Diachronic – Corinthian Matters

Journeys through an Ancient Landscape

by David PettegrewApril 4, 2016April 4, 2016Leave a comment

I spent Thursday and Friday last week visiting St. Mary’s College of Maryland located on the beautiful site of Historic St. Mary’s City, which served as Maryland’s original state capital and ranks among America’s oldest colonial settlements. It was one of the most interesting campus visits I have had in combining my interests in ancient landscapes and digital humanities. On Thursday morning, I visited a class of students in Historical Methods to discuss the subject of digital history and used examples from our Digital Harrisburg Initiative – a series of projects created by faculty and students at Messiah College and Harrisburg University of Science and Technology on 20th century Harrisburg. In the afternoon, I gave a lecture titled “Journeys through an Ancient Landscape” that outlined some of the main contours of my forthcoming book on the Isthmus of Corinth. The abstract for the afternoon lecture went something like this:

From the Panhellenic games of the sixth century BCE, to the Persian invasions of 479 BCE, the Emperor Nero’s disastrous tour of Greece in 66 CE, and Justinian’s fortifications of the sixth century, the Corinthian Isthmus captured the imagination of kings and emperors, philosophers and orators, traders and merchants, and missionaries and preachers as a place of congregation and competition. In this talk, we will journey through the layers of Corinth’s landscape to explain how its Isthmus became the most famous, consequential, and contested land bridge of the ancient world.

Putting the lecture together proved harder than I imagined. Although I was determined not to write out the talk and present simply from the PowerPoint presentation and some notes, I found it challenging to condense the main arguments of the book into a 45-50 minute talk.

I began with the close modern associations of this landscape with congregation, contest, and journey. Whether it is Robbie Maddison’s 200 foot long motorcycle jump over the canal in 2010, Peter Besenyei’s daredevil flight through in 2012, bungee jumping into the abyss, or simply taking selfies on the old national highway bridge, this is a landscape that seems to draw direct engagement.

From there, I laid out the “essential vision” of the Isthmus created by ancient authors and developed in new ways in the modern period. According to the maritime interpretation, Corinth was the quintessential traveler’s town, which gained its unique character from the 4-mile wide Isthmus that linked the Peloponnese with the Greek mainland. This Isthmus was the timeless and essential constant of Corinthian history. An Isthmus could neatly explain the entire trajectory of the city’s historical existence: its foundation and growth as an independent Greek polis from the 8th c BCE; the power and wealth of the Greek polis in the classical period; the importance of the region to the Macedonian monarchs who took possession of it after the conquests of Alexander the Great; and the Roman destruction of Corinth in 146 BCE and then its refoundation as a Roman colony a century later. The Isthmus was the determining force that altered the character of the city’s wanderlust population and determined its historical trajectories until barbarian invasions and earthquakes in late antiquity allegedly decimated the population

The remainder of the presentation took apart the maritime interpretation and offers a view of some of the historical contingencies that altered the landscape over time.

For example, the evidence of archaeological survey (that’s my team from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey in the picture below) has shown complex and changing patterns of land use, settlement, and trade from the Geometric era to the period of late antiquity that relate in interesting ways to the features in the landscape (the great trans-isthmus walls) or the changing historical context. In general, the discovery of archaeological evidence for habitation and agriculture in the territory disproves the old notion that the Corinthians of the classical or Roman periods had no interest in the agricultural resources of the territory.

Similarly, the ancient road called the diolkos was never the great transit road of the modern imagination. Nor was carting ships over the Isthmus regular ancient practice but reflected unique and extraordinary historical contingencies of the classical and early Hellenistic periods. Conveniently, a reconstructed 17th century ship at Historic St. Mary’s City called the Maryland Dove provided a good reference in point: the ancient triremes that allegedly went over the Isthmus in the fifth century BC were larger even than the Dove.

I also drew attention to the contingencies that framed ancient discussions of the Isthmus. The Greek concept of isthmos was never a static term but changed according to broader conceptions of the place of individual regions within the Mediterranean. Consider three different views of the Corinthian Isthmus as shown in the image below: the narrowest (dark blue) by classical Greek writers; the broader by the geographer Strabo; and the broadest by Pliny the Elder.

And to my delight, I discovered that the college was located on a peninsula that writers like Strabo would have called an isthmus formed by the constriction of land between St. Mary’s River and the Chesapeake Bay.

Once I get settled, I’ll aim to resume the Corinthian religion series this week and push out some more of this new and recent scholarship and news that has come my way. More soon!

Bridge of the Untiring Sea (Gebhard and Gregory, eds.)

by David PettegrewFebruary 18, 2016February 18, 2016Leave a comment

I finally have my hands on Bridge of the Untiring Sea: the Corinthian Isthmus from Prehistory to Late Antiquity, fresh off the press (December 2015) from the Princeton office of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. I wrote briefly about this forthcoming book in June (here and here).

The Bridge has been a long time in the making. It began really with a half century of excavation and survey on the Isthmus (Broneer’s excavations began at Isthmia in 1952). A conference was held in Athens in 2007 celebrating that milestone, which proceeded quickly to chapters in 2008 before stalling out in a long period of revisions (my own chapter on Corinth’s suburbs went through at least eight drafts from conference paper to final proof). So this is a well-edited and thoroughly corrected collection, which means no reviewer should point out spelling mistakes and grammatical inconsistencies in my essay! As I haven’t seen hardly any of these essays since the original presentation in Athens, I’m excited to finally have a copy to read, especially since I’m wrapping up page proofs of another book on The Isthmus of Corinth.

