Corinthian Matters

A Resource for the Study of the Corinthia, Greece

Bill Caraher

Investigating the West Hall of the Theater at Corinth

by Leave a comment

When Hesperia arrives with a new Corinth article, it is sort of like Christmas (or maybe Columbus Day) in my household. In this most recent issue (82.3), the former director of Corinth Excavations, Charles Williams, documented his recent excavations in the northern area of the theater. The article sought to integrate the results of recent excavations in the larger discussion of the architecture and archaeology of the theater. The theater was among the first buildings excavated at Corinth and the area had a long history from the 4th c. B.C. to the Byzantine period (at least). Williams’s excavations in the northwestern corner of the site primarily focused on Roman to Late Roman activity there.

CorinthTheater

In tone and form, the article was a throwback to the regular reports on Corinth excavations that appeared almost annually in Hesperia. The amount of detail is fantastic. The references to historical events (Actium, the founding of the colony, et c.) punctuate the archaeological findings throughout the text. The author assumes the significance of the site of Corinth and its monuments. Comparanda are minimal.

The article begins with a remarkable description of the various major Roman phases of the theater. The unlabeled illustrations make connecting the various features in the phase descriptions to the corresponding plan an exercise in architectural identification. Williams updates parts of Scranton’s half-century old study of the major Roman phases of the theater published as Corinth II. For folks interested in the architecture of theaters and the change in their function and arrangement from the Greek to Roman periods, Williams’s short survey of the Roman phases of the Corinth theater is a great case-study. The use of the Corinth theater as both an amphitheater and then as a space suitable for some kind of water battles has always fascinated me. Of particular note are the appearance of myriad buttresses and reconstructions marking out the impact of various earthquakes on the structure of the theater.

The second part of the article examines the work done during the 2011 excavation season. It begins with a discussion of the west analemma of the west parodos of the theater. (That phrase evoked some rainy afternoon standing with the members of the American School’s regular program and looking intently at the theater in some Greek city.) The discovery of this section of analemma helps to establish the shape of the Classical Greek theater that the Hellenistic theater supplanted. Williams then  describes in substantial detail the stratigraphy of the excavations of the west parodos detailing the relationship between drains and various buttresses necessary to support the earthquake wracked structure of the various associated buildings.

Excavations further north revealed more of the West Hall and uncovered more about the complex and curious history of the theater precinct. The West Hall represents a Roman addition to the theater probably dating to the 4th Phase, and its clear relationship to the “backstage” (my term, not Williams’s) are of the theater suggests that it served the actors and chorus. The walls of the hall appear to include blocks recycled from the earlier phase of the Roman theater. Like many of the buildings associated with the theater, it received buttresses at some point in its history perhaps in response to earthquake damage in the late-2nd to early-3rd century A.D. The building has a long history of use starting as a well-appointed structure with marble veneers and ending us as a space for industrial activities by the 3rd century.

One of the strangest and coolest discoveries the rooms abandonment in the 5th century it apparently became a dumping ground for cow bones slaughtered nearby and dumped over the west wall perhaps near the northwest corner. This massive, unstratified, deposit produced over a ton of bones that appeared to be the product of specialized, large scale butchery rather than urban debris.

Excavations in 2011 also revealed more of the “Lesser Plaza” and “North Peristyle Court”. Like the West Hall these spaces were Roman in date; the North Peristyle Court followed both the orientation of the theater and the “Theater Avenue” which followed the line of Roman centuriation. The north wall, I believe, of the North Peristyle eventually formed part of the Late Roman fortification of the city. While the Late Roman fortification of the city remains hard to date, but it might have been in the first half of the 5th century. This would make the bone deposit in the West Hall after the construction of the fortification and provide a bit of urban history for the periphery of the Late Roman city of Corinth. Of course, the wall could also be Justinianic in date, and I tend to prefer a later date for the wall owing to my recent publications suggesting that the emperor may have taken a personal, strategic interest in the loyalty of his Corinthian subjects.

