Corinthia

More on Corinth, Northeast of the Theater

Whenever Chris Pfaff and the Corinth Crowd publish one of their preliminary reports in Hesperia, it is a fucking event. These things are massive, baffling, intriguing, and much like an accident between a car driven by very serious academic archaeologists, a van filled with domesticated raccoons, and a truck full of slinkies, it is impossible to turn away. If you can check out “Corinth, 2022 and 2023: Northeast of the Theater” in Hesperia 94.4 (2025).

I guess I should make clear that despite my (somewhat) exaggerated metaphor, these reports are not bad (like an accident involving domesticated raccoons), but they are a bit crazy (not bad crazy — again like the metaphor — but, as the kids say, “chaotic neutral”). 

For those of you who have not encountered one of these reports before, it might be best to read my reviews of the 2018 and 2019. I somehow missed the report on the 2020 and 2021 season. The thing about these reports is that they are long and deeply strange. They offer incredibly detailed descriptions of the excavations at Corinth over the course of a particular seasons, but rarely offer quite enough detail — say complete stratigraphic assemblages or even, say, entire rooms much less buildings. This is fair enough, the report is bound by the limits of a field season or two rather than a context, building, class of material, or chronological period. More than that, Corinth is a very long standing project with many collaborators. It also is explicitly a training excavation. This means that it rarely has a clear research question; instead, it might have multiple — sometimes competing — research questions that require seasons or even just a single part of a single trench to answer. As a result, any given publication defined by a season or two work isn’t necessarily going to address a “question in the literature.”

This also means that these often lengthy reports (80+ pages!) lack a thesis or a conclusion (although they sometimes have a “summary”) and rarely have quite enough context to allow for firm conclusions. That said, they do contain cool stuff. This report published yet another Byzantine hand grenade from Corinth! It also published a good bit of Late Roman and Early Byzantine pottery including some Constantinopolian white ware bowls. These aren’t the first to be published from Corinth, but they’re a nice reminder that this is a kind of pottery that exists in the city of Corinth, but not — as far as I know — at Isthmia (although I probably need to check this to be certain! We certainly haven’t seen any in the 7th and 8th century contexts that we’ve been studying) or Kenchreai. There are some nice examples of LR5 amphora, but, of course, this is not surprising. We knew there were LR5 amphora at Corinth. 

There is a drain underneath a room with a fancy opus sectile floor called the “Marble Room.” The drain has a pitched roof, which is neat, and is filled with some cool Late Roman pottery and a single Byzantine lekane. What’s interesting is that the fill in the drain and in the room above it is all Late Roman (7th century?) in date. Pfaff tells us: “An adequate explanation for this late deposition remains elusive.” This kind of honesty is great and appropriate for this kind of publication, but it also reinforces just how limited this kind of work is. 

That said, the publication is festooned with precision. Measurements are nearly all to the third decimal point (in meters to be fair). The descriptions are often intense and dance along the absolute edge of comprehensibility. Some are unnecessary. 

Monosnap pfaff_2025_hesperia.pdf 2025-12-21 14-31-17.

The photo above was described as follows: “Pairs of horizontal lines demarcate the nominal joints between courses, while vertical pairs delineate the nominal lateral edges of the blocks. In many but not all cases, diagonal pairs of incised lines mark the corners of the blocks.” I mean, this is true, but it seems the mock the need for descriptive precision. 

All of this leads to the natural question: why is this article taking up 80+ pages in an important journal?

The previous articles aren’t cited often and they are largely cited by later reports on Corinth. (And I say this as the king of articles that no one reads). This alone isn’t disqualifying (right? RIGHT?), but coupled with the preliminary nature of the reports, it is understandable. 

It is possible that this is a “flex” by Hesperia and the Corinth Excavation folks. They publish this stuff because they can. I have to admit as an editor and publisher, I do this sometimes: I publish stuff because I like it. Full stop. The American School of Classical Studies at Athens digs the holes, they pay the bills, and they print the pages (well, not literally). They get to do what they want to do and this is a reminder.

A more charitable reading might be that lots of people feel connected to Corinth. After all, Corinth excavations has trained generations of American Classicists, Ancient Historians, and archaeologists and these “alumni” like to know what’s happening at Corinth. Articles like this help reinforce a sense of community around the American School’s excavation. It keeps folks in the know (and many of those folks who have remained in the field might find themselves reading Hesperia from time to time). I’m becoming more and more interested in the idea of communities of readers and this might an expression of that impulse.

