too much information, and it may seem as if a number of jigsaws have been put into the same box. Older eras, medieval and earlier (my preferences) have a different problem; a jigsaw of thousands of pieces of which you only have a few. The temptation to assume pieces fit together that do not is to be resisted, as finding a missing piece can greatly change a picture already in mind.
In the context of archaeological reports Peter Reynolds explains it best but his advice applies to research in general. Start by setting out the facts and then describe the interpretations, because the facts do not change but the interpretations will1; more facts are likely to accumulate. The French word histoire means both story and history but there is a difference, one is fiction and the other is fact, and not to be confused. There is value in well researched historical novels as they can be thought provoking as well as entertaining. It is problematic when interpretations of history are presented as, or assumed to be, fact.
Practical skills are as important for me as those needed to transcribe and translate original documents and understand their contexts. I continue to use and develop the woodworking skills learned at school and attended courses in old building techniques and materials. Archaeology has taken me to Oplontis, between Pompeii and Herculaneum, and like those places overwhelmed by the A.D. 79 Vesuvian eruption.
Computer graphics has developed in large leaps and bounds since I first worked on it, but I have kept pace. It enables the recording, demonstration and presentation of ideas; see the home page. It is keeping up the family tradition with the difference that the Keys were using the technology of their time and now using ours.
1 Peter J Reynolds, "Experimental archaeology and the Butser Ancient Farm Project", in "The Iron Age in Britain - a review", Ed. John Collis, University of Sheffield, 1977, ISBN 0 906090 00 8.