This article was pretty intense. The amount of detail was staggering and involved constantly moving back and forth between more detailed descriptions and the phase descriptions and plans at the front of the article. I kept thinking how this is a model article for advanced undergraduates to use to decipher a building’s history. The article provided more than enough detail for a student to reconstruct a history of the building, but also enough little challenges to separate students who understand architecture and stratigraphic excavation from those who don’t. The final section of the article offered some suggestions for future work setting the stage for students to consider the potential of various courses of action. A short paper assignment arguing in favor of one of Williams’ recommendation for future work would wrap up the assignment nicely.

Crossposted with the Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

 

The Chlamydatus of Corinth

by Leave a comment

In the most recent Hesperia, Amelia Brown has offered an intriguing article on a significant group of Late Roman portrait statues (“Last Men Standing: Chlamydatus Protraits and Public Life in Late Antique Corinth,” Hesperia 81 (2012), 141-176). Chlamydatus statues of Corinth depict men wearing the “distinctive long cloak or chlamys” and this dress typically associates these individuals with imperial office. Brown has assembled a group of 7 largely fragmentary, life-sized statues of this kind from around Corinth with 6 of them appearing in the forum area. These status date to the 4th and 5th centuries and represent both a change in Late Roman portrait style as well as the growing political influence of the imperial center at Constantinople of aristocratic representation at Corinth. According to Brown, these statues appear to be associated with imperial rather than local elite. Corinth’s position as the seat of the governor of Achaea probably accounts for the number of imperial elite present, but also made it both an appealing location for the display of honorific statues dedicated to men who had contributed to the safety, urban environments, religious life, and culture of the province.

As per usual, I’ll let Dr. Brown’s work stand on its own merits and recommend it to anyone interested in understand the development and archaeology of Late Roman statuary. Instead, I’ll focus on two interrelated but admittedly peripheral aspects of Brown’s work.

First, Brown does a nice job of arguing that the Lechaion road was the main area for the display of chlamydatus statues. In her reconstruction of this space of display the chlamys clad statues stood along the sides of the main road into forum area of Corinth. A visitor to the forum area would have passed under the impassive gaze of these statues as they walked along the main artery of the Late Antique city. The Lechaion Road provided access to basic civic amenities like latrines and shops as well as places of display like the Peirene fountain which likely served as an important source of water for the city as well as an area for informal recreation, gathering, and meeting. Thus Corinthians and visitors to the city lived their daily life in and among reminders of the city’s imperial patrons.

The Lechaion Road also likely served as the main route of official processions into the city of Corinth.  Important visitors from the west would have enjoyed their official adventus (or ritual of arrival) into the city along the wide, colonnaded, grandiose Lechaion Road. The chlamydatus would have watched the passage of fellow elites and their retinues accompanied by city fathers, fellow imperial aristocrats, and by the 5th century perhaps local representatives of the Christian communities. The position of the statues along the road left the main route into the city open, but also provided a permanent audience for ritual processions. The most important men in the city and perhaps province would always be there, standing to honor their fellow elites.

The statue that I was most intrigued by was the so-called Kraneion chlamydatus. This statue was found cut down and reused as a threshold at the Kraneion basilica which dates to the 6th century and stood immediately outside of the eastern Kraneion Gate to the city. The location of the statue near the eastern gate of the city suggests that this might have been an area for display during the Late Antiquity with chlamys clad statues greeting visitors from the east.

NewImageHesperia 81 (2012), p. 145

The reuse of the Kraneion chlamydatus in the Kraneion basilica interesting is that it was cut down for use as a threshold block.  It would be easy to recognize in this use of spolia practical concerns; torso of the chlamydatus provided a substantial block of marble suitable for the requirements of a threshold.

I do wonder whether there might be some symbolic considerations as well. The cutting down of the statue would have made it difficult for a visitor to the church to recognize the former function of the block. On the other hand, the process of selecting and cutting down the block must have involved a series of ideological decisions. The chlamys clad man had to be recognized as no longer relevant or important and therefore suitable for reuse. The placement of the block as a threshold offers a nice parallel to the original location of the statue near the gate to the city (or the placement of the other chlamydatus along the processional route of the monumentalized Lechaion Road).  In other words, the location of the reused chlamydatus at the threshold to the church finds a nice parallel with their original location in liminal spaces like the gate to the city or a processional way.