A more interesting argument could be that articles like this provide an insight into “how the sausage is made.” After all, Hesperia as long published preliminary reports on projects that are provisional. In most cases, however, these reports offer a methodological intervention, situate a project within a scholarly tradition, or even present a argument based on a preliminary analysis with the idea that more fulsome support is forthcoming. With Corinth, there was little in the way of method presented, no obvious research question or connection with a particular discourse, nor any real hope that a final publication will appear in my lifetime (i.e the next 25 years). Instead, this just is what it is. It’s performative. Maybe is like a live recording. There is something spontaneous, bracing, and immediate to it.

Finally, there is the most likely reason: politics. These pieces don’t feel like things that are performative interventions, exercises in community building, or genuine academic contributions (beyond the most basic level: we have another hand grenade!). They are something else and maybe it is the very ambiguity of these papers (embodied in the famous final line of the 2018 report “In general, the finds from the fill, including an equine cranium, can be characterized as refuse that has no association with the original function of the ditch.”

Much like the forlorn skull of the horse left in a ditch without context, these articles offer little more than what they are. And for that, I’ll continue to enjoy them. 

Winter Writing Wednesday

Last week, I was able to send my book manuscript to my publisher for review. This means that my book now has a (tentative) title: Archaeology, Photography, Oil: Workforce Housing in the Bakken. This means that I now have some time to work on other projects. For example, yesterday, I did pre-production work on most of the poetry for NDQ. I finished up some letters of recommendation, and I’m working on two books that are in production at my press. And, of course, there is grading. Always grading.

I am committed to making this winter productive even as the dust settles on the fall semester (amid the dying gasps of a winter storm). I have three projects that I really want to complete.

1. A Kiln at Ancient Arsinoe. In 2023 and 2024, we completed work documenting the kiln and surroundings in the area of E.F2 at Polis. We gave a paper on this at the 2024 ASOR conference. The kiln dates to the Roman period and was part of a multiphase installation that seems to have focused on ceramic production. The article, which we plan to submit to BASOR, will document these features and introduce the related ceramic assemblage. In particular, we’ll propose that a group of lamps found nearby might be the product of the ceramic installation. This assemblage of lamps, including several from the same mould and several showing no signs of use, is unusual at Polis because unlike the lamp fragments found elsewhere at the site, there is a remarkable level of consistency in the assemblage found near the kiln installation. The most vexing thing is that there is no clear stratigraphic (or depositional) relationship between the lamp assemblage and the ceramic production installations. This also is the fun and challenging part of this article.

2. Midwestern Modernism and the Regional Magazine: The First 23 volumes of North Dakota Quarterly (1910-1933). This is my major writing project of the new year and for a volume called the Edinburgh Companion to the Regional Magazine. I’m incredibly excited to write this piece and I am intrigued by the editorial team’s decision to host not only a writing day, but also some lightening presentations from the contributors. This is a brilliant way not only to ensure that we are writing, but also that our contributions will coalesce (potentially) around some key themes. Be prepared to see more on this in the coming months!

Here’s the current abstract:

Founded in 1910 at the University of North Dakota, North Dakota Quarterly represented a new type of regional magazine at the intersection of the expansion of higher education into middle of the American continent and new currents modernist thought—sometimes referred to as “Midwestern Modernism.” This movement developed across literature, art, architecture, and education and found fertile ground in turn-of-the-century “little magazines” which celebrated regional voices in an accessible style and at a modest price. While the magazine initially featured the work of University of North Dakota faculty, it soon expanded beyond campus voices with contributions of appeal to a regional audience. The juxtaposition of regional with national (and even global) issues in its pages reflected the growing sense of cosmopolitanism among Quarterly‘s authors and audience. Ironically the global engagement that played out across its pages ultimately paused its publication in 1933 as a result of university budget cuts during the Great Depression. This contribution looks to the first two decades of the Quarterly as a window into “Midwestern Modernism” and the contemporary development of regional magazines across the early-20th century American Midwest.

3. Survey Archaeology and Modern Greece. My colleague Nota Pantzou (University of Patras) and I are slowing bringing together an edited volume on the archaeology of contemporary Greece. This volume will include a paper that I co-authored with Grace Erny and Dimitri Nakassis at the Patras conference. Our paper compares the sites of Lakka Skoutara in the southeastern Corinthia and Chelmis in the western Argolid. The former can now bring in data published by the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey on Open Context. 

