Corinthian Matters

A Resource for the Study of the Corinthia, Greece

Category: Sites, Isthmia

Digitizing and Droning Isthmia

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Several years ago I wrote about the interesting work Professor Jon Frey of Michigan State University was doing with collaborators at Isthmia to digitize the excavation notebooks as well as the associated finds and context data. Over the last couple of weeks, MSU has spotlighted Frey’s recent work at the site including his discovery of a gymnasium at the site (now published in Hesperia, with Timothy Gregory).

The article, “Digital Dig: A New Discovery from Ancient Greece,” also includes a video of a drone survey at Isthmia carried out in the fall with James Herbst, Timothy Gregory, and others. This is a great example of innovative technology and digital tools shedding light on old data sets.

Here’s a taste of the cover piece:

Through the careful study of excavation records dating back some 40 years, Michigan State University’s Jon Frey has discovered an ancient gymnasium at the archaeological site of Isthmia, Greece.
 Frey and his team are performing a “digital dig” of sorts. Rather than using shovels and tools to excavate the site, the researchers are studying a backlog of evidence housed in remote storage.

“The neat part is there are many moments when we discover things that the original excavators missed,” says Frey, assistant professor of classical studies in the College of Arts and Letters. “So it’s kind of like our research has shifted from digging to detective work. We’re essentially re-excavating the archives.”

You can find additional videos about the work at Jon’s website, and The State News at MSU also did a separate writeup.

I embed one of the videos below.

Forthcoming Publications of the American School of Classical Studies

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I received a little pamphlet in the mail on Saturday about forthcoming publications of the ASCSA in 2016. Since some of these have been in production for years, I’ll save more detailed comments until the works actually appear in print. Forthcoming books include studies from Corinth, Isthmia, and the Nemea Valley, as well as the revised site guide to Corinth. I have provided links to the press pages for each book.

 

 

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

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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.

Isthmia IV (Sturgeon) and VII (Raubitschek) Online

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Chuck Jones kindly pointed out that two additional volumes of the Isthmia Series were available online. As orginally noted in his post from 2011 concerning open access publications of the ASCSA, Google Books has released previews of Isthmia Vol. IV. Sculpture I: 1952-1967  (Mary C. Sturgeon) and Isthmia Vol. VII: The Metal Objects, 1952-1989 (Isabelle K. Raubitschek). The previews are not complete and omit key pages, but many still be able to make use of them for research or reading.

Isthmia IVIsthmia VII

Joseph Rife’s Isthmia IX available in JSTOR

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IsthmiaIXSeveral years ago, the American School’s long-running series on the Corinth excavations was released via JSTOR allowing anyone with access to JSTOR to browse thousands of digitized pages of archaeological volumes from Corinth. I have been hoping that digitized works of the Isthmia series might someday be released via JSTOR as well. I don’t know of what plans are in place for that end, but I did see that Joseph Rife’s monumental work on skeletal material from the sanctuary is now available for digital consumption. To download or browse the digital edition, you will need access to JSTOR, of course. Here’s the link.

The End of Greek Athletics in Late Antiquity (Remijsen)

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This new book by Sofie Remijsen, scheduled for publication this month with Cambridge University Press, offers a fresh evaluation of how and why the tradition of athletic competitions came to an end in late antiquity. A work like this is long overdue in light of the long-standing and battered assumption that an imperial edict of Theodosius the Great simply shut the games down in the later fourth century. Judging from the book description, Remijsen will debunk that myth in a sweeping study of the entire circuit of Greek games.

As the book description puts it at the publisher page, “This book presents the first comprehensive study of how and why athletic contests, a characteristic aspect of Greek culture for over a millennium, disappeared in late antiquity. In contrast to previous discussions, which focus on the ancient Olympics, the end of the most famous games is analysed here in the context of the collapse of the entire international agonistic circuit, which encompassed several hundred contests. The first part of the book describes this collapse by means of a detailed analysis of the fourth- and fifth-century history of the athletic games in each region of the Mediterranean: Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Italy, Gaul and northern Africa. The second half continues by explaining these developments, challenging traditional theories (especially the ban by the Christian emperor Theodosius I) and discussing in detail both the late antique socio-economic context and the late antique perceptions of athletics.”