One could even go a step further and suggest that the relocation of the chlamydatus statue at the threshold of the church marked out the boundary between the civic world and the works of the church. The shift is more marked when you consider that within the church the congregation stood in the aisles and watched the ranked procession of the clergy. The congregation may have been accompanied by a passive processions of saints standing in the place of the onlooking chlamydatus along the Lechaion Road while the clergy’s liturgical procession echoed the ritualized adventus of Late Roman aristocrats into the city.

The physical subordination of the Kraneion chlamydatus at the threshold of the church echoed the gradual suppression of monumental civic space throughout the empire and their replacement with churches tied to the ecclesiastical rather than civic or imperial elite.

Crossposted to New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World.

More on Sicyonia, fortifications, and Late Antiquity

by Leave a comment

I’ve continued to work my way through Y. Lolos’s massive tome, Land of Sicyon. Hesperia Supplement 39 (Princeton: American School of Classical Studies, 2011) this weekend while waiting for the rain delayed Daytona 500.  I posted the first part of my review a couple of weeks ago and, so, I suppose this is part two.

There are three areas, in particular, which attracted my interest:

1. Rural Fortifications. As I noted two weeks ago, there remains significant work to be done on the rural fortifications of the Peloponnesus, and Lolos’s book does its part by documenting a significant number of undocumented or poorly documented fortified sites in the countryside. Of particular interest to me were the irregular fortifications at Kokkinovrachos (pp. 234-240)and the round towers at Profetes Elias hill (p. 231) and at Tsakouthi (pp.  240-244) which my colleagues and I reference in a 2010 Hesperia article. While the Kokkinovrachos fortification is much larger than our fortification overlooking Vayia in the southwestern Corinthia, they share the same irregular masonry and both combine a fortification with a free standing tower. Lolos argues that this fortification occupied a height with good views of the crucial intersection between Stymphalos, Phlious, Acrocorinth, and the Sikyonian sites of Titane and Thyamia. Maintaining a substantial stronghold on this hill allowed Sikyonian forces to command several significant routes into the city.

The round tower at Tsakouthi resembled closely the round tower at Lychnari in the Corinthia. Lolos suggested that the upper course of the tower at Tsakouthi were likely mud brick, and this construction, in fact, combined with the towers round shape would have made the tower less vulnerable to artillery blows from forces passing on the nearby road. Our tower at Lychnari may have also had a mud brick superstructure, although there is a sufficient stone in the area to allow for a stone tower of significant height. The smaller and poorly preserved round tower at Profetes Elias may be a good parallel for the smaller tower at the site of Ano Vayia.

The explanations for building a round tower as opposed to a square or orthogonal tower has never entirely satisfied me. It seems to me that a round tower would entail a significant increase in technical difficulty as each block had to be cut or at least trimmed to match either the interior or exterior diameter of the tower. (Blocks in square towers could fit in numerous different positions.)  While it seems likely the round towers were less susceptible to damage by artillery which would only ever inflict a glancing blow, the towers at Lychnari and Ano Vayia (and at Lolos’s Profetes Elias) do not seem close enough to major roads to make the additional work necessary. Moreover, there are numerous towers very close to major roads which are square or rectangular in plan.

Finally, Lolos contributes little the on going discussions of rural fortifications and land use. In fact, Lolos seems to be content suggesting that the fortification of Sikyonia primary served to allow the city to communicate with and deploy forces to across its hinterland. This may be the case, but for fortifications like the round tower at Tsakouthi, it seems like we should at least entertain the possibility that the tower was part of a agricultural complex serving the valley its overlooks.

