Isthmia

Washingtonia

It was a great pleasure to read my friends Kostis Kourelis and David Pettegrew’s (with Nikos Poulopoulos, Albert Sarvis, Alexandra Shehigian) article “Washingtonia 1829: an American refugee colony in Greece” in the most recent issue of the Journal of Greek Archaeology.

For those of you who don’t know, Washingtonia was the name of an early 19th century refugee settlement on the Isthmus of Corinth set up by Samuel Gridley Howe, managed by George Finlay, authorized by the Greek state, and briefly settled by refugees from the Greek War of Independence.

There more to this story than that, though. David Pettegrew has been searching for Washingtonia since around 2000. While working on the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey, there was constant buzz about the location and character of this strange 19th century settlement set up by Samuel Gridley Howe. This prompted numerous efforts to locate the settlement, Howe’s house, the hospital, and other features (including the konak of Kiamil Bey). Over time, we came to realize that most of these features have simply disappeared without leaving much of a trace on the surface of the ground or in the architecture of various villages of the region. This was a sobering realization to us as survey archaeologists. Instead of the survey representing a palimpsest of past use, certain features including elite residences, institutional architecture, and entire settlements have disappeared leaving very little trace in the surface record. 

[Full disclosure: It was never in my best interest to try to record the number of hours I spent driving slowly around the village of Hexamilia with Tim and Lita Gregory and David Pettegrew looking for traces of Washingtonia. Most recently, in 2023 (I think?), we managed one more slow speed driving field day through Hexamilion before one of us cracked and demanded that we stop this madness and get ice cream. This was well before one of us who had been in a small rental car, driving slowly through a village, tested positive for COVID. I am very pleased that they have been able to find traces of Washingtonia in Hexamilia, and part of me is also very happy to perhaps not talk about Washingtonia for a few years or… you know… ever again.]

Kostis, David, and their colleagues have used documents to fill the gap in the surface and architectural record and to reconstruct the landscape of Washingtonia. They have identified the location of the “manor house” of Samuel Gridley Howe which overlooked (and presumably supervised) the settlement. There is abundant room for metaphor here especially in relation to the idea of Greece as a crypto-colony. Howe’s interest in providing a school and a hospital as well as the panoptic perspective offered from his manor reads like a page from 1960s Foucault especially as Howe occupied the rebuilt the konak of the Ottoman Bey. The drone images offer an intriguing (and deliberate) parallel to the panopticism of Howe’s rebuilt house. This article is too modest in some ways; their analysis makes visible the colonialism of Howe’s philanthropy and reinforces his patronizing view of his mission.

This is a paper that was over 20 years in the making and embodies the best aspects of slow archaeology. Not only did the team demonstrate incredibly familiarity with the local landscape, but also brought together a remarkable array of evidence from 19th century maps, diaries, and archival documents to drone photography, artifacts on the surface, and contemporary architectural study. This patient approach to landscape not only helps us understand the Howe’s view of his work, but also traces the complex processes that transformed the Late Ottoman and Early Modern landscape. In the place of persistent places, the maps and landscape offer traces of settlement — ruined villages, clusters of houses, vanished and ruined buildings. Whatever persistence archaeology assumed in the countryside vanishes beneath modern buildings, agricultural activities, and vegetation leaving only the barest traces.

Their patience in reconstructing the landscape of the early 19th century (as well as early and later traces) reveals how ephemeral even early modern architecture and activities can be even under the scrutiny of 21st century archaeologists’ gaze. This is a vital reminder of the limits of archaeology not only for the most recent past, but for antiquity and the complexities of formation processes in shaping what we can see, recognize, and analyze. It seems almost certain that there is more work to do here especially near Kenchreai. This does little to undermine the significance of their work. David, Kostis, and their colleagues have managed to do what we 20 years ago seemed impossible:  reconstructed the landscape of Samuel Gridley Howe’s Isthmus. 

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. 

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)!

Recycling the Roman Villa

Last week, I read Beth Munro’s new book, Recycling the Roman Villa: Material Salvage and the Medieval Circular Economy (2024). It is an interesting take on the afterlife of the Roman villa primarily in the west.