 

The Table of Contents itself suggests that this work will offer a new starting point in its comprehensive discussion:
Introduction
Part I. An Overview of Athletics in Late Antiquity:
1. Greece
2. Asia Minor
3. Syria
4. Egypt
5. Italy
6. Gaul
7. North Africa
Conclusions to Part I
Part II. Agones in a Changing World:
8. A religious ban?
9. An imperial ban?
10. The athletic professionals
11. Athletics as elite activity
12. The practical organization of agones
13. The agon as spectacle
Conclusions to Part II.

 

Since our corporate friends at Google have already scanned sections and random pages of the book, I can see that there are frequent discussions of Corinth and Isthmia throughout, which will no doubt provoke fresh debate among Corinthian scholars, or at least a broader framework for consideration. Indeed, the work clearly advances the view that the ending of the athletic contests were much later than traditionally imagined (390s). Remijsen, for example, concludes (p. 167) that the Isthmian games ended in the period of AD 410-435, a date significantly later than either of the prevailing views which see athletic competition and religious cult ending in either the mid-third century date, or the late fourth. Moreover, pushing the end of athletic contests into the fifth century will also have broader implications for Corinthiaka. One passage I read, for example, reevaluates Antony Spawforth’s influential view (and that of Bruno Keil long before him) that the Emperor Julian’s Epistle 198 (“The Letter on behalf of the Argives”) was written not by Julian but some other author in the later first or early second century AD; Remijsen argues, rather, that the letter fits well within a mid-fourth century context.

 

That all of this comes from a snippet view suggests that the work has broad implications for the archaeology and history of the Roman and late antique Corinthia. Looking forward to reading the work and the critical reviews.

“Bridge of the Untiring Sea”: Contents

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Working through page proofs today for my contribution to the forthcoming Isthmus collection. I have transcribed below the table of contents for the volume, which highlights a chronological arrangement: two essays on the Bronze Age, about 7 essays on the archaic to Hellenistic sanctuary, and 7 essays on the Roman and late Antique Isthmus. Some 13 of the 17 essays deal specifically with Isthmia. While some of the essays explore broader historical issues, this is solid archaeological volume with its strong emphasis on classes of artifacts and particular sites.

I’ll add the bibliography to the Corinthian Studies library in Zotero today. The other front matter for the volume includes new maps of the Isthmus, new authoritative plans of Isthmia, about 160 photos and illustrations, and 6 tables. Look for this volume in print in August or September.

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Introduction (Elizabeth R. Gebhard and Τimothy E. Gregory)

Chapter 1. An Early Mycenaean Habitation Site at Kyras Vrysi (Eleni Balomenou and Vasili Tassinos)

Chapter 2. The Settlement at Kalamianos: Bronze Age Small Worlds and the Saronic Coast of the Southeastern Corinthia (Thomas F. Tartaron)

Chapter 3. The Archaic Temple of Poseidon: Problems of Design and Invention (Frederick P. Hemans)

Chapter 4. The Domestic Architecture of the Rachi Settlement at Isthmia (Virginia R. Anderson-Stojanović)

Chapter 5. City, Sanctuary, and Feast: Dining Vessels from the Archaic Reservoir in the Sanctuary of Poseidon (Martha K. Risser)

Chapter 6. The Temple Deposit at Isthmia and the Dating of Archaic and Early Classical Greek Coins (Liane Houghtalin)

Chapter 7. Riding for Poseidon: Terracotta Figurines from the Sanctuary of Poseidon (Arne Thomsen)

Chapter 8. The Chigi Painter at Isthmia? (K. W. Arafat)

Chapter 9. Arms from the Age of Philip and Alexander at Broneer’s West Foundation near Isthmia (A. H. Jackson)

Chapter 10. New Sculptures from the Isthmian Palaimonion (Mary C. Sturgeon)

Chapter 11. Agonistic Festivals, Victors, and Officials in the Time of Nero: An Inscribed Herm from the Gymnasium Area of Corinth (James Wiseman)

Chapter 12. Roman Baths at Isthmia and Sanctuary Baths in Greece (Fikret K.Yegül)

Chapter 13. The Roman Buildings East of the Temple of Poseidon on the Isthmus (Steven J. R. Ellis and Eric E. Poehler)

