Craft, clay and chronotopes

A feature piece by Lance Peng with reflections by Roderick Geerts

There is something haunting about craft….about the soft spiral of a thumb pressed into clay, the dusty ridges of a pot retrieved from earth after centuries of burial, the quiet alchemy of throwing, shaping, firing. The past is never just the past in archaeology, especially not when it takes form again (not metaphorically but literally) on a wheel, under the hands of someone who knows. This is what first struck me when I encountered Rodericvs, the living, breathing, spinning extension of Roderick Geerts, whose work as both a PhD researcher in Roman archaeology and a master ceramicist/experimental archaeologist slips and slides across temporal boundaries with an ease that is anything but casual. To me he is a time traveller of a particular kind: one who neither romanticises the past nor reduces it to data. Instead he crafts it….coils it, shapes it, burns it and in doing so, opens up a different kind of relation to history: one that is intimate, material, affectively charged.

To encounter Rodericvs is to feel that time has begun to loop. This is not simply a “return to the past” thing but a hauntological gesture in the Derridean sense: where the present is always marked by spectral traces, always half-inhabited by what might have been or could yet still be. Roderick’s pottery doesn’t just reproduce the past; it summons it. It doesn’t speak about antiquity but speaks with it….across cracks, across textures, across fire.

Watching Roderick’s work (and listening to the way he speaks about clay with the reverence of someone who has spent decades in communion with it) has made me reflect on what it means to “know” history, not through textbooks or timelines, but through touch. His approach to archaeology and reconstruction reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history: looking backward even as time propels us forward. But unlike Benjamin’s figure (helplessly pulled into the future while watching ruins pile up) Roderick dares to sift through those ruins and rebuild, not to restore an imagined wholeness but to dwell in the gaps, to learn from the broken.

There’s also a wonderfully monstrous energy in this. In Jeffrey Cohen’s language, the monster is a “harbinger of category crisis”….a creature that disrupts boundaries, queers classifications, forces epistemic recalibration. In many ways, Rodericvs is a monstrous practice. It blurs the lines between academic and artisan, between reproduction and originality, between object and story. The ceramic replica is not a copy; it is a conversation, an act of speculative historical inquiry. It asks: What did it feel like to drink from this cup? What were the daily gestures of a Roman potter’s hand? These are aesthetic questions and are also political/epistemological ones. They push back against the abstracting tendencies of academia and capitalism by insisting on embodiment, on process, on care.

And then there’s the mnemohistorical dimension--memory doesn’t only live in minds or archives. It lives in material practices. His reconstructions are acts of remembrance, not just representation. But it’s a remembrance that is mediated through fire and finger….not nostalgia but tactile invocation. His PhD research, which centres on Romanisation in the Low Countries, is itself an excavation of cultural transformations that were never clean, never total. “Romanisation” is a contested term for precisely this reason: it implies a coherent movement, a linear civilising mission. But Roderick’s work shows otherwise. Through comparison of archaeological reports, experimental replications of ceramic forms and reflection on past and present narratives, he reveals a more fragmented, hybrid, nuanced view of cultural encounter and material entanglement.

This is where his work moves me most: in its refusal of easy binaries. As a field director in commercial archaeology for over a decade, Roderick brings practical-theoretical precision to his doctoral work. He is not content to live only in footnotes and site plans. He works with mud and sweat and curiosity. He understands that ceramics were not decorative luxuries, but infrastructural lifelines: containers of grain, oil, wine, story. He reminds me that clay was the plastic of the ancient world: humble, ubiquitous, shaped by and shaping daily life.

Roderick doesn’t just study these vessels….he becomes, in a way, their conduit! His workshops with children, his open demonstrations, his collaborations with researchers: these are forms of generous pedagogy. They disrupt the idea of academic knowledge as something hidden behind paywalls or ivory towers. Instead, knowledge is shared in shards and sherds, in fingerprints and glaze. His philosophy echoes that of Gloria Anzaldúa I think, who wrote of la facultad, the deep intuitive understanding that comes from those who navigate multiple worlds. Roderick moves between commercial and academic, artisan and scholar, Roman and Dutch, past and present: not as contradiction but as method.

In Roderick’s hands, a pot is never just a pot. It is a vessel of memory, a chronotope (to borrow Bakhtin’s term) where time thickens, loops, folds. It is an invitation to feel, to think, to remember otherwise. I am reminded of Avery Gordon’s insistence that haunting is a way of knowing what has been excluded, rendered invisible or unthinkable. In that sense every pot is a ghost story. Every firing is a resurrection. Every workshop is an attempt to speak across centuries.

So this is not just an introduction; it is an invocation!? I invite you to read Roderick’s reflections as a personal research narrative and also as a meditation on how we might relate to the past differently. More sensuously. More ethically. More experimentally. His work is not only about Rome; it is about now, about how we live with history, how we shape it, how it shapes us.

Welcome to Rodericvs: a studio, a site, a spirit. And welcome to Roderick Geerts: archaeologist, potter, storyteller, time-traveller.

While I reflect on the spectral and monstrous dimensions of Rodericvs, Roderick grounds that energy in the material: listening to shards, reanimating them, and offering their stories to anyone willing to engage. Speaking from his experience as both scholar and ceramist, Roderick Geerts notes....

Broken pieces of pottery hold a certain magical value, if you listen well they can relate many stories from the past. These stories range from the hand that selected the clay from the nature, how it subsequently shaped them into the fired vessel they are, their travels and usage during their lifespan to being discarded in a waste pit never imagined to interact with humans again but still invoking more interest and careful study millennia later. That is the story broken sherds can tell us and the trained ceramist and scholar can listen to all those aspects and recreate an objects life that was once deemed lost in time. By recreating and showing the object in its prime state these stories become more relatable and tangible for a larger audience, the past comes to life when drinking from a Roman cup.

Bio

As a PhD candidate at Leiden University, Roderick Geerts studies Romanisation in the Low Countries. With 20 years of experience in Roman archaeology and pottery, including ten years directing commercial excavations, he combines scholarly research with experimental craftsmanship. Through his studio, Rodericvs, he creates historically informed pottery reproductions, inviting others to experience the material and cultural history of the Roman world.