I read this book to support my growing interest in the afterlife of large scale architecture in the Late Roman world. In particular, I’m curious about how the long afterlife of the Roman bath at Isthmia fits into larger patterns of reuse and recycling in Late Antiquity. Munro looks at a number of Roman villas in the west where there is evidence for recycling. The evidence is scattered and at times sparse, but there are indeed signs of systematic salvage at Roman villa sites. These activities extended beyond the well-known processes of spoliation where prestige materials such as marble architectural elements or sculpture were removed for reuse elsewhere.

Munro stresses the recycling of a more mundane kind. She explores the evidence for the melting down and reuse of glass and metal and the presence of lime kilns. She likewise points out that the evidence for workshops inside of villas was not evidence for some generic “ruralization” of what was already an ex-urban villa site, but rather for its systematic reuse.  

Munro’s book fits into my developing interest in three ways:

1. Ruin versus Rubble. I had to admit that I sometimes found the difference between ruins and rubble a bit slippery. Munro’s book does not deal with this explicitly, but her approach to the reuse of Roman villas demonstrates how a ruin — an abandoned site — can undergo revaluation from a building (with whatever functional, symbolic, or aesthetic character) to an assemblage of recyclable materials. Rubble in contrast has become valueless. Its value, moreover, is unrecoverable in ordinary circumstances. At best, it is pushed aside or removed; at worst, it represents waste.

My recent efforts to understand the afterlife of the Roman bath at Isthmia has involved me thinking about not only the bath, but the entire site of Isthmia as a kind of ruin that eventually becomes rubble as it falls out of any system of productive reuse. 

2. Location and Reuse. Munro makes clear that the recycling of villas need not be limited to local needs and markets. By showing that the level of recycling at some villas exceeds plausible local requirements, Munro suggests that villa recycling contributed to a larger market for materials such as glass and metal which would move along established trade routes.

In light of this, one wonders whether the location of the Roman bath along the busy and well-connected Isthmia corridor contributed to its continued occupation, even long after the Hexamilion wall was built (and abandoned). Are some features at Isthmia consistent with the continued extraction of material from the site and at a scale beyond that of local consumption? In many ways, it is unclear as evidence for recycling at Isthmia, beyond the reuse of some of the bath’s walls in the Hexamilion and the presence of a lime kiln in the area, is limited, but it might help us understand the persistence of occupation at the bath many centuries after it fell out of its primary use.

3. Details. Munro’s book — inter alia — offers some incredibly compelling little details. For example, she reminded me to Tamara Lewitt’s under appreciated article “Bones in the Bathhouse: Re-evaluating the Notion of ’Squatters Occupation’ in 5th to 7th century Villas.” Lewitt argues that the term “squatters” implies low-status individuals and contends that this overlooks the continue presence of higher status, wealthy residents in the countryside of the West. The individuals buried in the ruins of Roman villas may represent this high status rural elite whose use of perishable material in their daily lives made them otherwise more obscure than their Roman predecessors.

Munro also makes the interesting observation that “squatters” (or whatever we should call the later occupants of villas) sometimes created level surfaces atop collapse of Roman villas in the west. Is this the moment that the ruin as a productive expression of the past become rubble to be pushed aside? 

Some Concluding Thoughts on Isthmia from Summer 2025

 

Our time at Isthmia this summer was remarkably productive. Not only did we manage to move through 2500 batches of context pottery from both very recent and older excavations, but we also had a chance to study broad range of inventoried artifacts including the large quantity of Early Byzantine material. More importantly, though, we had the opportunity to talk and think about the later history of the Roman bath at Isthmia, how various groups used the building, and what traces they left behind.

At the same time that I was thinking and working through these things, I was also reading about rubble, especially Gastón Gordillo 2014 book Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction, and Bettina Stoetzer’s The Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin (2022). 

The intersection of the careful study of the bath at Isthmia (and its transformation from ruin to rubble to ruin again), its larger context, and modern thinking about rubble supported this brief conclusion to my report. It’s not great, but it’s a start and sometimes just getting words on the page is the catalyst one needs to think more deeply about a project.

~ 

This survey of the later history of the Roman bath at Isthmia allows for three conclusions.