UntiringBridge_m

The Bridge is a substantial book in paperback form, well-illustrated (160 figures) and carefully edited. It’s significantly smaller and about a third the weight of The Corinthia and the Northeast Peloponnese, another Corinthia conference published in 2014, which included 56 chapters and 558 pages on all aspects of the broad modern region of the Korinthia. While the editors’ introduction is short and efficient, the book just feels much more focused and coherent than The Corinthia and the Northeast Peloponnese with its sprawl of archaeological knowledge. The nearly 17 chapters and 400 pages of Bridge focus especially on the vicinity of the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Isthmia and, to some lesser extent, the broader region (technically the Isthmus, which has been generously extended in one chapter to the southeast Corinthia). Almost half of the essays (7 of 17) are devoted to the district of Isthmia in the geometric to Hellenstic periods (with chapters on subjects such as the Temple of Poseidon, the Rachi settlement, figurines, pottery, the Chigi Painter, and the West Foundation); another four chapters take on Roman subjects related to Isthmia (sculpture, agonstic festivals, Roman baths, East Field); there are a couple of Late Antique Isthmia essays (on lamps and the Isthmia fortress); and a few chapters consider the entire region (my piece on Roman settlement, Bill Caraher’s essay on the Justinianic Isthmus, and Tartaron’s piece on Bronze Age Kalamianos).

It’s worth noting that this is a collection of solid archaeological and (mostly) empirical essays on different facets of the history of the Isthmus, and especially the district of Isthmia. Some of the essays look like Hesperia articles with extensive catalogues and photos of artifacts. While the work’s scope provides “for the first time the longue durée of Isthmian history” (p. 1), covering the Mycenaean period to the end of antiquity, the editors do not attempt in the introduction (and there is no conclusion) to impose an overarching explanation or central thesis for the long-standing importance of the Isthmus through time. Rather, they offer a short discussion of its different values to ancient writers, an efficient overview of geography and topography of the broad Isthmus, a cursory history of research at Isthmia, and some discussion of recent research programs, publications, and approaches (which is only missing a substantial dicussion of recent efforts at digitization at Isthmia). What the introduction does establish is the long-lasting importance of the Isthmus in ancient thought and the important ties of the landscape to the city of Corinth — points that are discussed explicitly in many of the essays of the volume. But the essays largely stand on their own with little connection between.

In this respect, The Bridge of the Unitiring Sea should be most useful for Corinthian studies in its presentation of a series of state-of-the-field studies of different material classes (pottery, lamps, architecture, terracotta figurines) and sites, some of which are underpublished. Many of the scholars who have contributed essays to the volume have been engaged for years–decades, even–in archaeological research at Isthmia, the Isthmus, and Corinth and their material classes. The collection, for example, offers up-to-date assessments of the architectural development of the Temple of Poseidon, the history of settlement at Rachi, the West Foundation near Isthmia, the Roman bath, the mysterious “East Field” area near the Temple of Poseidon, and late antique lamps–most of which will form the subject of their own specialist publications in the future.

The work is valuable in a final respect in making available numerous up-to-date maps, plans, and illustrations: maps of the eastern Corinthia, the Isthmian district, the Sanctuary of Poseidon, and the Temple proper; maps of Bronze Age and Roman and Late Roman settlement in the Corinthia; state plans and restored views of the temple, sanctuary, and domestic architecture (at Rachi); reconstructed views of men at work; and dozens of photos of materials excavated at Isthmia.

As the Isthmus is central in so many ways to Corinthian history, this edited collection is a most welcome addition to the scholarship of the ancient Corinthia. And since the essays cover every period from prehistory to late antiquity (sadly, no medieval), and often consider the sanctuary’s relationship to Corinth specifically, this is a work relevant to anyone interested in ancient Corinth and Panhellenic sanctuaries.

Ceramics, Cuisine, and Culture (Spataro & Villing, eds.)

by David PettegrewFebruary 1, 2016January 29, 20162 Comments

This new edited collection devoted to the study of Mediterranean kitchen ware is a welcome development in the scholarship of ancient pottery, the most ubiquitous object unearthed in excavation and documented in regional surveys. Most publications on Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Antique pottery have focused on amphoras (storage and transpor Ceramics-Cuisine

t vessels), or fine table wares (for dining), material classes that were produced and regularly exchanged across the Mediterranean. The gritty, scorched, utilitarian kitchen wares, however, have been relatively neglected, even though they comprise one of the most common kinds of pottery found in Hellenistic and Roman contexts and were the basis for one of the most fundamental human activities in the ancient world: cooking and food preparation As they tend to be regionally produced, and regionally produced in similar forms over long periods of time, they mark significant indicators of regional tastes and traditions. Sarah James’ important new study of interim period floor deposits from the Panayia Field in Corinth, for example, has highlighted cooking vessels as one of the best indicators of a population of Corinthians still living in Corinth the century after its sack in 146 BC (see pp. 34-36 of James’ essay in Corinth in Contrast).

Edited by Michela Spataro and Alexandra Villing, Ceramics, Cuisine and Culture: The Archaeology and Science of Kitchen Pottery in the Ancient Mediterranean World (Oxbow Books, 2015) includes essays spanning from the Bronze Age to the Modern period, although many of the essays focus on Hellenistic and Roman subjects. As the table of contents indicates, several essays consider kitchen wares in Peloponnesian and Greek contexts near to the Corinthia, including the nearby Berbati Valley, Laconia, Aegina, and Athens. And as the introduciton states, all of the essays aim to “tease out what kitchen wares can reveal about past and present societies and their development, by utilising, combining and pushing the boundaries of the diverse investigative tools available today.”