Since my paper included a good many references to work by other scholars (and our work in these areas), it should not be particularly complicated to expand it to 5,000 or 6,000 words.

ASOR 2025 Recap

I had a nice time at the 2025 ASOR annual meeting. It was a good chance to catch up with friends, scheme some schemes, and hear some papers. In hindsights, I’d have liked to spend more time in sessions and less time in meetings, but at least the meetings that I had were broadly productive. 

I walked away from the meeting with three things rattling around in my head.

Thing the First

I attended a couple of panels that had papers focusing on post-destruction activities at sites. It’s almost too easy to speculate on why post-destruction activities might be a point of interest at this years gathering of Near Eastern archaeologists, but whatever geopolitical motivation existed for this interest, it is nevertheless a regular concern for most archaeologists. 

I was particularly intrigued by the critical attention that “squatters” received. Not only was this group theorized in some useful ways — for example, how do you distinguish a squatter from, say, the seasonal reuse of a building — but also situated squatting in historical contexts.

This was relevant to my research in Greece partly because the Byzantine Dark Age settlement in the Roman Bath at Isthmia has sometimes been described as a “squatter settlement.” The reasoning seems largely to be that the folks who settled in the bath didn’t own the building or were in no way related to the building’s builders. This is probably accurate, but perhaps burdens the Dark Age settlers with unnecessary baggage as squatting has a reputation as transgressive behavior. The Dark Age settlers at Isthmia may have not had any transgression in mind when they availed themselves to ruins of the Roman Bath. Moreover, the relationship between 6th or early 7th century burial activity at the site and the Dark Age residents is hardly clear cut. It may be that by the 7th and 8th century that the ruins of the Roman Bath had acquired new symbolic significance and even ownership by these residents.

Thing the Second

Late Roman Cyprus is always interesting. First, there are catastrophic events that seem to punctuate the chronology of the island starting with the earthquake of 365 and ending with the Islamic raids of the late 7th century. While scholars have questioned the significance and consequences of these events (and other earthquakes including the famous 551 tremor that appears to have destroyed the entire Eastern Mediterranean and recently the impact of the Justinianic plague), they still serve to frame not only the chronology of the period, but also the character of the social and economic life on the island.

Curiously, the long shadow cast by these events has led scholars to overlook more typical topics of interest to Late Roman historians and archaeologists. For example, the end of paganism on the island (and the rise of Christianity) remains rather obscure and understudied compared to elsewhere in the Mediterranean. It was fascinating, then, to see a paper on Late Roman statue of Artemis from Kourion and associated with a building that appears to have collapsed in the 365 earthquake (adjacent to the famous “Earthquake House”). The excavators date the statue, probably manufactured in Aphrodisias, to the middle of the 4th century which would make it a rather late example of Artemis and offers another example of the continued manufacture and export of statues of gods and goddess from this famous production site in Asia Minor. 

It seems likely that the owners of this house (and the statue) was a pagan presuming that the date of the collapse of the house of remains mid-4th century. This would provide us with another unsurprising benchmark for the persistence of paganism on the island among elite households. Of course, it is possible that the owner of this statue appreciated it for its (somewhat dubious) style rather than its religious significance. It seems less plausible to imagine that someone imported a 4th-century statue of Artemis onto the island for aesthetics alone.

Thing the Third

Readers of this blog know that I’m very interested in pseudoarchaeology. Unlike some of my “debunk it all and let God sort it out” friends, I’m more interested in the reason for the persistence of pseudoarchaeology and the interesting ways in which it develops to both reflect disciplinary practices as well as trace deeper currents of popular thought. 

I had some productive conversations on a pseudoarchaeology book that instead of being (yet another) half baked monograph takes on the form of a dialogue (modeled loosely on Gavin Lucas and Laurent Oliver’s Conversations about Time (2021) or Raphael Greenberg and Yannis Hamilakis, Archaeology, Nation, and Race (2022)). This would allow my casual bloggy style to come to the fore and leave room for differing opinions. 

More on this project next week, I think, when I write up some thoughts on what this book might look like (and who has volunteered to co-author it with me)!

Two Weeks at Isthmia

As my time working at Isthmia hits the two week mark, our routine of ceramic analysis is giving me the bandwidth to start to think more broadly about the situation at Isthmia.

For those who don’t read the blog regularly, I’ve been working with my colleagues Richard Rothaus and Scott Moore to analyze the after life of the Roman bath. To do this we’ve studied the way in which people used the bath not only for the construction of the Hexamilion Wall, but also for other activities including eventually settlement at the site.