First, the presence of a series of horizons at Isthmia capture more than just discrete interventions in the life of the Roman bath. While it may be that Lamp Deposit and the material found beneath sections of collapsed wall in Room I and Room II is closely associated with the construction of the Hexamilion wall, continued activity on the floors of Room I, II, III-IV-V, and Room VI suggest that the construction of the wall itself did not lead to the abandonment of the bath. In fact, the digging of a trench across the northern part of the mosaic in Room VI, the creation of a new drainage system in Room IV, and the modification of the drains in Room I and II indicate that not long after the construction of the wall the bath building saw renewed investment. The shelter provided by the vaults of Room VI and the still standing walls elsewhere in the bath undoubtedly offers benefits worth repeated visits as the robust assemblage of 6th century material demonstrates. As the bath continued to collapse, it likewise continued to attract visitors. By situating the simple apsidal shelters of the so-called “Dark Age Settlement” within the larger context of the activity at the bath (and the site at Isthmia [e.g. Phase IV from Rife, Isthmia IX, 135-143), it becomes possible to see the 7th and 8th century activity at the bath as part of a continued use of the bath building as a place of shelter and investment. It becomes particularly important to consider the possibility of overlap between assemblages associated with the floor of the bath (and the burials in Room II) and the Early Byzantine surfaces. The closer these are in date, the more difficult it becomes to argue that the builders of the Early Byzantine surfaces at the site were unaware of the earlier burials and therefore a distinct (possible “Slavic”) community. As Rife notes in Isthmia IX (44), there is every indication that these are the same community who occupied the area around the bath in earlier centuries.

These conclusions are broadly similar to those reached by scholars studying Early Byzantine and Dark Age activities elsewhere in Greece where it is increasingly clear that handmade pottery, for example, does not necessarily represent new arrivals in the Balkan peninsula, but rather appears as a part of larger shift toward highly local ceramic production practices, changes in food preparation practices, and demographic change. The appearance of long-lived forms of ceramics — such as Late Roman 2 transport amphora and various wheelmade jugs, basins, and cookpots — with handmade forms of pottery reveals the process of material change at site.

In this geographic and chronological context, then, the assemblage at Isthmia reflects the ongoing development of life in the Corinthia and the Southern Balkans more broadly rather than a marked and catastrophic grand brèche. In this area, our work echoes that arguments advanced by scholars such as Thansis Vionis (as well as many others) who see the 7th and 8th centuries as a period of prolonged but incremental change rather than abrupt discontinuities. In this context, the period from the final, perhaps abortive, renovations of the Roman bath through to the so-called “Dark Age” settlement represents a continuous stretch of investment in both the bath building as well as the larger sanctuary. Continuous efforts to revise the chronology of widely distributed Late Roman ceramics complements work on locally produced cooking pots and utility wares to show that some of the best known forms dated traditionally to the 5th and 6th centuries may, in fact, date to a century (or more!) later. Deposit B9 at Koutsongilla (Kenchreai) for example produced both the latest forms of imported African Red Slip (e.g. 99) and Late Roman C ware (e.g. 3f) as well as “Slavic ware” in a fabric similar to that at Isthmia (no. 275). Intensive pedestrian survey in the Eastern Korinthia likewise noted the dispersed presence of contemporary activity in the fields east of Xylokeriza including ARS 99 and 104-6, a Group N juglette base, and a later amphora rim (see units 20, 502, 516, 519, and 527). The growing recognition of these assemblages across the region and Greece more broadly has made it possible both to connect the Early Byzantine or Dark Age period clearly to long standing Late Antique economic and cultural practices, especially through the continuity of ceramic types, and to demonstrate ongoing activity at urban, rural, and ex-urban sites such as Koutsongilla and Isthmia.

The modest character of the Dark Age settlement at Isthmia, with its surfaces and apsidal structures build atop the collapsing walls of the Roman bath, perhaps encouraged scholars to mark these activities as a significant change from those that preceded them. Our arguments for the continuity of activity and use of the bath, however, suggest that modern views toward collapsed structures and rubble more broadly influenced attitudes toward historical continuity. It seems likely that the collapsing walls of the bath and growing strata of rubbly debris continued to draw visitors to the site. These visitors likely appreciated the availability of shelter and building material on the most basic level. They may have also understood the site’s location as part of the trans-Isthmian Hexamilion Wall and the visibility of the bath’s crumbling remains as bearing witness to the long-term importance of the place. The presence of a burial in the Room II drain of the bath and investment necessary to adapt the changing shape of the bath to the needs of Late Roman and Early Byzantine visitors suggests that activities at the site were not simply opportunistic. In fact, the presence of rubble would not have marked the bath as a place of discontinuity or marginal or waning use as it might in our modern era, but as a site persistent value and significance.

