Good morning and welcome to my Thanksgiving liveblog. Last year and in 2021 I live blogged my Thanksgiving morning. Not quite a tradition, but two point make a line and three points make a triangle. Or something.
6:30 AM
I have coffee, a handful of almonds, the stereo is warming up, and I have a paper copy of Kim Bowes’s Surviving Rome: The Economy Lives of the Ninety Percent (2025).
It’s a brisk 20° outside and I’ll start the coals and finish preparing the smoker in a few minutes. The goal is to get the turkey on about 8:00 am for dinner around 2 pm or 3 pm.
7:15 AM
Coals are on and Surviving Rome is open while I listen to the opening tracks of Larry Young on Blue Note (playlist, but based on the 1991 box set). The first tracks are Young and Grant Green from his 1964 Talkin’ About. Green and Young have very solid rapport with Young being more adventurous and Green, well, doing Grant Green things.
Surviving Rome starts as one might expect. New interest in the 90% bolstered by archaeology, non-literary texts, new ways of thinking about ancient economic life (and labor), and hat tips to precarity, the first global economy, and Sir Moses Finley. Good stuff so far.
Now, I better check those coals.
7:45 AM
Bowes is talking about how to categories the laboring “poor” or the 90% of the Roman world with an appropriate reference to E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class.
Grant Green and Larry Young are playing “I’m an Old Cowhand” and the coals are holding at 225° which is as good as place as any to start smoking.
7:50 AM
The turkey is on and Sam Rivers is playing with Larry Young and Grant Green on Into Somethin’ (1964). So good!
8:15 AM
The turkey is holding steady at 225° and I’ve made it through the Surviving Rome introduction. Bowes tells us a good bit about what this book will not to do: appeal to Marxist theories, macro-economic studies, conventional categories (e.g. class, the poor, labor, et c.), concepts such as premodern or subsistence, histories of capital (see Piketty), UN Model Life Tables, or comparisons with ethnographic examples (beyond allusions to modern America and her neighbors in Philadelphia).
The book is leaning into the very contemporary concept of precarity to describe the live of the 90% in Rome. The problem isn’t so much having enough food as being able to save.
8:50 AM
I’m close to hitting the turkey with the first pile of wood chips to get the smoking started. I’ll probably do two rounds of apple wood smoke at around 9 am and around 10 am (with the latter being mostly performative as I’m not sure how much smoke the turkey will take on 2 hours into cooking).
Surviving Rome is getting interesting. The first chapter makes clear Bowes’s commitment to understanding Roman economic life through practice, particularly the “cognitive context” for Roman numeracy. Of particular interest (no pun intended) are the various accounting documents on ostraca, papyrus, inscriptions, and graffiti. I have often wondered how graffiti accounting worked. It was not that uncommon to find scratched lists, quantities, and prices on walls (even in 5th and 6th century churches!), but commonly in places where commerce too place. Once the graffito was made, what prevented someone from manipulating it? How was it erased or marked when accounts were closed? How did these things function? An ostraca could be thrown down a well or papyrus torn up, but accounting records scratched into the wall of a building seemed more public and persistent and not the kind of ephemeral accounting documents one might expect from myriad small scale transactions.
One thing I admire about Bowes’s writing is her use of concluding sentences in her paragraphs. She almost always reiterates the main point of the paragraph in clear language in the last sentence. In fact, these sentences are so sharp and clear that they help carry the book along and make it much more readable.
Larry Young is back with Grant Green on Street of Dreams (1964) with Bobby Hutcherson on vibes. It’s good and easy and spacious:
9:30 AM
I’ve put on some coals for the fire just to keep things going should the temperatures lag a bit. So far, we’re holding steady over 200° and the turkey has pushed past 115°. There tends to be a little lull at 150° and it’s important to keep the heat on to keep it from stalling too long and drying out.
Bowes’s book is getting into the nitty-gritty of Roman account reasoning. There’s a lot in the first chapter, but one point that’s pretty great is that some Romans learned certain accounting ideas in the Roman army where soldiers bought their provisions against their pay on a regular basis. When veterans mustered out and returned to their communities they brought their accounting methods with them and this probably led to the propagation of some form of debts and income in Roman rural society among the 90%.
She also probably answered my question about graffito. It is perhaps their permanence that made this a useful methods. Once a debt was settled, there was a record of what was purchases, how much it cost, and how much was paid. Scratching it into a wall would have marked the transaction settled.
Grant Green and Larry Young are together once more on Green’s I Want to Hold You Hand (1966). It’s unapologetically pop-y, but not unsophisticated with Young and Green trading gestures and solos. It’s just the kind of relaxed music that makes Thanksgiving morning feel right and cosy.
10:10 AM
The turkey feels a bit ahead of schedule (but I suppose this is better than late) with internal temperatures in the 140° already. I figure two more hours should do it.
I managed to get through the first chapter of Bowes’s book. I very much appreciate her emphasis on practice and found many points of contact between her work and some things that I occasionally think about. For example, she noted how Egyptian contract even between non-citizens often looked to the state for enforcement. This is despite the fact the Roman courts were not particularly “kind to non-citizens.” That said, they still found that Roman courts were places where appeals could be heard and adjudicated fairly. This reminds me of some of the arguments that Anthony Kaldellis made for the legitimacy of the Roman state being grounded in popular expectations that Roman officials (up to and including the emperor) behaved in fair, consistent, and magnanimous ways.
I’m onto the heart of Larry Young’s discography right now and listening to his masterpiece Unity (1966). Woody Shaw’s trumpet is great and Young’s playing is adventurous and compelling. I love this album.
Finally, I have the Richmond – Furman basketball game in the background which is on ESPN2. Sort of a scrappy start for my Spiders who really should take care of Furman and keep their perfect record unscathed.
11:15 AM
We’re getting there. The Spiders are being out Princeton-ed by Furman which is profoundly annoying, but I guess what happens sometimes. Evidently the Mighty Spiders have no plan when driven toward the baseline other than to turn the ball over.
The music continues to roll and the reading has slowed to a holiday crawl.
The turkey is sitting at 155° and some extra coals should nudge it along to completion.
Noon
The Spiders have somehow pulled within 3 with 2:00 left to place in a bit of a Thanksgiving miracle! Suddenly they are showing a new level of defensive tenacity!
Along similar lines, the turkey seems done in slightly over 4 hours. This is record for us and is a bit baffling to be honest as the smoker temperatures didn’t get above 225° for most of the morning.
A 1 pm meal is a bit early even by our standards, but it gives us plenty of time to have a turkey lunch and dinner!
Thanks for hanging out with me this morning and I hope you all (who observe) have a happy Thanksgiving.
Gobble, gobble.
Archaeology of the Mediterranean World 