The elephant in the room, of course, is the wall itself. Not only would it have loomed figuratively over the ruined bath, but also literally.

I continue to struggle to think about how the wall (and the bath) shaped the experience and behaviors of the individuals living in its ruins and shadow. As a way to think about this differently, I followed a tip by University of Virginia graduate student James Razumoff who suggested that I read some of Lori Khatchadourian’s work and provided me with a copy of “Life Extempore: Trials of Ruination in the Twilight Zone of Soviet Industry” from Current Anthropology 37.2 (2022), 317–348.

This article features how two Armenian informants leveraged the ruins of Soviet industrialization to make a living in the 21st century. Khatchadourian introduced the concept of “trails of ruination” which described the efforts to make a living from ruins when “time and temporality, matter and materiality rebuff with opposing force.” She deploys this concept to understand the tension between Soviet and capitalist forms of engagement with the materiality and time. 

At a site like Isthmia, of course, there are fewer traces of ideological change much less the kind of abrupt ideological change that occurred with the collapse of the Soviet empire. One wonders, however, how the memory of a particularly vibrant phase of Roman building in the Corinthia (and the institutional apparatus that made such a phase possible) lingered in the wall (and the earlier bath). 

This summer, I’ve spent far less time thinking about the wall and the bath and more time thinking about the material from individuals “lots” or stratigraphic (loosely defined) units. The finds from each unit will help us be able to tell the larger story of the post-Roman bath. Thus far, we have studied almost 2000 sherds from context pottery and over 100 inventoried finds from the bath. Our plan is to produce the definitive publication of the bath’s afterlife with a thorough, if not complete, artifact catalogue.

Stay tuned for more!

Two for Tuesday: Slavic Ware in Greece

As readers of my blog know, my current research in Greece examines the latest phases of ancient activity at the Roman Bath at Isthmia. This involves a “Dark Age settlement” visible in both some scrappy architecture features built into the carcass of the 2nd century AD bath and a significant assemblage of hand-made “Slavic” pottery. As I have argued before, this material represents the culmination of the ancient ceramic tradition and the perfection of the functional form without the frivolous and distracting glazes, slips, and shapes of earlier pottery production. 

There have been two recent articles that discuss this handmade pottery that I have read this week as I warm up for work at Isthmia.

First, Anna Panti’s 2023 article in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports titled “The Maroneia cave in Aegean Thrace. Byzantine period transport amphoras and coarse ware.” The Maroneia cave produced a small assemblage of 6th-8th century handmade vessels as well as an assemblage of pottery dating from the 6th to the 12th century. The earlier material from this assemblage consists of several familiar forms of Late Roman amphora — including our beloved LR1 and LR2 types — as well as flat based juglets which seem to be a favored form of table ware in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine period. 

Cave sites seem to be more common toward the end of antiquity and they fit a narrative that there is significant instability in the southern Balkans associated with the decline in Roman power in the region. The presence of both handmade and imported pottery suggests that whatever disruptions occurred in the 6th, 7th, and 8th century they did not necessarily restrict the arrival of amphora to the site, but did perhaps disrupt the movement of regional fine ware and cooking pots.

The other article is a by T.K. Vasileiou and A.K. Vionis in the same journal but in 2025. It’s titled “A petrographic contribution to the study of handmade vessels from Early Medieval Greece: A case-study from Boeotia and Achaea.”  Vasileiou and Vionis compare two samples of handmade ceramics: one from Boeotia and one from Achaea. They combined traditional formal analysis with ceramic petrography using transmitted-light optical microscopy (TL-OM). 

Their conclusions are probably as important and their methods. They recognized that communities in the 7th and 8th centuries must have still had access to larger regional markets, while also supplementing their needs with locally produced forms. These handmade or slow wheel made forms showed enough standardization to suggest some form of local manufacture beyond the household level, but mostly like below the regional level. The introduction of handmade wares likely reflects both the arrival of new settlers in the region, but also hints at exchange and sustained cultural contact between the groups.

This parallels our arguments from Isthmia as well, although greater attention to the size and shape of vessels might help us understand production more clearly. Thus far, we’ve been so intently focused on sorting local context that we’ve missed out on some of the larger regional considerations. While we won’t have an opportunity to do the kind of scientific analysis that Vasileiou and Vionis performed — at least at this stage of our work — we can leverage some of their broader conclusions to expand the context for our work.