Here’s the abstract:

The 23 papers presented here are the product of the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and approaches to the study of kitchen pottery between archaeologists, material scientists, historians and ethnoarchaeologists. They aim to set a vital but long-neglected category of evidence in its wider social, political and economic contexts. Structured around main themes concerning technical aspects of pottery production; cooking as socioeconomic practice; and changing tastes, culinary identities and cross-cultural encounters, a range of social economic and technological models are discussed on the basis of insights gained from the study of kitchen pottery production, use and evolution. Much discussion and work in the last decade has focussed on technical and social aspects of coarse ware and in particular kitchen ware. The chapters in this volume contribute to this debate, moving kitchen pottery beyond the Binfordian ‘technomic’ category and embracing a wider view, linking processualism, ceramic-ecology, behavioral schools, and ethnoarchaeology to research on historical developments and cultural transformations covering a broad geographical area of the Mediterranean region and spanning a long chronological sequence.

The Socio-Environmental History of the Peloponnese during the Holocene

by David PettegrewJanuary 20, 2016Leave a comment

Those who like their history long should be interested in this new article in Quarternary Science Reviews on environmental and human change in the Peloponnese over the last 9,000 years. Co-authored by fifteen historians, archaeologists, geographers, and geologists, the article aims to relate a range of climatic data with archaeological data to discern the relationship between environment and human settlement during the Holocene.

Weiberg, Erika, Ingmar Unkel, Katerina Kouli, Karin Holmgren, Pavlos Avramidis, Anton Bonnier, Flint Dibble, et al. “The Socio-Environmental History of the Peloponnese during the Holocene: Towards an Integrated Understanding of the Past.” Quaternary Science Reviews. Accessed January 12, 2016.

The comparison of data over many regions and long stretches of times means that the environmental records do not neatly match up with the archaeological data. The authors identify social and political factors as most significant than economic factors, and reject the notion that better climate always meant greater settlement. The article, while inconclusive, is nuanced and cautious, and devotes discussion to the challenges of doing such coarse comparisons, especially in respect to regional variation and chronology. Here’s the abstract:

Published archaeological, palaeoenvironmental, and palaeoclimatic data from the Peloponnese in Greece are compiled, discussed and evaluated in order to analyse the interactions between humans and the environment over the last 9000 years. Our study indicates that the number of human settlements found scattered over the peninsula have quadrupled from the prehistoric to historical periods and that this evolution occurred over periods of climate change and seismo–tectonic activity. We show that societal development occurs both during periods of harsh as well as favourable climatic conditions. At some times, some settlements develop while others decline. Well-known climate events such as the 4.2 ka and 3.2 ka events are recognizable in some of the palaeoclimatic records and a regional decline in the number and sizes of settlements occurs roughly at the same time, but their precise chronological fit with the archaeological record remains uncertain. Local socio-political processes were probably always the key drivers behind the diverse strategies that human societies took in times of changing climate. The study thus reveals considerable chronological parallels between societal development and palaeoenvironmental records, but also demonstrates the ambiguities in these correspondences and, in doing so, highlights some of the challenges that will face future interdisciplinary projects. We suggest that there can be no general association made between societal expansion phases and periods of advantageous climate. We also propose that the relevance of climatic and environmental regionality, as well as any potential impacts of seismo-tectonics on societal development, need to be part of the interpretative frameworks.

The Western Argolid Archaeological Project

by David PettegrewJuly 30, 2015July 30, 2015Leave a comment

The Canadian Institute in Greece has updated its digital archive of archaeological projects and research with content on the Western Argolid Regional Project. The summary includes information on personnel, survey type, five-year research plan, description of study area, detailed research goals, methodology, maps, and references. Images from the 2015 season are included with the report.

If you missed the WARP 2015 season, the team actively blogged about their work on the project website. The project is establishing a new standard of survey that combines fine-grained mapping of artifact distributions–the hyper-intensive–with substantial territorial coverage of landscapes. Over two seasons, field teams have surveyed over 13 sq km of territory using relatively small survey units–and the third season promises to add another 6 sq km to that total. In this sense, WARP improves on previous work by projects such as the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey, which captured fine-grained distributions but only at limited coverage (ca. 4 sq km).

Classical Archaeology in Context (Haggis and Antonaccio, eds.)

by David PettegrewJuly 23, 2015July 15, 2015Leave a comment

This new book published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH should be of wide interest for classical archaeologists who understand how particular contexts, theory, and method frame archaeological research, data, results, and conclusions at the end of the day. As one of the longest-running excavations in the Mediterranean, references to Corinth are plentiful. I am also glad to see due attention paid to smaller rural sites in the Mediterranean. Here are the details:

Haggis, Donald, and Carla Antonaccio, eds. Classical Archaeology in Context: Theory and Practice in Excavation in the Greek World. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2015.