2. The Late Roman Boom. Like most region in the Eastern Mediterranean, Lolos’s Sikyonia saw a boom in settlement and sits during the Late Roman times. The number of new sites is truly remarkable with over 60 site with Late Roman material and only 23 having material from immediately earlier periods.  While the extensive nature of Lolos’s survey which did not sample his study area in a systematic way, makes it difficult to determine whether this pattern he identified would survive a more rigorous sampling regimen, it is nevertheless consistent with findings published from the Eastern Corinthia, for example, which documented the Late Roman period as time of particular prosperity.

Of particular note is Lolos’s documenting of several previous overlooked or under documented Early Christian churches including a “Early Byzantine Church” at the site of Litharia you Rakka of Poulitsa. The rather small number of Early Byzantine churches in the Peloponnesus alone makes this structure worth additional consideration. The presence of rural church apparently situated apart from significant settlements appears increasingly to be a feature of Late Roman Greece. Lolos’s argument that the site of Klisi-Boukoura of Stylia might be a monastic foundation based on its size of over 3,000 sq. m. This would be rather unprecedented in the Peloponnesus in Late Antiquity, but does show how many significant interpretative gaps exist in our knowledge of the Early Christian landscape. Recent work in the Eastern Corinthia has shown that even in the hinterland of a major city, rural churches remain undocumented.

3. Diachronic Survey. Finally, one of the most interesting parts of Lolos’s book is his commitment to treating the history of Sikyonia in a diachronic fashion. He not only includes discussions of the Venetian period census record, but also of Medieval, Ottoman, and Early Modern period sites. This includes a brief comment on zevgolateio which are groups of kalyvia, or modest, seasonal dwellings, that form a small hamlet (p. 365). From his short remarks, it would seem that the settlement at Lakka Skoutara in the Corinthia which my colleagues and I are now bringing to publication, represents a zevgolateio. The illustrations that he provides of the interior of a season dwelling coincide closely with those found in Lakka Skoutara, which is unsurprising, of course, considering the geographic proximity and similar ethnic make up of the populations.

I have a bit more to read and process from this rich, closely edited, and significant work, and I expect that I’ll provide some final words on the book in the coming weeks.

Crossposted to The New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World.

On-site and off-site at Pyla-Koustopetria: A Response to Chris Cloke’s Interpreting Ceramic Assemblages

by 1 Comment

Last week Chris Cloke generously shared some of his work with the pottery from the Nemea Valley Archaeological Project over at Corinthian Matters in a three part post. In a nutshell, he argued that there was evidence for manuring during Late Antiquity.

It’s a busy week, but I wanted to follow up on his suggestion that PKAP present some of its data to see whether we could detect similar trends. Our work at Pyla-Koustopetria, of course, is rather different in scope than the work of the NVAP. We focused on one, mid-sized, site rather than an entire region. Moreover, by Late Antiquity the built up area of our study area appears to have been rather large in relation to our overall study area.

Nevertheless, there is reason to think that the northern reaches of our study amount to an off-site zone. The distribution of tiles, for example, suggests that only the coastal zone of our study area had tiled buildings. (The tiny numbers in each unit represent the total number of Late Roman artifacts from each unit.)

LateRomanTile

Moreover, the distribution of fine and kitchen wares, most frequently associated with domestic activities appear to be concentrated in similar area.

LateRomanKitchFine

In contrast, the distribution of coarse and utility wares, like amphora, extends of a much larger percentage of the study area.

LateRomanCoarseAmph

Judging by these maps, it would appear that the northern part of our study area which comprised the coastal plateaus of Mavrospilos/Kazamas and Kokkinokremos saw a functionally different kind of activity than the coastal area. Cloke has suggested that the prevalence of less diagnostic sherds – and coarse and utility wares are almost be definition less diagnostic than fine and kitchen wares – might represent material scattered through manuring.

Cloke argue, however, that this is a product of smaller sherd size rather than a specific functional difference, and compares the percentages of diagnostic pottery from both on-site and off-site transects to demonstrate that similar proportions of diagnostic ceramics appear in both ceramics. Clearly, this pattern does not appear in the PKAP data.

Moreover, it does not appear that the average weight of the sherds varied in a consistent way across the PKAP study area.

