Despite the growing number of ancient world blogs, it is still relatively uncommon for scholars to think of the blog as an acceptable or appropriate medium for communicating their research. I keep a small list of scholarly blogs about ancient and medieval Greece in a list on the right side of this site – scroll down to the Blogging Greece heading.
Over the holiday break, I was pleased to see that Dimitri Nakassis, a colleague from the Eastern Korinthia Survey, and assistant professor of Classics at the University of Toronto, has begun a new blog called Aegean Prehistory, dedicated, as his first post notes, to his research interests in “the archaeology and scripts of the Aegean Bronze Age.”
Since Nakassis has conducted archaeological work in the Corinthia and the Argolid, we may expect that his thoughtful posts will on occasion explore Corinthiaka. His first post, for example, discusses the Bronze Age site of Korakou, situated northeast of Corinth on a ridge above the Corinthian Gulf, and the digitized excavation notebooks of Carl Blegen from the early 20th century. Here’s the opening bit about the notebooks:
Prior to excavating LBA Pylos, Blegen excavated at a number of other prehistoric sites in the Peloponnese, one of which is Korakou. This site, located on the bluffs overlooking the Corinthian Gulf at the outskirts of modern Corinth, was excavated in 1915 and 1916, and formed the basis for Blegen and Wace’s ceramic chronology of the Greek mainland for the Greek Bronze Age.
Blegen’s excavation notebooks have been scanned and made publicly available by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the Corinth Excavations (among other things). As my colleague Bill Caraher pointed out in his blog (about two years ago!), these are a fantastic resource, but they are static. There is no opportunity for scholars to add metadata to the digital scans…
Dimitri goes on to demonstrate the need to develop more dynamic digital forms of these notebooks. Read the rest of the post here.
Corinthian Matters 