Chapter 14. Corinthian Suburbia: Patterns of Roman Settlement on the Isthmus (David K. Pettegrew)

Chapter 15. Work Teams on the Isthmian Fortress and the Development of a Later Roman Architectural Aesthetic (Jon M. Frey)

Chapter 16. Epigraphy, Liturgy, and Imperial Policy on the Justinianic Isthmus (William R. Caraher)

Chapter 17. Circular Lamps in the Late Antique Peloponnese (Birgitta Lindros Wohl)

“The Bridge of the Untiring Sea”. A New Book about the Isthmus

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The closest I came to the Corinthia this year was a flight over the Isthmus en route to JFK from Athens. A very busy spring semester led directly to a productive field and museum season of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project in May-early June. Now that I’m back in the US and the summer stretches before me, I have a little more time to release some Corinthiaka updates, news items, and reviews.

One important update is that the long-awaited book titled “The Bridge of the Untiring Sea”: The Corinthian Isthmus from Prehistory to Late Antiquity, has now entered proof stage and is scheduled for publication in late August. Edited by Elizabeth R. Gebhard and Timothy E. Gregory, this work publishes a conference held in 2007 at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens to celebrate 50 years of archaeological work at Isthmia and across the broader Isthmus. Here’s the book cover and description:

Pindar’s metaphor of the Isthmus as a bridge spanning two seas encapsulates the essence of the place and gives a fitting title for this volume of essays on the history and archaeology of the area. The Isthmus, best known for the panhellenic sanctuary of Poseidon, attracted travelers both before and after Pausanias’s visit in the 2nd century A.D., but only toward the end of the 19th century were the ruins investigated and, after another half century, finally systematically excavated. More recently, archaeologists have surveyed the territory beyond the sanctuary, compiling evidence for a varied picture of activity on the wider Isthmus and the eastern Corinthia. The 17 essays in this book celebrate 55 years of research on the Isthmus and provide a comprehensive overview of the state of our knowledge. Topics include an early Mycenaean habitation site at Kyras Vrysi; the settlement at Kalamianos; the Archaic Temple of Poseidon; domestic architecture of the Rachi settlement; dining vessels from the Sanctuary of Poseidon; the Temple Deposit at Isthmia and the dating of Archaic and early Classical Greek coins; terracotta figurines from the Sanctuary of Poseidon; the Chigi Painter; arms from the age of Philip and Alexander at Broneer’s West Foundation on the road to Corinth; new sculptures from the Isthmian Palaimonion; an inscribed herm from the Gymnasium-Bath complex of Corinth; Roman baths at Isthmia and sanctuary baths in Greece; Roman buildings east of the Temple of Poseidon; patterns of settlement and land use on the Roman Isthmus; epigraphy, liturgy, and Imperial policy on the Justinianic Isthmus; and circular lamps in the Late Antique Peloponnese.

I’m jazzed to see this volume in print. I have not seen any of these pieces other my own (obviously!) and Caraher’s piece on the Justinianic Isthmus. Most of the essays in the volume naturally focus on areas where the most fieldwork has occurred, especially in and around the Panhellenic sanctuary at Isthmia. A few consider the broader landscape of the eastern Corinthia including even places that are not on the Isthmus such as Kalamianos in the southeast Corinthia. 

Here’s the publication page for the book at the ASCSA website. The book is available for pre-ordering at Oxbow and Amazon, among other places.

Ten Unexpected Stories of Corinthian Archaeology, 2014

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Cozied up at a country house near Granville, Ohio, my family ushered in the new year watching Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future II. This movie was a blast from the past. Released in 1989, I was a 15 year old skateboard punk when the film came out, and I distinctly recall conversations with friends about the (im)possibilities of the “hoverboard” – a wheel-less skateboard that floats on air (one of my friends claimed to have ridden one). In the second movie in the series, Doc Brown and Marty McFly travel 30 years into the strange future of 2015 with flying cars, hoverboards, automatic shoelaces, video conferencing, drones, accurate weather forecasts, and biometric scanners. This visit to 2015 causes a disruption of the space time continuum when the antagonist Biff Tannen borrows the time machine, visits his youthful self in 1955, and creates a new dystopian past and present (which alters the future 2015, of course), which resolves itself ultimately in the year 1885. No doubt Back to the Future II will be a hit this year: there are already a number of stories and videos like this one from the Washington Post, which compare the 2015 depicted in the film with the 2015 of our day.