Publisher page
Some content available via Google Books

“This book compiles a series of case studies derived from archaeological excavation in Greek cultural contexts in the Mediterranean (ca. 800-100 B.C), addressing the current state of the field, the goals and direction of Greek archaeology, and its place in archaeological thought and practice. Overviews of archaeological sites and analyses of assemblages and contexts explore how new forms of data; methods of data recovery and analysis; and sampling strategies have affected the discourse in classical archaeology and the range of research questions and strategies at our disposal. Recent excavations and field practices are steering the way that we approach Greek cultural landscapes and form broader theoretical perspectives, while generating new research questions and interpretive frameworks that in turn affect how we sample sites, collect and study material remains, and ultimately construct the archaeological record. The book confronts the implications of an integrated dialogue between realms of data and interpretive methodologies, addressing how reengagement with the site, assemblage, or artifact, from the excavation context can structure the way that we link archaeological and systemic contexts in classical archaeology.”

CONTENTS

1. Donald C. Haggis and Carla M. Antonaccio, “A Contextual Archaeology of Ancient Greece”

Historical Contexts and Intellectual Traditions

2. James Whitley, “Scholarly Traditions and Scientific Paradigms: Method and Reflexivity in the Study of Ancient Praisos”

3. Carla M. Antonaccio, “Re-excavating Morgantina”

4. David B. Small, “A Defective Master Narrative in Greek Archaeology

5. Tamar Hodos, “Lycia and Classical Archaeology: The Changing Nature of Archaeology in Turkey”

Mortuary Contexts

6. Alexandra Alexandridou, “Shedding Light on Mortuary Practices in Early Archaic Attica: The Case of the Offering Trenches”

7. Anna Lagia, “The Potential and Limitations of Bioarchaeological Investigations in Classical Contexts in Greece: An Example from the Polis of Athens”

Urban and Rural Contexts

8. Jamieson C. Donati, “The Greek Agora in its Peloponnesian Context(s)”

9. Donald C. Haggis, “The Archaeology of Urbanization: Research Design and the Excavation of an Archaic Greek City on Crete”

10. Manolis I. Stefanakis, Konstantinos Kalogeropoulos, Andreas Georgopoulos, and Chryssi Bourbou, “Exploring the Ancient Demos of Kymissaleis on Rhodes: Multdisciplinary Experimental Research and Theoretical Issues”

11. Kalliope E. Galanaki, Christina Papadaki, and Kostis S. Christakis, “The Hellenistic Settlement on Prophetes Elias Hill at Arkalochori, Crete: Preliminary Remarks”

12. Evi Margaritis, “Cultivating Classical Archaeology: Agricultural Activities, Use of Space and Occupation Patterns in Hellenistic Greece”

Sanctuary Contexts

13. Athanasia Kyriakou and Alexandros Tourtas, “Detecting Patterns through Context Analysis: A Case Study of Deposits from the Sanctuary of Eukleia at Aegae (Vergina)”

14. Dimitra Mylona, “From Fish Bones to Fishermen: Views from the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Kalaureia”

The Isthmus of Corinth Project (Coming Spring 2016)

by David PettegrewJuly 20, 2015July 15, 2015Leave a comment

One of the research projects I will not be working on all summer is my long-labored book, The Isthmus of Corinth: Crossroads of the Mediterranean World. I put the final touches on the manuscript during my fieldseason in Cyprus (with the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project) just in time for the deadline with University of Michigan Press. I’m happy to report that the manuscript is now out of my hands at last and will enter the production queue with a scheduled publication of Spring 2016. That’s all good news of course since this project required a full sabbatical to complete along with the better part of my summers for the last three years. I’ve updated the project page to reflect the final state of the manuscript. There may be small changes in the next few months, but nothing major.

Here is my description of the work from the project page:

The Isthmus of Corinth: Crossroads of the Mediterranean World is a study of the relationship of local, regional, and global interactions in the Roman Mediterranean. Its starting point is the ancient and modern view that the land bridge was a constantly connecting and essential landscape throughout Corinth’s history that altered its economy and character in consistent ways. From the destruction of the Greek city by the Romans to the end of antiquity, historians, poets, orators, and preachers characterized Corinth as an exceptional kind of maritime city made prosperous and powerful from its crossroads, facilities for traffic, commercial markets, pilgrim sites, naval fleet, and decadent pleasures. The ancient consensus that a timeless landscape determined the history, wealth, and character of the city, was adopted almost wholesale by European travelers and the first classical and biblical scholars of the 18^th-19^th centuries.

The book argues against the timeless view of the Corinthian Isthmus and shows instead how the landscape changed frequently in its connection to a wider Mediterranean world. The chapters of the work survey the extant Greek and Latin literature for the Isthmus and synthesize archaeological evidence, especially the data from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey. The chapters begin with the sixth century BCE and step in chronological increments to the fifth century CE.

The table of contents with brief summary:

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Preface

1. Introduction

Outlines the problem of the essential or timeless view of the Corinthian Isthmus. Makes the argument for contingency.

2. The Isthmos

Surveys the conceptions and definitions of the isthmus in the Classical and Hellenistic era and offers a new interpretation of the famous passage in Thucydides about how the Isthmus made Corinth wealthy and powerful

3. The Gate

Surveys the physical landscape of fortifications and settlements that the Romans encountered in the late third century BCE. Outlines the physical developments of the regional structures from the archaic to Hellenistic periods, with special attention to the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey data.

4. The Fetter

Surveys the central place of the Isthmus in the interpretation the Roman destruction of Greek Corinth and the great catastrophe of the loss of Greek freedom.

