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This guest author post is written by J. Clayton Fant, Leah E. Long, and Lynley J. McAlpine, co-authors of the new book Roman Decorative Stone Collections in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, from the University of Michigan Press. The book will be published this August in hardcover and ebook.

When we three co-authors joined forces in 2011 to start the project that has become this book, we never imagined its scope or such a long timeline for completion. We were two U of M graduate students from the Interdepartmental Program of Classical Art & Archaeology at the dissertation stage and one U of M graduate old enough to have retirement on the horizon. Elaine Gazda, supervising curator for the duration, suggested to Fant that two graduate students, who were then working on doctoral theses involving fine Roman stones, would be logical collaborators. Leah Long was studying the role of marble from the Aphrodisias quarries in regional trade patterns, and Lynley McAlpine was conducting a theoretical inquiry into the painted representations of imported marbles in Italian contexts. Elaine had recently supervised Leah and Lynley’s curation of two pull-out drawers in the then new Upjohn Wing of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology (where a visitor can see the fragments published in this book in person today). With my long-standing– and Lynley and Leah’s burgeoning– expertise on marbles, a project was born.

First, we had to define our scope of inquiry amid the thousands of potentially relevant artifacts in the Kelsey’s collections. The museum’s own accession system had grouped just under 1000 objects collected by Francis W. Kelsey himself or at his behest as well as other distinct collections, most notably one of pioneering archaeologist Esther Van Deman (another is at the American Academy in Rome). Archival documentation found by Lynley helped sharpen the collection’s identity by suggesting that these were seen by Kelsey and his successors as forming a teaching collection. Similar but much larger architectural elements like cornices seemed to depict building styles rather than building materials. In the end, our selection included some 700 artifacts.

A good archaeologist first meets a class of objects by cataloguing them. The museum’s accession books passed on valuable information like findspot or place of acquisition, date, and identification. We started with a tranche of the museum’s own database and built a new Filemaker one with many additional fields for dimensions, marks on the artifacts, material identification (original and– separately– ours), et cetera. Because of the museum’s security system, we could not work on weekends. I made dozens of mid-week trips from Ohio, sandwiching two days’ work around one night’s stay. All of us were used to doing fieldwork in Mediterranean climates, but the museum’s basement with its harsh lights and protocols (wearing blue gloves, etc.) was challenging in its own way. After several years, we were just within sight of the end when Leah and Lynley began to transition to budding academic careers outside of Ann Arbor. With the help of the collection managers (Sebastián Encina and Michelle Fontenot), data collection got done, and we moved on to writing our individual chapters. This was easier to do from a distance (Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, San Antonio Museum of Art, University of Akron). At that point, we were still working independently, but then were given the luxury of an editor, Leslie Schramer, who was hired at the Kelsey Museum in 2017. We owe her immense gratitude for bringing this publication to fruition. In fact, it is hard to see how the whole project could have come together without her steady hand.

Now, on the eve of publication, we have all gone through enough major life-changes to propel a reality TV show: two Ph.D. degrees, two marriages, a child, and a number of job changes.

Regrets? I wanted to stick in a baseball reference. J. D. Candler, one of our most colorful collectors, made an industrial fortune in Detroit where, among other things, he made the rubber roof for the Detroit Athletic Club of which he was a stalwart member. Every baseball fan knows the building because it looms over left center field of the Detroit Tigers’ ballpark. But I missed the chance, and now they have built up that roof with another story so there’s nothing to see.

Liberating the fragments from obscurity in the basement of the Kelsey Museum, where they had been housed for over one hundred years, and bringing them to the light of day has been an accomplishment we are all proud of. We hope this will be a contribution to the interested public and a wide audience of scholars.