Historiography

Are you ready for your vocabulary word of the day? Historiography. 

History, obviously, is the study of things that happened in the past. 
Historiography, it turns out, is the study of how events were written down in the past - basically the history of history. It's also used in some academic journals to mean a summary of previous work on a subject. 

These are the types of things you learn when you collaborate with an archaeologist. 

Calvin and I are writing a paper right now that we're planning to submit to an archaeology journal, and we had to include a "historiography" section. This is a new experience for me. My papers usually appear in journals like Marine Ecology Progress Series, Limnology and Oceanography, Polar Biology, and Invertebrate Biology - all of which are specifically geared toward an audience of ecologists. You know, people who spend their days with animals, trying to figure out how they live and relate to their environment. People who don't really think much about history. Or historiography. 

Sidescan sonar images showing three areas of 
structural change in Portland over time.

But the world is changing, my friends. Maritime Heritage Ecology is gaining traction. Ecologists are studying communities on shipwrecks, and archaeologists are thinking about how colonization changes an artifact. Disciplinary boundaries are breaking down, and we're all the better off for it. You know, as soon as Calvin and I came up with Maritime Heritage Ecology, I knew we were going to have a hard time deciding where to publish our work. Until some publisher starts a Journal of Maritime Heritage Ecology where we can send our papers, we're going to have to bridge the gap ourselves. We'll send one paper to an ecology journal and the next one to an archaeology journal, then hope our colleagues on both sides are willing to read them. 

The study we're writing up right now is actually really exciting. We used archived data from SBNMS and our own investigations in 2019-2020 to track changes in the Portland shipwreck over two decades. I'm referring both to structural changes in the shipwreck and to changes in the biological community. In fact, structural and biological changes parallel one another. When part of the wreck collapses, the community there becomes dominated by different species. When a fishing net gets hung up, the species composition shifts. There is a direct and demonstrable influence of shipwreck structure on the community that manifests over time. 

This study is peak Maritime Heritage Ecology. I'm having a lot of fun writing the paper with Calvin and am really looking forward to submitting it!