Some of the stories of Corinthian Archaeology in 2014 remind me a bit of the strange world that the 1985 Marty McFly encounters when he travels 30 years into the future. There’s a kind of improbable, unexpected, or futuristic ring to them from the perspective of classical archaeology practiced a generation ago. How many archaeologists working in the Corinthia in, say, 1984, imagined that the following news stories would comprise the major archaeological events of 2014? If our time traveling archaeologist of 1984 had visited the year 2014 and stolen some tools and returned to the past, imagine the mayhem this would have created for the space time continuum.

Since it’s that time of year to compile lists of the greatest archaeological finds of 2014 (see, for example, this one from ASOR and this one from Archaeology magazine), it seemed fitting for Corinthian Matters to publish a ranking of the top ten unexpected stories of 2014. None of the stories below focus on new archaeological discoveries of 2014, which will not appear in journals anyway for at least several years, and none focus on new scholarship that made a splash last year, although your friends at Corinthian Matters are busily updating the Zotero library as we speak and will unleash a slew of new articles and books in the next couple of weeks. The stories below, rather, relate to the archaeological practice of Mediterranean archaeology, and are ranked not by their overall intellectual ramifications or importance per se – although many of them have already had an impact on archaeological knowledge – but according to their shock value – the “Great Scott!” of Doc Brown – from the vantage point of the past. Focusing on archaeological practice, I have had to exclude some pretty awesome stories like daredevil Red Bull pilot Peter Beneyei flying through the Corinth Canal twirling and whirling and plunging and looping. All the same, the ranking in its own way provides some view of the shifting landscape of archaeological practice today, especially as technology has crept into archaeological craft. Now I respect that you might arrange this list in a different order, or might substitute one story for another but here’s the AUTHORITATIVE list of Corinthian archaeology stories (where “Corinthian archaeology” is archaeology that has something to do wi5h the Corinthia).

10. Zigzag Art Discovered in the Panayia Field in Corinth

This story was certainly unexpected. It was one of the most widely circulated but least significant stories of the year which has to be included because it hit so many archaeological channels. The short piece from Live Science highlighted “Zigzag Art” on Geometric vessels from a sarcophagus of Corinth dating to the early 8th century BC. Zigzags are great, but are not overly impressive on Geometric vases (zigzags carved by early humans on 500,000 year old shells, on the other hand, are pretty cool). The author missed the major story – outlined in this recent report in Hesperia – about the early technological achievements of the Corinthian population. Still, the Panayia field excavations got some fine media attention. That the archaeological work reported in the Hesperia article and news piece was carried out a decade ago shows how long it can take for archaeological knowledge to reach the public and why it’s hard to put together a top ten list of discoveries of Corinthian archaeology in 2014. We may not know for many more years the full significance of what archaeologists documented last year.

9. The World’s Largest Solar Boat Arrives in Corinth

Ms-Turanor-PlanetSolar-departs-Monaco-27-September-2010-Photo-courtesy-of-PlanetSolarThis one also I didn’t see coming, but like the zigzags, got a lot of press. In July, the world’s largest solar-powered boat, “Tûranor PlanetSolar,” visited the port of New Corinth for several days and then sailed through the Canal. Operated by researchers from the Swiss School of Archaeology and the Greek Ministry of Culture, the catamaran was on an archaeological enterprise to the Argolid to conduct an underwater survey in search of a putative prehistoric settlement near Franchthi Cave. The boat was equipped with geophysical survey equipment that would map the seabed. The scale of the solar ship, as well as the technology employed for underwater survey, make this story worthy of report even though the archaeological work fell well outside the realm of the Corinthia. I never did hear what they discovered. See also coverage at  this site.