Isthmia and Rubble

On my flight from Greece to Cyprus, I read the first part of  Gastón Gordillo’s book Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (2014). To be clear, I’ve not read enough of the book to offer a thoughtful take on it (or the subject), but it was enough to get me thinking about how to apply some of his ideas to the situation at the Roman bath at Isthmia.

Here are a few shaky ideas:

Idea the First

It is clear that as part of an effort to remove rubble from the second century bath, the excavators removed most of the evidence for its later use. The only exception is the “e-shaped structure” that rests against the west wall of Room VIII. In all other places, as the excavators removed the unruly and “formless” rubble to reveal the original form of the bath (as they saw it), they also cleansed the bath of its later history. This archaeologically mundane act of removing rubble from the building also served to purify and even abstract the remains of the building to an idealized and digestible form.

Idea the Second

Rubble serves to mark chronological breaks in continuity. This is particularly important for those of us interested in Late Antiquity. The transformation of the Roman bath with its clearly defined spaces and functions into rubble marked the end of antiquity (so the narrative goes). 

At the same time, there is evidence that the use of the rubble to form spaces and surfaces has continuity with the walls and floors of the Roman bath. In other words, the very definition of the collapse of the bath as rubble created an expectation of discontinuity which then impaired our ability to recognize the rubble as a necessary element for continuity (of function? of space?) in the bath. Because there is rubble, there must be change?

In other words, it was the appearance (and recognition) of rubble that separated the activity in the bath immediately after its abandonment from the activities a century or two or three afterward. Rubble caused the breach as much as it represented it. It was both necessary and evidence for the end of antiquity.

Idea the Third

Finally, I started to think a bit about how rubble works to create a sense of place. The Roman bath and the Hexamilion wall in some ways anticipate the 6th century burial in Room II and the 7th century settlement. The relationship between these buildings and their rubble can help us understand how they remained places in the Greek landscape. The visibility of the rubble would have made the bath and this particular stretch of the wall visible. The rubble offered a kind of functional value both as building material and, perhaps, as a place of marginal value to others. Maybe the rubble was only inviting to those willing to make use of its affordances? The rubble might have also provided the area with a sense of history. It might have marked the remains of earlier activities in the space — settlement, agricultural work, and the rituals associated with burial — and this would have made the space important for particular groups (and perhaps worth avoiding by others). 

 

Of course none of these ideas is polished or well-considered enough yet to go beyond a kind of creaky blog post, but I do like that a month spent looking at notebooks and pottery from the bath (but oddly only rarely at the bath itself) would slowly help me think about Late Antique Greece in ways relevant to conversations about rubble and ruins across the humanities. This is something that I hadn’t expected, but I’m pretty pleased that it’s happened! 

Three Things Thursday: Final Week at Isthmia Edition

This summer I’ve been trying to limit my blogging to a few times a week (excluding my “Foto Phriday” feature. Slowly, but surely, I’ve started to feel pressure to blog more and my discipline and focus have started to falter. My excuse is that is very hot here in the Corinthia and I’m getting excited about the end of the field season. This isn’t a very good excuse though.

Today, I’m giving in to my impulse to write with a short and sweet three things Thursday.

Thing the First

I’ve been thinking more and more about two metaphors that seem popular in today. First is life in the shadow of empire. This seems fitting to describe the Dark Age settlement that I’m studying at Isthmia which literally emerged in the shadow of the Late Roman Hexamilion Wall. 

The other metaphor is life amid ruins. This first captured my attention in Anna Tsing’s Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015) and has sort of lingered around the edges of my thinking for the last decade or so. At Isthmia, of course, life amid ruins is quite literal. The 2nd century Roman Bath that forms a key character in the story we’re trying to tell is literally falling down throughout our narrative. In fact, the act of ruination appears to be more than simply a narrative distraction, but is fundamental to our understanding of the life at the Roman bath. As the partially deconstructed building falls down people who are living (or at least visiting) the Roman bath and the shadow of the Hexmilion Wall make do and adapt their surroundings.