5. The Portage

Analyzes the changing historical significance of ship portages over the Corinthian Isthmus in antiquity. The center of the chapter is the remarkable portage of the orator Marcus Antonius, grandfather of the famous triumvir, in 102/101 BCE. The chapter contextualizes Marcus Antonius in light of the frameworks of Roman aristocratic values and imperialism during the interim period.

6. The Bridge

Studies the important place of the Isthmus for the first century of the Roman colony’s history. Offers a new interpretation of Strabo’s influential interpretation of the landscape.

7. The Center

A study of the meaning of canalization in antiquity, and especially the Emperor Nero’s failed canal effort. Situates Nero’s enterprise within the particular imperial frameworks of the 50s-60s CE. Also discusses the long-term effects of the canal enterprise on the landscape during the later first to early third centuries CE, including settlement documented in the Eastern Korinthia Survey.

8. The District

A study of the fragmentation of the essentializing conception of the Corinthian Isthmus in the later third to early fifth centuries, including the later Roman transformation of the panhellenic sanctuary at Isthmia.

9. Conclusion

****************************************************************

I’ll be posting more on this project in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

Digitizing Isthmia with the Archaeological Resource Cataloging System (ARCS)

by David PettegrewAugust 27, 2014August 25, 20141 Comment

DKP Introduction: I noted yesterday that the National Endowment for the Humanities recently awarded Jon Frey, Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Culture at Michigan State University, a major grant for the digital implementation of an open-source application known as the Archaeological Resource Cataloging System (ARCS). I asked Jon more about what his teams have been doing at Isthmia and what they hope to accomplish with the grant. He kindly agreed to provide the following overview of the work of Michigan State University and Ohio State University in recent years.

First of all, thanks to David for inviting me to post to Corinthian Matters as the forum he has created gives me an opportunity to write more candidly about our efforts to build an online collaborative workspace for the utilization and organization of digitized archaeological documentation. I tend to feel a bit awkward trying to describe this project more formally as if it has always followed a linear research plan with clearly defined goals and expectations. Rather, in the spirit of a weekend DIY project—and I think ARCS fits into that category in many respects—I’ve been learning as I go, largely through trial and error, but also through the helpful advice of far more experienced neighbors in what I have found to be a very welcoming and encouraging digital archaeological community. This is very much a good thing, as my own feelings about this project oscillate at unpredictable intervals between the fear that ARCS is nothing new (“good for you, you built a VRE!”) and the hope that this project will enable many smaller archaeological projects to share their evidence in a way that respects both their limited resources and the unique ways in which they have organized their recording systems.

History of the Project

The project as a whole began over five years ago with the digitization of notebooks at the Ohio State University Excavations at Isthmia. Yet far from following a clearly defined, institutional plan, this project served a much less lofty, personal goal. More than anything else, I was tired of returning to America at the end of the summer only to discover that I had failed to record a key piece of information and would have to wait until the following season to continue my research. By keeping all of these notebooks on a hard drive, I could eliminate this problem. At some point though, it became apparent that by relying on digital copies of these documents, I had effectively removed them from the information network in which they had been designed to function. This is because the document archive at Isthmia—as at most excavations and surveys—is essentially an analog form of a relational database. Depending on their research question, individuals may consult field diaries, photographs, maps, drawings, descriptions of individual artifacts, or informal reports, all of which, ideally, reference one another according to a pre-determined system.

Figure. Working at the Isthmia archives

Such systems have been refined over decades and have become quite effective at aiding in the retrieval of information, but are not without their inefficiencies and idiosyncrasies. As the work of individuals who are at different levels of experience—frequently the case at projects that also serve as field schools—certain documents may be incomplete or contain errors. Moreover, as artifacts themselves, archaeological records may deteriorate, be misplaced or become lost altogether. Thus, as most archaeologists know, gathering primary information is typically an immersive experience that requires as much time-consuming physical activity as mental. Moreover, most are also familiar with the fact that such archival work rarely reaches a successful conclusion without the helpful intervention of another, more experienced individual who is familiar with all of the peculiarities of a project’s documentation system.

Bearing all this in mind, I soon became interested in exploring how one might build a digital version of an archaeological archive that improves upon this system rather than replaces it altogether. A brief survey of other digital archaeology projects and services revealed a number of ongoing efforts to address related issues, but such initiatives appeared to be more concerned with the standardization and secure storage of archival quality digital data than with the utilization of that data in a virtual research environment. In addition, the use of such services was significantly easier for projects that had been “born digital” or possessed the financial resources to employ full time archivists or independent companies to digitize their entire archive at once.

As a result, with colleagues at the MSU College of Arts and Letters Academic Technology Office I began to develop an open source solution that would allow an archaeological project to create a digital workspace where documents could be collected, curated and shared according to an organizational scheme defined by the individual project. With the assistance of an NEH Digital Humanities Startup Grant in 2011, we created the Archaeological Resource Cataloging System (ARCS), which can be accessed at the present moment at http://arcs.cal.msu.edu

The goals outlined in the NEH proposal seemed modest at the time, but in hindsight, were too ambitious. We offered to build a program that would:

Interface with Digital Asset Management systems like ResourceSpace and Omeka
Work on PC and mobile devices
Be easily modified to suit different archaeological projects
Allow a variety of file types and data types
Augment but not replace digitized documents through the use keyword tags and links to stable URIs.
Be open-source and free to use

As the project began, we soon learned that we could not reasonably achieve the first two objectives within the grant period. Thus we resorted to the creation of our own database and optimized the site to work best on PC devices running Google Chrome. In addition, the complexities involved in building a version of ARCS to be tested using data from Isthmia made it difficult to maintain a separate, project non-specific source code. There were also a number of issues that we discovered we needed to address before ARCS could become a useful system. To begin with, there was the question of who exactly would be carrying out the work of uploading and curating the information. Then there was the question of what metadata standard and terminology we would use in order to make the documents presented through ARCS easily searchable and relatable to other resources.