8. Good Luck for the Eutychia Mosaic at Corinth

Screenshot (23)In August, the ASCSA announced plans to restore the Eutychia mosaic through a generous donation. The organization provided this update in October. The restoration of a mosaic is not improbable per se from the vantage point of 1984 (conservation work was taking place at the great monochrome mosaic at Isthmia in the 1980s), but was nonetheless unexpected, and deserves to make the list given its significance for Corinthian archaeology and the publicity of the process (see no. 2 below). The Eutychia mosaic was originally uncovered in excavations of the South Stoa in the 1930s and has in recent decades been enclosed in a dark room off limits to visitors in the southeastern corner of the forum in Corinth. It’s that mosaic you can never really make out when you peer through the fence surrounding it. Since Broneer’s excavation, the mosaic has been interpreted as part of the office of agonothetes: the mosaic show a victorious athlete with a goddess holding a shield inscribed with eutychia, or “Good Luck.” It’s great that Betsey Robinson’s recent article in Hesperia publicized the need for restoration work, and also cool that that the work was recorded with video and publically released in tandem with the conservation.

7. Western Argolid Regional Archaeological Project Begins

P1070124As a landscape archaeologist, it’s inevitable that at least one survey project would make this list. Several friends and collaborators from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey teamed up to launch a new distributional survey in the western Argolid with an acronym – WARP – that competes with any survey project of Greece and Cyprus. I had the good fortune of visiting this beautiful survey territory, the Inachos Valley, in the opening days of the project. Now, this isn’t the Corinthia per se, but the team contained so many Corinthian archaeologists that it seemed right to include the project in the rankings. Plus the project came on strong in the blogsophere with committed bloggers like Bill Caraher and Dimitri Nakassis pumping out interesting social media on a daily basis. The idea of a survey is not that unexpected of course from 1984, when some of the major surveys of Greece were fully in motion. Nonetheless, WARP gives us an example of an efficiently run hyper-intensive survey. As their abstract for a conference paper describes their work, the project surveyed some 5.5 sq km using very intensive distributional survey methods in a single season – greater coverage, that is, than the 4 sq km covered by the Eastern Korinthia Survey over three seasons (although EKAS was beleaguered by permit problems). If WARP is this efficient over the next two seasons, the project may end up one of the most efficient, intensive surveys projects carried out in Greek lands.

6. American School Launches New Maps and Spatial Data

Screenshot (27)It’s hard to know whether our classical archaeologist of 1984 would have imagined how important the GIS revolution would be for archaeologists of the future. The concept and technology for geographic information systems was established by the mid-1980s but commercial GIS software did not become widely available until the 1990s. Today archaeologists cannot live without it. In September, the ASCSA announced the dedication of a page populated with free GIS data, which continues to grow into a one-stop shop for free downloadable files related to Greece and the Peloponnese: digital elevation models, roads and cities, topographic contours, and ready made maps. I got to tour a beta version of this page in late August and had planned to blog the news release but the arrival of a little baby boy in early September changed that. This news certainly deserves a place on the list since it makes a major contribution to many different engagements on Corinthian archaeology. I will soon update the maps section of this site to point to this site.

5. The Lechaion Harbour Project Launches

One of the most exciting stories of the year was the launching of the Lechaion Harbour Project (LHP), a Danish-Greek enterprise designed (according to the project’s Facebook page) “to digitally survey, excavate, study, and publish the submerged archaeological remains of Corinth’s main harbor town Lechaion.” Some of the news outlets wrongly reported that Lechaion’s harbor had been discovered (it had never fully been lost). The real story was the use of such sophisticated equipment to map the underwater remains at Lechaion and – this is important – a systematic archaeological study of the harborworks. The project released a series of updates and mini-reports via its Facebook page about the process of an underwater digital survey through the use of dredges and a “3D parametric sub-bottom profiler” (sounds futuristic?). See this brief report from Archaeology magazine, this longer one from The Greek Reporter, and the original press release.

4. Michigan State University Wins NEH grant for Archaeological Resource Cataloging System

ARCS notebook

This story didn’t circulate as widely as I expected it would, but when the news release comes from was the prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities, you know it’s big. Dr. Jon Frey of Michigan State University was awarded a Digital Humanities Implementation grant on the order of $324,586 to develop and expand a tool called Archaeological Resource Cataloging System (ARCS) for digitizing the excavation notebooks at Isthmia, Nemea, Tauric Chersonesos, and Polis (Cyprus). ARCS is an open-source application for preserving and interacting with excavation notebooks and other field documents. This is a boon not only to Corinthian archaeology but also for smaller archaeological projects that are trying to record and preserve data on limited budgets. It’s also unexpected from our vantage year 1984. For a review of grant awarded, see this post, and Dr. Frey’s comments here.

