Last week, I walked across the stage of Yale University’s Woolsey Hall to accept my master’s degree in Archaeological Studies. I completed the coursework for the degree decades ago, but during the year I took my classes Mrs. Kuhl became pregnant and our oldest son was born days after I handed in my last final exam.
The only thing left for me to earn the degree was to write and submit my master’s thesis. The plan was that I would write the thesis while taking care of our baby, then we would find childcare and I would go back to work full-time. Yet what was intended to be a six-month temporary measure stretched into a 20-year career as a stay-at-home dad, freelance writer, and author.
Finally, last fall, I approached Yale about the possibility of returning to finish the degree. I was astounded at how receptive they were. “It’s not a big deal,” said Dr. Richard Burger, the head of the Council on Archaeological Studies, about writing the master’s thesis. When I expressed some unease about completing it by the March deadline, he simply said, “You’re a writer, aren’t you? You have a leg up on everybody else.”
This set off a mad scramble to write and submit my master’s thesis before the end of March. Having never written a thesis before, I searched the internet for tips and advice, particularly for anthropology and archaeology theses. I was both disappointed and surprised. Different colleges have different expectations; for example, a number require theses two or three times longer than what Yale asked for. My googling discovered only a single testimony about the thesis-writing process, and the writer’s biggest takeaway was to add all images and photos to the document last. Good advice, although I wished for counsel that was a little more substantial.
Here then are some of my conclusions about writing a master’s thesis. They aren’t so much advice as they are experiences that I hope others can learn from. Take from them what you will.
Choosing the topic took longer than expected.
Dr. Burger said the thesis should be about 70 pages long and I should choose a topic that interested me — after all, it’s easiest to write about something you enjoy. I told him about Samuel Smedley and my interest in American colonial and maritime history, and he suggested I reach out to some of the historical societies and maritime museums throughout New England for something in their collections which had been overlooked and under-studied. Those items, he said, would make for a great topic. Dr. Burger also reminded me that a master’s thesis is meant to demonstrate competency in the field and is not necessarily new research, which is what a doctoral dissertation seeks to accomplish. What the Council on Archaeological Studies was looking for was a demonstration of the skills and knowledge the program had taught me.
I immediately thought to myself, I want to write my thesis about pirates. To date, only three confirmed shipwrecks from the Golden Age of Piracy have been discovered: the Golden Fleece, located in the Dominican Republic and therefore beyond my reach; the Whydah Gally, discovered off Cape Cod in 1984; and Blackbeard’s own Queen Anne’s Revenge in North Carolina. How amazing it would be, I thought, if I wrote about artifacts found aboard a bona fide pirate ship.
The first thing I did was to bombard the Whydah Pirate Museum in West Yarmouth, Massachusetts, with numerous emails and phone calls inquiring about their collection. Yet none of those communications ever received a response. As I grew increasingly frustrated and confused, Mrs. Kuhl — who is often smarter than I am — finally suggested the reason they didn’t want to talk to me is that, as a published author, they worried I would ultimately transform my thesis into a book; the artifacts of the Whydah are privately owned and therefore the owners are likely very jealous about who should write books about them. While at the time my immediate concern was the thesis and not a future hypothetical book, to be fair such a fear would not be entirely unfounded. Writers will write, and my enthusiasm for pirate history should tell you a thing or two about my inclinations toward profit.
I abandoned the Whydah and next reached out to the Queen Anne’s Revenge Conservation Lab, located on the campus of East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. While initial talks proceeded well, the conversation broke down when the head conservator realized I wanted to write about a specific collection of artifacts that she was already writing about. Those artifacts, she told me, were off limits. Thanks but no thanks, no solicitors, goodbye.
My thesis topic is one chapter of a bigger project.
By this time we were into the holidays and I was no closer to my topic than when the leaves were still on the trees. I narrowed my research to piracy in New England but still could not find anything meaty enough to write 70 pages about. The obstacle, of course, is that it’s difficult to associate an artifact or assemblage with piracy outside of a shipwreck. There have been a number of frameworks suggested for identifying terrestrial sites as pirate camps or bases (which is a fascinating subgenre in itself), but the literature certainly didn’t need one more.
I then changed tacks completely. The Whydah Museum was presumably worried I would write a book based on my thesis. What if instead I wrote a thesis based on an idea for a book?
For several years I’ve been kicking around a concept for another nonfiction book, so I began thinking about the parts and chapters that would compose it. This winding path led me to sassafras. After Elizabeth finally granted permission for English colonization of North America (England trailed far behind Spain, France, and Portugal), there was a rush of colonial efforts to find gold or an easy passage to Asia or to establish privateer bases from which to launch attacks on the Spanish Treasure Fleet. These dreams quickly wrecked on the cold shoals of reality, however, and the merchant backers sought to recoup their losses by shipping profitable commodities back to England. They identified sassafras as the first of these, based on its medicinal reputation that trickled from the American Indians to the French to the Spanish and finally to the English. Even after John Rolfe began growing tobacco at Jamestown around 1610, sassafras was still a major export, to the point where the Virginia burgesses complained that by 1620 the colony produced only two crops: tobacco and sassafras.
