It must be a sign of the official end of summer in the U.S. that the Penn Museum Blog has been running a series of final field reports on field work and study at archaeological sites in Egypt, Iraq, Italy, Xinjiang, Turkey, and Greece.
One of these posts comes from Ann Brownlee, Associate Curator of the Mediterranean Section of the Penn Museum, who writes about her summer work studying the Archaic pottery and vase painting from the Potter’s Quarter.
I am writing from the site of Ancient Corinth, where excavations under the auspices of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens have been going on since the late 19th century….At Corinth, I am working on late seventh and early sixth century BCE pottery from the area known as the Potters’ Quarter. Up next to the city wall on the west side of the city, the Potters’ Quarter is one of the sites around the city where pottery was produced. The Potters’ Quarter was excavated by Agnes Newhall Stillwell, a graduate of Bryn Mawr College, for several years beginning in 1929, when she was a fellow at the American School. No kilns where the pottery was fired have been discovered in the Potters’ Quarter, but the large quantities of damaged–misfired, cracked, misshapen–pottery as well as much material associated with pottery production, especially try-pieces, that are found in fills and deposits make clear that pottery was produced nearby.
I am working on the very large quantity of material from a well–Well 1929-1 in Corinth nomenclature–in the Potters’ Quarter. The well was dug in the 7th century BCE and once it went dry, it was filled up with quantities of pottery, discarded no doubt from nearby potteries. Some of the pottery from the well was published by Stillwell and J. L. Benson (Corinth XV:3: The Potters’ Quarter: The Pottery. Princeton 1984), but much remained unstudied and that is what I am working on. I am particularly interested in the different painters whose work is represented in the well’s contents, and here I’ll focus on the painters of the shape known in Corinth as the kotyle. It’s the same as a skyphos, a deep two-handled drinking cup, and the kotyle is very common in Corinthian pottery of the late seventh to mid-sixth centuries BCE. Some Corinthian kotylai (the plural ofkotyle) are very fine, but not the ones I’m working with. An example, Corinth C-31-46, (fig. 2) from elsewhere at Corinth shows the shape–only one handle is visible here–and the decorative scheme, which includes a figural zone that here has an elongated panther and part of another animal.
Read the full post here.
Corinthian Matters 