3. The American School Launches its Virtual Field Trip App to Corinth

2014-08-25 09.21.32After a fifty year hiatus in publishing edition after revised edition of the official guidebook to Corinth and its museum, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens announced the imminent publication (now in production) of a seventh edition of Ancient Corinth: A Guide to the Site and Museum, plus – and here’s the kicker – a now available digital tour of Ancient Corinth via the Field Trip app available for iPhones and Androids. As I wrote in my review of the product, the Field Trip app enhances and greatly changes the user’s experience of Corinth. Visitors to the site who make use of the app can jump in and out of tour from anywhere on site (freeing them from the linear tour of the old guidebooks) and – really cool – anyone anywhere in the world can “tour” Corinth. This kind of public and digital archaeology product deserves a high rank not only for being unexpected a generation ago but also for making a major contribution to the study of ancient Corinth.

 

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Now, ranking two most unexpected stories of 2014 was a tossup. It could have gone either way, but this is, I think, the right order, if you accept that the last one qualifies.

2. Corinthian Archaeologists Record Excavations of Frankish Quarter with Google Glass

corinth_2014season1026wearableglasses

This one knocked my socks off. In April the ASCSA announced that it was conducting its excavations of the Frankish quarter in Corinth using Google Glass. The excavations of the Frankish quarter marked their own interesting story, but were not surprising in their own right (excavations of the Frankish quarter began at Corinth in the late 80s). Yet the futuristic wearable technology in recording contexts (image left) takes the ASCSA Back to the Future (image right). Not sure that Google Glass will be the wave of the future, but this clearly marked one of the year’s most unexpected stories that expands upon a range of new directions in digital recording systems. As the ASCSA’s final news release describes the experience, “For our purposes, the students used Glass to create an interesting series of FPV (first person view) videos summarizing their excavations at regular intervals. This not only challenged them to present their excavations in a different medium but also forced them to question different audiences and how video might supplement the existing excavation record.” And my favorite quote: “Some [students] also found talking to their glasses disconcerting.” 

Some of these FPV videos are available on Google Plus:

This story certainly would have been number one unexpected story of the year had it not been for an even more bizarre story that narrowly edged it out.

1. Corinthian Archaeologists Excavate Atari Burial Ground in Alamogordo, New Mexico (and launch Punk Archaeology)

Atari-Graveyard-ControllerI really have few words for the winner. It was truly and completely unexpected. Even if our hypothetical archaeologist in 1984 had predicted all of the above, she/he could never have predicted that a group of archaeologists who had spent so much of their careers working in Greece would have been part of an excavation of a landfill in New Mexico to dig up the dump of the worst video game of all time, the 1983 Atari flop, E.T. New Mexico is a long way from the Corinthia, but three members of the archaeological team – Andrew Reinhard, Richard Rothaus, and Bill Caraher – were trained in Corinthian archaeology through ASCSA projects, published on Corinthian materials (in the case of Rothaus and Caraher), and (in the case of Reinhard) oversaw ASCSA publications. Some may disqualify this piece from Corinthian archaeology, but using the logic of association (see no. number 7 above), I think it deserves its place in the ranking. The story appeared in the major news outlets like Archaeology Magazine and CNN, and exploded in the blogosphere, so that even the ASCSA promoted (and has continued to promote) the story on its website. Two fun articles on this Atari dig include this one in Harper’s Magazine about the new punk archaeologists, and this one in The Atlantic by the punk archaeologists. This is not mainstream classical archaeology by any means, but rather “punk archaeology” – whatever that phrase means. Like the other stories outlined above, the run of the punk archaeologists in a New Mexico landfill offers another telling example of the unpredictable practice of archaeology today.

Archaeological Reports (Journal of Hellenic Studies)

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The 2014 volume of Archaeological Reports is now out and promises some interesting new studies of the northeast Peloponnese and Greece.

If you’re not familiar with Archaeological Reports, the journal is published by the British School at Athens and offers “the only account of recent archaeological work in Greece published in English.”