LateRomanWeight

The map above shows the average weight of Late Roman sherds (excluding tiles) across the study area. It is possible to imagine a slightly higher average sherd weight for the coastal units immediately below the height of Vigla in the left-center of the map, and a slightly lower average sherd weight for the material scattered to the north on the Mavrospilos/Kazamas plateau.

While this is slightly suggestive, I wonder, vaguely, whether this has something to do with the greater soil depth on coastal plain that “protects” sherds more. The plateau units tend to have thin soils with patches of exposed bedrock. This seems like a far more hostile environment for sherds and may have accounted for why they are more poorly preserved. In other words, the condition of the sherds has much more to do with post-depositional processes than how they were deposited.

I expect that David Pettegrew – the expert on survey site formation processes – might have some observations.

Crossposted to New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World.

A Working Paper on Lakka Skoutara in the Corinthia

by Leave a comment

With the recent preliminary publication of the work by the SHARP team at the site of Kalamianos in the southeastern Corinthia, it seemed like a good opportunity for David Pettegrew, Tim Gregory, Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory and I to dust off a long-in-progress manuscript dealing with the site of Lakka Skoutara.

This paper is still very much in-progress, but we have drawn upon it for a paper at the 2010 Modern Greek Studies Association Meeting and at the 2012 Archaeological Institute of America meeting. We have also made available our photographic archive from our work at this site.

With the growing interest in this particular section of the Corinthia, we thought it would be a good idea to get throw our ideas into the mix and get the history of this “small world” into the conversation.

We’ll undoubtedly revise this draft over the next year or so and keep an updated draft available. Over the past couple of weeks, David Pettegrew (the editor of Corinthian Matters) and I have talked about making Corinthian Matters a destination for working papers on … Corinthian Matters. The idea of working papers has strong roots in the hard and social sciences where researchers regularly circulate papers prior to publication. It also provides a way to make research available that escapes from pay-walls and other ways that corporations looks to profit from faculty research.  If you have a working paper that you want people to see, drop David or me an email.

Cross-posted to New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

From the Corinthia to Sicyon

by Leave a comment

This weekend I spent some quality time with Y. Lolos newly published tome, Land of Sikyon. Hesperia Supplement 39 (Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2011). It runs to close to 650 pages and provides a nearly comprehensive view on (as his subtitle states) the archaeology and history of a Greek City-State.  With a book of this size and level of detail, I feel a bit like a cat attacking a sofa. The best I’ll be able to do is attack various parts of it and then race off. That being said, over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting my observations on the book as I work my way through it. Scholars interested in the history, archaeology, and topography of the Corinthia and the northwest Peloponnesus have eagerly awaited this book (so eagerly, in fact, that it’s listed in World Cat as having been published in 2006, 2009, and 2011).

This weekend I took particular interest in Lolos detailed description of the history and land routes through the region. My very first article looked at a series of fortifications on the far eastern end of Mt. Oneion. In this article I discuss briefly the idea that an army could cross the eastern end of Mt. Oneion in order to enter the Peloponnesus while avoiding the fortifications around the city of Corinth.

From that article:

In addition, once an army crossed the mountain’s eastern end and moved south, it had bypassed the defenses of Acrocorinth and gained ac cess to a complex network of roads leading toward the population centers of the southwest Corinthia, such as Tenea, Kleonai, and Phlius, as well as the Sanctuary of Zeus at Nemea. Thereafter, an army could link up with routes into the Argolid or move toward the west through the uplands of the northeastern Peloponnese to descend into Sikyonia, Arkadia, and Achaia.

When I wrote this, however, I had only the faintest idea how a force could descend into Sikonia.  Historically, I knew it was possible, as Xenophon tells us (Hell. 7.1.18-19) that the Theban general Epaminondas did just that during his second invasion of the Peloponnesus in 386, despite efforts by the Athenians, Spartans, and Pellenians to hold the eastern side of the mountain.