The more I read, the more amazed I became. Sassafras is an ubiquitous junk tree where I grew up in southern New Jersey, and I couldn’t believe entire expeditions were sent across the Atlantic specifically in search of it. I had found my topic: “Sassafras as a Trade Commodity in North America, 1577–1960.”
That Monday in Woolsey Hall, while waiting to go onstage and accept our degrees, I chatted with Murphy Tu, the only other archaeology master’s student who graduated from Yale this year. Murphy grew up in Shanghai, which inspired him to dedicate his career to investigating the urbanization of early China. He told me that he has often looked around at Shanghai’s cityscape and wondered how it developed. This was a similar sentiment to what I wrote in my thesis’s conclusion in which I described the curiosity of being in a history museum and wondering how and why the artifacts and exhibits wound up there. Why are things a certain way and not another? It’s a fundamental question of archaeology.
Murphy wrote his master’s thesis about animal teeth from sites in Malawi, which had been recovered by his advisor, Dr. Jessica Thompson. While Malawi and Africa are outside his research interests, Murphy used Dr. Thompson’s collection as an exercise in gleaning information from teeth, a skill he hopes to use one day in China. Like mine, his thesis was a step toward a larger goal. In the fall Murphy is beginning his PhD program at Stanford, and I look forward to following what I’m sure will be an extraordinary career.
I stuck to a daily word count.
Murphy said he wrote his thesis in a month, but of course that followed months of research in the lab. When I write long nonfiction, I write while I perform the research. If I don’t lay it out on the page as I go, it tangles and garbles in my head. This can be inefficient because sometimes if I learn something new that contradicts what I wrote earlier, I have to go back and rewrite that portion, but I’ve found that what I lose in wasted effort is more than made up by the finished product’s coherence and flow.
Dr. Burger said the thesis had to be about 70 pages long. At 300 words per page, that’s 21,000 words or about half the length of A Season of Whispers and The Island of Small Misfortunes. Once he confirmed my topic, I immediately opened an Excel spreadsheet and calculated how many words I had to write daily working seven days a week to meet the deadline. As intimidating as the thesis was, the daily quota began at 300 words a day — just one page — and grew smaller when a good day’s work exceeded the minimum, which reduced the overall number of words still unwritten. In the early weeks there was more research than writing and my notes from January express white-knuckle anxiety over not always meeting my daily count, but by mid-February I was rolling along. In the end I had more days where I wrote over the quota rather than under. I finished the thesis an entire week before it was due.
Often the greatest obstacle is the overwhelming scope of a project. Reducing the thesis to a series of attainable daily goals was crucial to completing it.
The thesis played to my strengths.
By the 1620s, sassafras was no longer as valuable as it had been just 20 or 30 years earlier. The exports from Jamestown flooded the markets in England and crashed prices, so much so that the Pilgrims at Plymouth ignored the abundant sassafras growing around them and instead exported clapboard and furs. Its medicinal reputation carried on, however, and sassafras became a common ingredient in patent medicines and as a flavoring agent.
In archaeology, there are field projects, there are lab projects, and there are library projects. My thesis is squarely the latter. Using archival resources (including an incredible artifact from the 17th century — an actual apothecary’s account book), I was able to chart the precipitous drop in sassafras prices due to abundant supply. Several archaeologists I spoke to said the market crash in sassafras was something suspected but never actually studied, so I confess I feel a small degree of pride in being among the first to look into it.
While I did complete Yale’s field school and even did some CRM work, I am not a field archaeologist, nor am I terribly adept at lab analysis. I’m a researcher and writer, and my thesis reflects that. Dr. Burger and Dr. Roderick McIntosh, who was my second reader, understood I held no ambitions to pursue a PhD, and that I intended to use my degree to write more books and perhaps work for a museum or historical society. By focusing on what I am good at, I could abandon any pretense of making the thesis something it wasn’t. The thesis was never about digging or analyzing artifacts. It was intended as a survey of the sassafras craze at the turn of the 17th century, about how it began and why it ended. That focus allowed me to sort the information by relevance and minimized the risk of wandering off on long tangents or losing my conclusions in the weeds.
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Those were my experiences writing a master’s thesis. So if you’re seeking it, my advice to anyone embarking on the same journey is this: Give yourself plenty of time to find the topic; make the thesis a step toward a greater ambition of yours; break it down into reasonable daily goals; and play to your strengths as a student and an individual.
And if I have one last piece of parting advice, it’s to enjoy the process as much as you can. Enjoy the fall down the rabbit hole and enjoy becoming an expert on your subject. Enjoy the satisfaction of accomplishing what you set out to do.
