Corinthian Matters is devoted to the archaeological and historical research of the Corinthia, Greece. The website was created and designed to be an educational resource for the history and archaeology of the city and territory of Corinth, the modern region of the Corinthia more generally (e.g., Sikyonia, Cleonae, and the Nemea Valley), and related academic topics including classical archaeology, the history of early Christianity, late antiquity, archaeological methodology, and digital approaches to history.
I (David Pettegrew) launched the site in 2010 to popularize Corinthian studies and introduce broader public audiences to new scholarship. Since antiquity, people have been fascinated with the city on the Isthmus, its reputation for wealth and extravagant living, and its association with bustling crowds. Today Corinth continues to interest visitors because of its extensively-excavated urban center, its dramatic and curious landscape, and its connections with the apostle Paul and the first Christian communities. But these mark only parts of the Corinthia’s long and impactful history at the center of Greece. I hope you find this site a useful and rich resource for seeing the history and archaeology of Corinth in wider perspectives.
How to Use this Site
Corinthian Matters is a resource website with an intermittent blog component. How “intermittent” depends on my availability from week to week, month to month, and year to year to write new content. The site provides both short news pieces and stable resource pages for studying Corinth.
The kinds of things you can find on this site:
1. News on archaeological investigations, conferences, presentations, and publications on Corinth from antiquity to the modern period.
2. Resources for scholars, teachers, and anyone interested in Corinth, including especially images, video, maps, and bibliography.
3. Essays and reviews about Corinthian history and archaeology, and the place of Corinth in modern culture.
4. A place for the dissemination of my own thinking about the Corinthia, late antiquity, early Christianity, digital humanities, and the intersections of faith, life, and scholarship.
If you have suggestions or queries, I will consider them as I have time. Please send to “dpettegrew” at “messiah.edu”.
About the Author
I am a professor of history and archaeology at Messiah University, a private Christian university near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Over the last twenty years, I have taught classes covering the history of Greece, Rome, Late Antiquity, Early Christianity, Historical Archaeology, Digital History, and Digital Public Humanities. My research and teaching have centered on integrating archaeological and textual evidence to narrate local history, especially Mediterranean cities and landscapes in the Roman and Late Antique periods, but I generally love good historical and archaeological problems irrespective of time and place.
I completed my PhD in 2006 from The Ohio State University with a major field in ancient Greek and Roman history (and a particular focus on late antiquity), and minor fields in church history and landscape archaeology. My dissertation, “Corinth on the Isthmus: Studies of the End of an Ancient Landscape,” became the starting point for subsequent research and publications on the Corinthia, including a broad historical study of the landscape titled The Isthmus of Corinth: Crossroads of the Mediterranean World (Ann Arbor, 2016: University of Michigan Press) and an open digital book titled Corinthian Countrysides: Linked Open Data and Analysis from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (Grand Forks, 2024: The Digital Press). I remain actively involved in Corinthian studies through affiliation with Michigan State University’s Excavation at Isthmia, annual drone surveys and topographical studies of the Isthmus (in collaboration with colleagues at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, Franklin & Marshall College, and the Corinthian Ephoreia), and ongoing study of the datasets and discoveries of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey. I usually travel to Corinth in early summer each year, and occasionally get the privilege of bringing undergraduate students from Messiah University for three weeks of study and research.
As a field archaeologist, I have participated in fieldwork in southern Ohio, central Pennsylvania, Ancient Corinth and the eastern Corinthia, the island of Kythera, and Cyprus. Much of my research has dealt with archaeological methods, datasets, and their interpretation. In addition to the fieldwork in Greece, I co-authored (with colleagues William Caraher and R. Scott Moore) Pyla-Koutsopetria I: Archaeological Survey of an Ancient Coastal Town (Atlanta 2014: American Schools of Oriental Research), a diachronic survey of coastal sites in Cyprus, and am finishing, with colleagues, a second volume on excavations there.
I have a long-running interest in the history of Christianity and the archaeology of the early church. In 2019, I co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology (New York 2019: Oxford University Press). More recently, I’ve been restudying early domestic church buildings at Dura-Europos (Syria), Messenia (Greece), and Megiddo (Israel). I am currently finishing a short book about the archaeological study of early Christianity that will serve students of the history of early Christianity. As a Catholic professor teaching at a Protestant university, I write as one interested in the ways archaeology can variously enrich, expand, and complicate our understanding of Christian communities.
Another important part of my work as scholar and teacher is coordinating digital humanities on my campus and collaborating with students and community partners on a range of public projects related to the history of the capital region of Pennsylvania. I’m particularly proud of the work we’ve completed through the Digital Harrisburg Initiative, a series of collaborative public-history projects exploring the social and spatial history of Harrisburg through historical records, maps, GIS, and public scholarship. Our work there has prioritized telling the overlooked histories of marginalized communities, including the multi-ethnic vanished neighborhood of Harrisburg’s Old Eighth Ward that was eradicated through eminent domain in the 1910s to make way for the expanded state capitol complex.
I contribute to Corinthian Matters sporadically, as I have time and energy, and continue to value it as a site for exploring the intersecting domains of the Greek past and the methods we use to discover and know them.
You can learn more about my activities as a scholar and teacher by visiting my institution’s profile page, Linked In profile, Google Scholar account, or the Digital Harrisburg blog.