Lolos’s book provides some crucial clarification on the route of this invasion. It seems likely that the Thebans must have marched to Phlious before moving south to Sikyon along the route of the Asopos river or alternately veering slightly further west and passing the sanctuary of Titane on a decent to the Sikyonian plateau.  Lolos’ book provides significant evidence for these routes through his thorough compilation of evidence for wheel ruts and road cuttings that suggest the presence of cart roads. Of course, the army of Epaminondas probably had very few carts as they had entered the Peloponnesus through a rather tricky march over the eastern part of Mt. Oneion.

While Lolos has worked out the routes west and south in Sikyonia and R. Bynum Jeanie Marchand, and Mike Dixon (all under the watchful eye of Prof. Ron Stroud) have pieced together the road networks of the southern and western Corinthia, as far as I know, no one has worked out the roads running south of Mt. Oneion from the area of Solygeia (and the modern village of Loutro Elenis) to the Xeropotamos River valley. This is a relatively small area, but one where one might expect to find areas of exposed bedrock that would preserve wheel ruts. Moreover, it’s tempting to imaging that the hills further south had watch towers to monitoring traffic obscured by the mass of Oneion.

As a side note, it feels strange to blog on ancient Greece at a time when the modern Greece is in such turmoil. I wonder whether reading, thinking, and writing about ancient Greece provides me with a safe way to keep that place in my head without incurring the emotional cost of reflecting on its current troubles.

Costposted to the New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

A New Mycenaean Center in the Corinthia

by Leave a comment

I just finished reading the T. Tartaron, D. Pullen, R. Dunn, L. Tzortsoulou-Gregory, A. Dill, and J. Boyce, “The Saronic Harbors Research Project (SHARP): Investigations at Mycenaean Kalamianos, 2007-2009,” Hesperia 80 (2011), 559-634. I rarely get excited about the Bronze Age, but it’s hard not to get excited about a major new site. Extending for over 7 ha and including over 50 buildings, the site of Kalamianos represented a major harbor on the Saronic coast. Constructed primarily of the grey Corinthian limestone, the outlines of the site remained visible on the surface allowing the SHARP team to outline the site and its buildings without excavating. Using the techniques of intensive pedestrian survey they produced a significant ceramic assemblage of material from the site which they feel grounds the site chronologically in the Late Bronze Age. A larger regional survey of the region north and west of the coastal village of Korphos has indicated that the area also had significant activity in the Early Bronze Age and rather little activity thereafter. Extensive survey of the hills and valleys surrounding Korphos has produced additional evidence for a vital Bronze Age landscape suggesting that the region was a particularly prosperous and well-developed corner of the busy Saronic world.

On a personal level, the documentation of activities in this area is interesting because the site of Lakka Skoutara where David Pettegrew and I have worked for close to a decade is just a few kilometers (as the crow flies) from their study area. The publication of the ancient, medieval, and modern landscape of Kalamianos and surrounding regions will form a key anchor to our analysis of Lakka Skoutara.

The most interesting thing to me is the methods used to document the site and the extraordinary transparency of the authors in describing their procedures. The integration of architectural, extensive, and intensive survey in a methodologically consistent treatment of a single area.  The use of kite and balloon photography to assist in documenting the visible architecture produced some rather striking images that were effective in conveying both the methods and the character of the preserved architecture.

Over the course of intensive survey, the SHARP collected ceramic material using the chronotype system from both specific rooms within clearly defined buildings and across survey style transects. Using a gridded system for the most part, their work follows a similar approach our large site in Cyprus, and this is unsurprising since both David Pettegrew and myself learned the craft of survey from Tom Tartaron, Daniel Pullen, and Tim Gregory over the course of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey.  When the final results are published, the survey work at Korphos will represent another good example of the “4th Wave” intensive survey in Greece which tends to focus intensively on single sites or microregions of a few square kilometers rather than the large areas typical of “Third Wave” regional survey in Greece.

NewImageFigure 40. Satellite image of the Korphos region with the locations of small elliptical stone enclosures indicated by open white ovals, and two larger Mycenaean enclosures indicated by filled ovals.