In order to address the labor issue, we adopted a “crowd-sourcing” approach, but this presented its own challenges. A great deal of time was devoted to devising and implementing the type of user access and control measures that are typical of all digital projects that have resorted to volunteer workers to achieve their goals. The metadata issue was less easily solved. While Dublin Core appeared to be the best solution, we soon discovered that this schema did not apply to archaeological documentation as well as we would have hoped. Quite often the 15 core elements had to be translated into descriptive categories at Isthmia that merely seemed the best fit. Other aspects of archaeological documentation were left completely unaddressed. The end result was the creation of a metadata schema for Isthmia that was more complex and idiosyncratic than the system already in use at the excavation. Finally, the development of a list of approved terminology and formats for these metadata fields has proven to be a challenge in and of itself.

These issues aside, the beta version of ARCS should still be seen as a successful demonstration of the advantages of presenting primary archaeological documentation as digitally augmented evidence. This is seen most clearly in the case of the field notebooks with which this digitization project began. On the one hand, a simple digital image of a notebook page cannot be easily parsed by a computer and thus made machine searchable.

A 1970 notebook from the Isthmia Archives

On the other hand, electronic transcriptions (even when carried out in accordance with TEI standards) do not fully capture the dynamic and organic character of these documents with their photographs, drawings, and handwritten notes, often made by several different individuals over time. Yet, when a notebook page is presented as an image, supplemented by user-generated keywords and hyperlinks to other digital resources, the result is the best of both worlds.

Notebook as it appears in ARCS

The main governing principle throughout the development process has been to electronically update, but not replace the traditional operating procedures common to most archaeological archives. Thus the front page offers the user the opportunity to consult evidence by type (notebooks, maps and plans, cataloged artifacts, reports, etc.) just as these documents are physically arranged at an archive or library.

Front page of ARCS

While users may search for a specific reference at any time, the “resource view” interface also allows for a visual scan of the evidence, just as one might fan through the pages of a book or a series of index cards or drawings.

When a user has identified the information they seek, hyperlinks offer them the chance to follow digitally the cross references that already exist in the original documents. Moreover, just as one might gather together several different types of documents as part of their research, ARCS allows users to create digital collections to which they can return at any time.

All documents and collections have stable URIs so this information can be shared between users as well. Also, because work at an archive often involves conversation with colleagues and consultation with experts, each document on ARCS has an associated discussion forum, where users can ask questions or provide answers.

Finally, because excavations and surveys—even those that are not currently engaged in fieldwork—continue to grow and =generate evidence in both traditional and digital formats, ARCS is equipped with a simple drag and drop upload feature. While they are encouraged to provide as much information as possible about the resource they are creating, at the very least users must define a title and type for the resource. In this way, large batches of information can be uploaded at once and left on the system to be cataloged, tagged, and linked to other data later.

Upload page in ARCS

The version of ARCS currently in use at Isthmia continues to grow. At present the system contains nearly 7,300 unique resources, ranging from digital copies of all notebooks, to notecards representing all inventoried artifacts, to a representative sample of drawings, plans, and type-written reports. Other documents are added each season as they are scanned and processed. As a matter of conservation and preservation alone, this is an important step for the OSU Isthmia Excavations. At the same time though, any of these resources can now be organized into collections and shared with interested researchers in a matter of minutes. Thus requests for information from the Isthmia archives are now beginning to be met by means of an email containing a link to the relevant digital resource. But most significantly, the ARCS system has allowed a smaller project like Isthmia to “go digital” on its own terms (literally and figuratively) and budget without relying on its better-funded peer institutions to share their source code and resources.

In addition, the ARCS project has also produced an unexpected, but no less important, outcome. As a teaching tool, this online resource has been used not only as a way to provide undergraduate students with unprecedented access to primary archaeological documentation but also as a way to encourage them to contribute in a meaningful way to its creation. For the past three years, students enrolled in Prof. Timothy Gregory’s online classical archaeology courses at OSU have been presented with the full body of documentation associated with the excavation of a number of individual trenches at Isthmia, which they then use to generate archaeological reports of their own. For the past five years, students participating in my own study abroad program and courses at MSU have taken a lead role in scanning, processing, uploading and annotating the documents themselves. The process is not always perfect—asking undergraduate students in Greece to perform up to the standards of a professional archivist is at times a real challenge—but in the end, the results are generally reliable. In any case, such activities challenge students not only to make sense of several, potentially conflicting forms of evidence, but also to see the practices and assumptions that underlie the interpretations of the past that are often taken for granted. This is exactly the type of “doing history” that is now held to form the foundation of effective teaching strategies in undergraduate education (see, for example, the discussion in T. Mills Kelly’s recent book on Teaching History in the Digital Age).

