Notes on Research

My suggestions for happy information hunting, online and in libraries.

Go for quality sources. There's lots of junk and just plain wrong stuff out there. Watch out for fanciful etymologies that bear no relation to linguistic or historical reality. Substantiate and authenticate whereever you can.

Try searches in Google Books and Google Scholar. You'd be surprised what is out there online, including of lots of out-of-copyright classics. If the book is recent, Google Books will typically allow you to view a limited amount of pages, so use the Search in this Book feature to maximize what you can access.

You can find a lot if you pick the right search terms. The more specific, the better. Combine two or three key words to narrow down the millions of results you'll never have time to look at. I wanted a to find an exact cite for where Strabo talks about mother-right culture in northern Spain. So I searched for Strabo Cantabria gynocratia. If you're not sure about the spelling on that last word, try women, or gynocratic. Note that you'll get more hits with Cantabria than Cantabrians (the first will include the second, but not necessarily vice versa).

Even better, use quotes to get the search engine to limit results to an exact phrase or title. If you search for Strabo and women, it's going to give you everything that has both of those words in it, or either. But supposing you remember a certain phrase; searching for “but this is not at all a mark of civilization” will turn up a targeted result that gives you title, chapter and verse:

... it is the custom among the Cantabrians for the husbands to give dowries to their wives, for the daughters to be left as heirs, and the brothers to be married off by their sisters. The custom involves, in fact, a sort of woman-rule - but this is not at all a mark of civilisation.

So it comes from Strabo's Geography, Book III, Chapter 4, 18, which my search turned up at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Strabo/3D*.html .

Note that here the British spelling is used. When I did this search, I didn't feel like typing out the whole phrase, but only put “but this is not at all a mark,” feeling confident that this would turn up the phrase, and it did. However, searching with the quotes method, it must be an exact match or it won't show up, though Google will sometimes ask, Did you mean to search for X?

In British English, certain words will appear different than the American spellings, as "civilisation," "colour," etc. Or another translation will often choose different words or word order, which will throw off a quote-target search. You might have to experiment a little to find what you need.

If you know other languages, that will greatly broaden what you can come up with. Especially because the richest source of articles on French archaeology will be in French, and on Spanish folklore, in Spanish. Stuff you'll never find in English.

Even if you don't speak these languages well, if you are looking for images you'll find many more this way. Recently I did quite a few online searches for the female statue menhirs of the late neolithic. What came up in English was limited, but searches in French, Spanish, Italian turned up lots I hadn't seen before, especially after refining my search to the term of choice in Italian: statue stele (plural).

Google Image is a great way to find pictures. Make sure to click through to the actual image--don't download the low-res thumbnail image that shows up on the search page. You can also see the page where the image appears, often with a caption and other identifying information.

Be imaginative about what word combinations might get you what you want: if you're searching for Cycladic figurines, try that first, and then try again with substitutes for the second word: statues, statuettes, idols, goddesses, etc. Then do the same substituting for Cycladic: Aegean, Naxos, etc. or even Cyclades. Image searches can also lead you to some sites with great information, including quality articles.

Wikipedia can be a starting place to get an overview or the names of archaeological cultures in your region of interest. It also gives sources, including online sources, and then you can fan out from there. Sometimes the articles are pretty good, sometimes they are biased, or don't have much. I've noticed the quality improve a lot over time.

If you can get access to it, do searches in JSTOR, an online database for scholarly articles. This is especially good for obscure subjects. Someone has written an article about it. Many public libraries subscribe to it, and if yours does, you can get access via your library card, from your home computer. San Francisco, for example, allows all California residents to apply for a card (which however has to be done in person). Once you have that, you can plug into this amazing treasure trove.

When i was living in rural Washington, the state had an interlibrary loan service, and it was possible to get books from the university library system sent to my tiny local library. It's worth looking into what your local library can offer. In some places residents have the right to get library cards for state universities. Even if there's a fee, like $100/year, it's worth it. You could never buy all the books you'll get access to, and certainly not of this quality. Or if the library won't allow you to check out, you may be able to get a stacks pass. Stacks copiers aren't cheap, but you can judiciously copy pages you can't live without.

Don't forget to copy the URL, title, and author of the articles you find. If you are going to use scholarly annotation, you'll also need the date you accessed them. (Web resources often shift around to new pages, new sites, and are updated by their authors.) I've had occasion to regret many times an early carelessness about keeping citations together with notes, or over-optimism about my ability to remember what source they came from.

Even if we disagree vehemently with a book, it may be that some of the information, at least, is of value for us, but not necessarily in the way that its author intended. I've continually found bits over the years, later discovering that big chunks were being held back. It's the filtering and gatekeeping effect. That's aside from the issue of bias where the information comes through in very distorted forms.

I'm working my way through an author who is considered tops in ancient Greek religion, and finding lots of great info, but he often makes snide asides and tries to minimize the significance of the overwhelmingly female symbolism (for the neolithic, for example). Such books are candidates for the "hermeneutics of suspicion," in the words of Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza: a fancy phrase for watch out for encoded assumptions and agendas.

But watch out for gaps in your own information, and make sure you know the material upside down and inside out so you can make your own case.

copyleft 2009 Max Dashu