I was gratified to see that their systematic extensive survey produced a preliminary map (above) of the strange round enclosures found on numerous height in the area. In his preliminary study of these enclosures, M. Dixon argued that they were Classical or Hellenistic in date and represented a series of ad hoc fortifications designed defend a vulnerable landscape from the historically documented threat of the Athenian fleet (in the Classical Age) and the more persistent threat of local raiding during the unstable Hellenistic centuries. The SHARP team found little to support a Classical or Hellenistic date for these enclosures and, noting the absence of any substantial quantity of ceramic material, preferred an Early Bronze Age date on the basis of a few sherds found wedged in the walls.

I had the opportunity to look at some of these strange little “fortifications” first hand about a decade ago while documenting the site of Lakka Skoutara. The absence of ceramic material from these sites is, indeed, vexing. And a few Early Bronze Age sherds do little more, at present, than provide a terminus post quem for these rough enclosures.

There were any number of interesting tidbits from their preliminary publication, but a few really stood out to me:

First, I was pretty interested to see that they used the absence of later pottery collected by the survey to argue for the absence of later activity at the site. To my mind, this is an important step for the field of survey archaeology. We are often relatively confident in arguing from the presence of activity based on the presence of ceramics, but we rarely have taken the next step. The vagaries of site formation and the differential visibility of various periods in the surface record have usually led us to stop short of making arguments ex silentio.  But, I suppose the extraordinary geomorphological stability of the landscape around Korphos provided them with the confidence to make this claim.

Next, it is remarkable, however, that there is very little discussion of Byzantine material. The site of Stiri features a significant Middle Byzantine church dedicated to the Panayia. It was the katholikon of a monastery that may have been visited by Os. Loukas and is attested in census records as late as the 18th century.  It probably functioned in some capacity into the 19th century. Remarkably, the area around the church which is strewn with important Early Bronze Age remains seems to have produced almost no Medieval pottery (according to their admittedly preliminary report). This may be the result of local geomorphological activity – the church site in a polje filled with sediment that may have covered the Byzantine surface – or perhaps a preference of non-cermaic material at the site during the Byzantine period (although this seems a bit unlikely).

Finally, it is a bit troubling, however, to imagine a Byzantine church leaving almost no trace in the local ceramic assemblage and, then, using that same assemblage to date walls visible on the surface. I have no reason to doubt their confidence in assigning Late Bronze Age or Early Bronze Age dates to features in the landscape, but I anxiously await a more systematic treatment of their results to understand the complexities of site formation in this area.

In my informal visits to the area over the years, I’ve seen significant evidence for Late Antique activity in the area including some Early Christian mullions at the church of Ay. Pantes in the village of Korphos itself. It was interesting to note that the SHARP team found a Late Roman kiln site amidst the ruins. Their suggestion that the center of habitation in the region moved to the location of Korphos town during antiquity seems plausible.

One last thing: the color photographs and illustrations in the article are fantastic!

Crossposted to New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

A Paper on Corinthian Peasants

by Leave a comment

Among the gaggle of Corinthian papers at this year’s Archaeological Institute of America/American Philological Associate Annual Meeting is a paper that David Pettegrew and I offer on peasants in the Corinthian countryside for a joint APA/AIA panel organized by Kim Bowes and Cam Grey from the University of Pennsylvania. (I’ve been blogging about this topic for some months now.)

Here’s the panel and the details:

Session 5J:
Joint AIA/APA Colloquium: Finding Peasants in Mediterranean Landscapes: New Work in Archaeology and History
1:30 p.m.−4:00 p.m.
Independence Ballroom
Organizers: Cam Grey, University of Pennsylvania, and Kim Bowes, University of Pennsylvania

1:30 introduction (10 min.)
1:40 Producing the Peasant in the Corinthian Countryside
David K. Pettegrew, Messiah College, and William Caraher, University of North Dakota (20 min.)
2:05 Placing the Peasant in Classical Athens
Robin Osborne, University of Cambridge (20 min.)
2:30 Not Your Run-of-the-Mill Cereal Farmer? The Evidence from Small Rural Settlements in the Cecina valley in Northern Etruria
Nicola Terrenato, University of Michigan, and Laura Motta, University of Michigan (20 min.)
2:50 Break (15 min.)
3:05 Stuffed or Starved? Evaluating Models of Roman Peasantries
Robert Witcher, University of Durham (20 min.)
3:30 Excavating the Roman Peasant
Kim Bowes, University of Pennsylvania (20 min.)