Future Directions

While the source code is now freely available on GitHub, there is still much to be done before ARCS can be easily implemented at a wider range of archaeological projects. This is why I am excited that, in collaboration with Ethan Watrall at the MATRIX Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences and with the funding of an NEH Digital Implementation Grant, we are now able to continue with this project. Some of the more significant improvements that we have proposed are as follows:

Because the creation of the underlying ARCS database had represented a stop-gap measure when integration with other data management systems proved too difficult, we plan to implement the KORA Digital Repository and Publishing Platform. This will improve the speed and efficiency of keyword searches as well as the overall organization of the data that is studied through ARCS.
Inasmuch as it became clear in the early stages of development that ARCS could not (and probably should not) serve as an archival solution, we will be developing an export utility that will properly format the data created and augmented within this system according to the standards required for data storage with services such as the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) and the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR). This export utility will also allow for the transfer of data generated in ARCS to other software applications such as Microsoft Access and ArcGIS for higher order statistical and geospatial analysis. In addition, because many projects—especially those that have transitioned from traditional analog to digital recording practices—have already created their own databases or other forms of machine-readable information, we will develop an import utility so that this evidence can be organized, augmented and shared through ARCS.
Because the import and export of different types of data will require a standard format for ease in identification, we will adopt the use of the ArchaeoCore metadata standard, developed at the Fiske Kimball Fine Arts Library at the University of Virginia specifically for use in archaeological contexts. We expect that, in keeping with the work of the Linked Ancient World Data Institute the use of ArchaeoCore will allow data to be shared between archaeological projects without requiring each individual project to redesign its recording system to fit a universal standard.
Having implemented these changes in the version of ARCS already in use at Isthmia, we will begin to collaborate with William Caraher and Amy Paplexandrou at the Princeton Polis Expedition Medieval Monuments Project, Adam Rabinowitz at the Preserve of Tauric Chersonesos Excavations at Chersonesos, and Kim Shelton at the UC Berkeley Excavations at Nemea in order to test the ability of the ARCS system to adapt to different recording systems for archaeological data. This will involve the creation of an installation wizard that can be used to customize ARCS to suit a particular project’s unique recording system as well as an ontology mapping tool to aid in the sharing of data between projects.

Given my experience in the first phase of this project, it is reasonable to assume that we will encounter some obstacles along the way. Likewise, it would be foolish to think that ARCS will offer a solution to all of the long standing issues associated with the transition to digital techniques for gathering archaeological evidence. For example, we at the OSU Isthmia excavations have maintained some traditional techniques but have adopted certain innovations so that the resulting mix of traditional, handwritten notebooks and artifact catalogues alongside digital images, illustrations and databases requires a concerted effort to coordinate. But at the same time, I think it is reasonable to hope that through the development of ARCS, it may be possible to achieve the elusive goal of sharing archaeological evidence between and among sites in way that nevertheless respects the unique identity of each project’s system for recording and interpreting its evidence. In this way, it may be possible to follow the lead of survey archaeologists in adopting a regional view of the ancient world, but with a degree of detail that is typically the strength of an excavation.

Major NEH Grant awarded for the Digitization of Excavation Records at Isthmia

by David PettegrewAugust 26, 2014August 25, 20141 Comment

It’s not every day that one sees friends and colleagues awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop open-source applications for uploading, organizing, and sharing archaeological data and records. I was delighted last month when I saw the announcement circulate on FB that Dr. Jon Frey of Michigan State University received a Digital Humanities Implementation grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities on the order of $324,586—all to continue to develop and expand a tool called Archaeological Resource Cataloging System, or ARCS for short. These grants are incredibly competitive and award little more than 10% of applications, so congratulations to Dr. Frey and his colleague Ethan Watrall for developing a compelling archaeological tool that has earned the national recognition of a tough group of external reviewers.

I’ve invited Jon to contribute a post about the work of Michigan State University and Ohio State University at Isthmia over the last few years in digital affairs, and map out what he plans to do with the grant he’s been awarded. So, tomorrow’s post will come straight from Jon. In the meantime, here’s the press release from the NEH.

And the press release from Michigan State University:

“The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded nearly $1 million to Michigan State University as part of its Digital Humanities Implementation Grants program.

Marking the largest grant, Jon Frey, assistant professor of art history and visual culture, and Ethan Watrall, assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and associate director of MATRIX: Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, received $324,586 for ARCS: Archaeological Resource Cataloguing System.

It will provide an open-source application in which users can upload, tag, sort and link digitized copies of photos, drawings and archaeological documents. The project builds upon the original case study of Ohio State University’s Isthmia excavations, for which Frey is field coordinator….”

The blog site for MATRIX: Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at MSU, provides a little more context:

“Originally funded by an NEH Digital Startup Grant and developed as a proof of concept by a small research group in the College of Arts and Letters (http://arcs.cal.msu.edu), ARCS is an open-source application designed to reintroduce many of the advantages of traditional archival research into its new electronic form. By means of an intuitive web-based interface, users can upload, visually scan, keyword, sort, and link together digitized copies of photographs, drawings, and (frequently handwritten) documents that together are the most faithful representation of the archaeological record. What is more, ARCS relies on a crowd-sourced approach to augment the information it contains. This not only provides a ready alternative to archaeological projects that lack a staff of dedicated archivists, but also encourages collaboration among scholars as well as public interest in a project’s ongoing research.

While the start-up phase of the project was very successful, the NEH Digital Implementation Grant will allow the project team to address several key software, design, and sustainability issues, including improved software architecture, interoperability, and community adoption and use.