Table of Contents:

“Introduction & overview” (Zosia Archibald)

“2013–2014 — a view from Greece” Catherine Morgan

“Newsround” (David M. Smith and Helen Murphy-Smith)

“Method in the archaeology of Greece”(Zosia Archibald)

“The work of the British School at Athens, 2013–2014” (Catherine Morgan)

“The city of Athens” (Robert Pitt)

“The Classical naval installations in the Piraeus” (Chryssanthi Papadopoulou)

“Central Greece and the Peloponnese (Archaic to Roman)” (David M. Smith)

“Recent epigraphic research in central Greece: Boeotia” (Fabienne Marchand)

“Crete (prehistoric to Hellenistic)” (Matthew Haysom)

“Macedonia and Thrace: Iron Age to post-Roman urban centres” (Zosia Archibald)

“Archaeobotany in Greece” (Alexandra Livarda)

“Rural sites in Roman Greece” (Daniel Stewart)

IF you visit the table of of contents online here, you can click on article titles to see an abstract or opening paragraph.

Two articles that caught my attention:

1. Smith, David M. “Central Greece and the Peloponnese (Archaic to Roman).” Archaeological Reports 60 (November 2014): 55–71. doi:10.1017/S0570608414000088.

The much shorter Archaiologikon Deltion for the single year of 2005 invariably offers far fewer reports on the work of the Archaeological Service than the four-year volume with which we were presented last year. This, in itself, is no bad thing, although the geographical and chronological balance generated by such a large dataset is notable by its absence. This unevenness is, as ever, partially offset by the publication of fieldwork, although certain areas maintain a far more visible archaeological presence than others. This is particularly true for the northeastern Peloponnese, which has, in recent years, been the recipient of an almost unparalleled focus of both research and rescue excavation; a fact reflected in the significant contribution made to this year’s report by the edited proceedings of the conference The Corinthia and the Northeast Peloponnese: Topography and History from Prehistoric Times until the End of Antiquity (Kissas and Niemeier 2013). A total of 56 individual papers provide details on sites that range in date from the Neolithic to the Byzantine period. A great strength of this collection lies in the contribution of so many current and former staff of the Archaeological Service, and, of the numerous papers that engage directly or indirectly with the archaeology of the Archaic to Roman period, several are discussed in greater depth in the course of this report. A complementary Hesperia supplement detailing the current state of prehistoric and historic research on the Corinthian Isthmus is due to appear before the end of the year (Gebhard and Gregory forthcoming), as is a study of material from Henry Robinson’s 1961–1962 excavation in the North Cemetery (Slane forthcoming). The study of religious practice during the Classical period benefits from the publication of the first volume of material from excavations conducted by the Canadian Institute in Greece between 1994 and 2001 in the Sanctuary of Athena at Stymphalos (Schaus 2014a), while the consolidation of synthetic regional studies and individual site reports within Villae Rusticae: Family and Market-oriented Farms in Greece under Roman Rule (Rizakis and Touratsoglou 2013) will no doubt ensure that it becomes a standard text for the study of the rural economy of Roman Greece (see Stewart, this volume).

2. Stewart, Daniel. “Rural Sites in Roman Greece.” Archaeological Reports 60 (November 2014): 117–32. doi:10.1017/S0570608414000131.

[W]hile pretending to throw some light upon classical authors by careful observation of the manners of the present day, romantic travellers succeeded in fact in accommodating reality to their dreams … by creating for themselves and for their readers carefully edited portraits of modern Greece that transformed the present into the living image of the past (Saïd 2005: 291).

Thirty years ago archaeological field survey promised to reshape radically our understanding of the countryside (Keller and Rupp 1983: 1–5). Traditional archaeological approaches to cities and monuments were increasingly seen to be extensions of textual research, and research on the rural landscape was envisaged as a way to access the other side of the traditional urban-rural dichotomy (though see the comments in Alcock 2007: 671–72). Some scholars estimated that, in the Classical period, the vast majority of Greek poleis had populations of less than 3,000 and territories no more than a few hours” walk from the urban core. Given that, they asked, does it make sense to divide elements of Greek life into “city” and “country”? In a sense, the study of landscapes was seen as a way to redress perceived imbalances between this urban-rural division and the picture painted by the ancient sources of Roman Greece as a pale reflection of its Classical brilliance. In the years since, landscape studies have grown to include much more than archaeological field survey, but this tension between textual and archaeological narratives remains at the heart of understandings of rural Roman Greece.