And here’s the paper:

Crossposted to New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Some More Corinthian Bodies

by Leave a comment

It was a pleasure to see another Corinthian article in this month’s American Journal of Archaeology. Betsey Robinson’s study of the Eutychia mosaic from Corinth introduces us to this frequently overlooked mosaic and another pair of Corinthian bodies.

NewImageFig. 2 (p. 106) Room C of the South Stoa at Corinth, viewed from the north, showing robbed eastern wall, mosaic, and marble-revetted bench against southern wall. (for more pictures go here).

The mosaic stood in a room in the Hellenistic South Stoa, but the mosaic dates to the 2nd century.  Robinson walks us through the iconography of this mosaic which shows a half-nude seated female with a shield inscribed with the word Eutychia (or fortune) and a nude youth with a victory crown. The central panel is surrounded by corner panels featuring various birds. The mosaic has been traditional associated with the administrator of the Isthmian games (the agonothetes).

Robison suggests that this mosaic should be understood as a personification of Corinth and the youth should be associated with the Isthmian games. She is careful, however, to articulate the way in which viewers would have come to these interpretations. Her analysis did not derive from a detached scholarly view of typology, but a careful consideration of ancient ways of seeing and producing art.  This grounding in ancient ways of seeing opened the door to significant ambivalence in how ancient viewers might have understood this mosaic. Rather than being a liability, she suggests that such ambivalent relationships with ancient iconography are the inevitable products of the Greek – Roman hybridization that occurred in the provinces. All in all, this is a very clever and subtle reading of a neglected mosaic.

By connecting events, cities, and places to bodies, I couldn’t help but think about some of Kostis Kourelis’ recent posts which find parallels between the Byzantine water altar at the site of the former Asclepeion in Athens and an etching on an architectural discovered at the site (see here and here). The architectural fragment depicted an individual drinking from a flagon and showed the interior of the vessel flowing into the distended belly of the drinker. Here’s Kostis’ sketch of the etching:

NewImage

The etching of the drinker conceptualizes the experience of the water altar in distinctly in human terms and space. The prevalence of the body as a spatial metaphor for all kinds of ancient buildings, events, places, and features makes it unsurprising to find water features paralleled with the body. All the same, Kostis’ timely post presents a nice parallel as Robinson suggests that the bodily metaphor for Corinth might evoke the personification of Peirene fountain which is sometimes also associated with the Isthmian games (other Panhellenic games have fountains associated with them).  Perhaps the appearance of springs with their gaping caverns or the flow of fluid within made them particularly suitable for personifications. Or maybe the association of springs with the nymphs who frolic in their grottos.

Robinson identified the birds around the central panel as “conventional ‘hospitality gifts’ ” (p. 107). These birds may remind the view that the mosaic itself was a gift and perhaps related to the liturgies associated with the Isthmian games. Various birds are relatively common in Early Christian mosaics across the Eastern Mediterranean and it got me wondering whether the birds that appear in this context draw are likewise to draw a parallel between hospitality gifts and acts of munificence to the church.

The other thing that was interesting was that the mosaic was repaired in Late Antiquity. That suggested that the mosaic remained visible for hundreds of years. It is interesting that Robinson was willing to entertain a certain amount of ambiguity in how “contemporary” viewers saw the mosaic, but it is more challenging to understand the “contemporary view” of a mosaic that lasted at least two hundred years.  The article, in general, lacked a clear since of “now” for the viewer. My guess is the late antique viewers who chose to renovate the mosaic had different goals in mind, interpretative lenses and local contexts from viewers contemporary with the mosaics original construction.

Crossposted to the New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World.