As part of this new phase of the ARCS project, the project director’s have identified three archaeological projects that have already begun to digitize their primary documents and are interested in using the ARCS software in order to meet their research needs. Implementation at each of these projects will involve a further development of ARCS, which will in turn yield an even more flexible platform that can be customized to match each individual project’s unique system of archaeological documentation. Most importantly, because our implementation of the software involves multiple projects, we will be uniquely suited to develop a middle-ground solution that bridges the gap between the need to preserve the unique character of each project’s evidence and the larger goal of utilizing the evidence from several locations in research at a regional scale.”

Stay tuned for Jon’s fuller presentation of his work with ARCS and outline of where he plans to take it.

Touring Corinth (virtually) with the Field Trip App

by David PettegrewAugust 25, 2014August 25, 2014Leave a comment

About a month ago, Andrew Reinhard of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens announced a new digital tour of Ancient Corinth that accompanies the publication (in press) of Ancient Corinth: A Guide to the Site and Museum. The book, which will hit the market this fall, marks the first guidebook to Corinth published by the ASCSA in over half a century, and it should offer a total overhaul of the sixth edition of the old guidebook. Here’s a description of the new (physical) guidebook:

“This is the first official guidebook to the site of Ancient Corinth published by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in 50 years. Fully updated with the most current information, color photos, maps, and plans, the Corinth Site Guide is an indispensable resource for the casual tourist or professional archaeologist new to the site. The Guide begins with a history of Corinth and its excavations, followed by a tour of the museum. The Guide continues with a route inside the fenced area of the archaeological site from the Temple of Apollo to the Bema to the Peirene Fountain and more. The final section describes the ancient monuments outside the fence: the Odeum, the Theater, and the Asklepieion, and then the various remains of Ancient Corinth located within and outside the ancient Greek walls, including the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore and the Lechaion Basilica. Short bibliographic notes for many entries lead the reader to fuller descriptions of monuments, objects, and concepts. A glossary is also provided. Interspersed between descriptions of 69 monuments are seven Topographical Notes and focus boxes on special topics such as geology, Pausanias, St. Paul, and prehistoric Corinth and the Corinthia.”

What makes this seventh edition of the guidebook particularly interesting is that the ASCSA partnered with Google to make much (all?) of the content of the guide available for free via Google’s Field Trip app (which you can download here for iPhone and here for Android). In fact, given the partnership with Google, the app enhances and even changes the reader’s experience of the tour. As their press release notes, “You will be notified by your device’s GPS when you approach any of over 50 Corinth monuments. View images, descriptions, links to more information on ascsa.net, and related Hesperia articles. Field Trip frees you to tour Ancient Corinth however you like in whatever direction you choose.” In other words, you can jump in and out of tour from anywhere on site and are not constrained by the linear presentation that the physical guidebook assumes. All you need is a phone and connection.

As for the app itself, the iPhone page notes that

“Field Trip runs in the background on your phone. When you get close to something interesting, it will notify you and if you have a headset or bluetooth connected, it can even read the info to you. Field Trip can help you learn about everything from local history to the latest and best places to shop, eat, and have fun. You select the local feeds you like and the information pops up on your phone automatically, as you walk next to those places.”

Field Trip works just as this description suggests. When I downloaded and loaded the app, a map appeared showing my location as a blue dot in Camp Hill, PA, with yellow dots representing the sites in surrounding Harrisburg. There are cards for monuments, churches, synagogues, and sites associated with Harrisburg’s place in the American Revolution, Civil War, City Beautiful, and historic floods, among many others. Clicking on the dots loads cards containing photos and information related to the place, and external links to relevant sites. The app, which is designed especially for, well, “field trips,” spotlights sites in the vicinity of your current location. The designers have not yet made it easy for “virtual” field trips.

I was curious, though, whether I could access the Corinth tour virtually from my home in south-central Pennsylvania. I discovered that I could, in fact, but not as easily as I would have expected. The app does not include, so far as I can see, an inbuilt search feature that will zip you around the world instantaneously to another place like Ancient Corinth, but it does include a global map, which you can slide to any location in the world by zooming out and then in.

I was disappointed at first to see no yellow dots over Ancient Corinth and assumed the app didn’t work from remote location, but the cards appear once you zoom into close range.

Unfortunately, the app is really not designed for this purpose. For example, you can’t save your particular place on the map if you’ve strayed far from home, and if you’re looking at Ancient Corinth from Harrisburg, PA, and accidentally tap on the “Map” or “Nearby” button on the bottom, and (sometimes) the “Back” arrow when looking at a card, it will teleport you back to where you actually are.

These foibles aside, there’s still much to gain from a virtual field trip. There are dozens of cards with up-to-date information and scores of beautiful high-quality color and B&W photos. In their brevity, the cards oversimplify the debates over particular places in the Corinthian landscape, but they do hint at the scholarly controversies. I was glad, for example, to see in the discussion of the fortification walls of Corinth the two hypotheses about the date of the Late Roman wall, the Theodosian and Justinianic. The cards also link to additional information beyond the app, although the external links to bibliography are selective.

Two other things struck me as I was using this app and thinking ahead about teaching this upcoming year. First, as I work today on my syllabus for a course in Historical Archaeology, I’m considering having my students take the virtual tour of Corinth and see what they can do with both the urban topography of Corinth and the ways that archaeologists construct knowledge in a landscape. The aerial view, in particular, could encourage students to consider the city in terms of topography and natural resources.

Second, as I’m planning for another field school and museum program with the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project in Cyprus, I’m struck by how easy it could be to create Field Trip cards (or use those that already exist) for the sites of Cyprus, which form our itinerary when we visit the island in late May.