Thing the Second 

As someone who received his PhD at the turn of the millennium, I hope that I can be excused for continuing to be preoccupied with the notion of continuity or change. Most of us studying Late Antiquity were talking about it as much to justify the period as a reasonable object of study as to argue that our focus on the period offered insights into both antiquity and the Middle Ages. Today, the study of Late Antiquity feels on more solid ground and less in need of justification, but the specter of continuity or change continues to exert an influence over how archaeologists (in particular) study the 4th to 8th centuries.

Our study of the Roman bath at Isthmia, puts the issue of continuity into relief. We’re trying to discern whether how much time passed between the last activities on the floor of the bath building (while it was partially deconstructed and falling down) and the activities on top of leveled surfaces that stood atop the rubble of collapsed walls which made the floor of the bath inaccessible. The nearer in date the two deposits, the better we can argue for continuity at the site. This is significant because the assemblage atop the collapsed walls of the bath includes handmade pottery that does not appear on or near the floor.

Thing the Third 

One of my great weaknesses as a scholar (other than, say, the compulsive blogging or my inability to focus on one thing at a time and so on) is that I need to write to think. As a result, I fill my world (and often the world of other people) with words, half baked ideas, and convoluted arguments. 

Right now, I’m in writing mode here at Isthmia. I’m trying to narrate the history of the afterlife of the Roman bath. It’s fun, frustrating, and energizing in turn. It is also incredibly inefficient and the embodiment of a kind of slow practice that requires patience for iterative aspects of writing (and thinking). 

Scale (and Isthmia)

I was really excited to read Katie Kearns’s recent article in Heritage, “Everyday Climates: Household Archaeologies and the Politics of Scale.” It’s open-access; so you can read it too. Kearns argues for the significance of household scale research especially in the archaeology of climate change. This challenges the idea that global problems (or situations) require global approaches best conducted at the macro- if not planetary scale. She calls these approaches “big-scale” approaches.

For archaeology, the lure of big-scale approaches has fed the development of large-scale, collaborative archaeological work that often pulls together large quantities of climate data, site based information, and quantitative analysis. Big-scale archaeology relies on big-data to produce “big archaeology.” There is nothing wrong with this, but for many of us, archaeology remains better at producing small-scale knowledge through the intensive and often painstaking practice of excavation. Consequently there has emerged a bit of a mismatch between our hyper-focused practices and our desire for planetary conclusions. To be clear, Kearns does not argue this, but it feels tacit in her turn to household level archaeology to understand changes in storage patterns, consumption and discard, and gender based household economies. Going smaller teases out the human level impact of climate change and offers a counter-balance to the state, society, and transregional arguments often favored by archaeologists studying climate change.

For our work at Isthmia, Kearns’s recognition of small-scale archaeology was a welcome validation. While we’re not working on climate change, in particular, we are interested in certain phenomenon that like climate change, are often studied on the transregional and global level. We’re interested in the shadow of empire at the site of Isthmia where the massive, imperially funded Hexamilion Wall of the 5th century defines the spatial organization of the area. We’re also interested in using a “Dark Age” settlement of the 7th or 8th century as a way to think about demographic, economic, and social change often considered at the regional level. To do this, we’ve decided to dig down in the complexities of site formation in the late history of a 2nd century Roman bath and the traces of evidence left behind by households that lived in the bath’s ruins for what may have been only a few decades in a period of tremendous instability. Over 50 years of legacy data produced by the Isthmia Excavations supports this kind of analysis.

This is also true for our work at Polis.

I still think about slow archaeology and I suspect there is a connection between slow archaeology and small archaeology. These two approaches lean into the detailed, patient, and careful work that often requires limited focus and often produces correspondingly limited (or human, if you will) conclusions. 

The opposite is probably a kind of fast or big-archaeology. I can avoid feeling today that “big archaeology” (like big science) endures critiques (if not downright attacks) from both sides of the ideological spectrum. Reducing the plurality and complexity of the human experience to data even when it is in the name of progress risks complicity with the very forces that have created many of the contemporary crises from the start. There is a reason why our work is sometimes known as the industrial-military-university-archaeology complex. 

Of course, now, I’m getting away from Kearns’s argument and run the risk of deploying them in the service for things that may not align with her views! Check out the article, though.

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.