Corinth Excavations in 2020 and 2021

It is becoming a ritual now to celebrate the publication of the Corinth Excavations annual report in Hesperia, the flagship journal of the American archaeology in Greece. Since their first appearance three years (or so?) ago, they have attracted wonderment, some positive, and some critical attention. The reports largely do what they say on the box: the report on the work of Corinth. The audience for such reports is unclear and their purpose appears to straddle “olde tyme” practices and post-modern ones while also reminding us that the American School of Classical Studies at Athens is a deeply and proudly weird place.

First, these reports harken back to an age where scholars would publish the results of their seasons regularly in the popular media. They would highlight significant discoveries, showcase notable finds, and share the news about progress in a serial way. In some ways, these reports served to generate public interest in these projects and often sought to attract subscribers who would offer material support to these projects (see Amara Thorton’s fascinating [and open access!] book on early publishing habits in archaeology here and my comments on it here). Today, one might imagine that this kind of work is better suited for the web or even an institutional newsletter, but these Corinth reports are perhaps too detailed and honestly academic for the latter and the former just seems so incompatible with the American School’s publishing practice (and its relentless commitment to high quality print publications).

Second, this kind of publication also looks forward. There’s something very “meta” (as the kids say) about publishing such provisional knowledge and the care and attention that the author and editors take to narrate their work. Contemporary archaeological publications often tend to elide the granular description and day-to-day (or even season-to-season) narratives that translate and present ongoing decision-making on archaeological projects. As a result, readers tend to digest relatively sanitized “final reports” which tend to offer relatively simplified and “uncomplicated” presentations of archaeological processes. These tendencies (relatively) produce archaeological knowledge that often seems far more secure in its final publication than it was at any point in the knowledge making process.

By presenting work at Corinth as ongoing and knowledge as provisional, the Corinth excavation group looks to make their general processes and thinking more transparent. More than that, they engage in the challenging (and fraught) task of narrating such provisional knowledge in ways that preserve some authority without presenting any conclusions in such a way that they can’t be overturned, modified and discarded later. The main tactic used in the Corinth articles is a bewildering array of details — measurements, descriptions, and relationships — that establish the authoritative knowledge of the excavator. The uncertainty comes through in authors acknowledgement that they have not studied all of the contexts, there remain unexcavated areas, and the excavation season does not necessarily constitute the kind of discrete body of “data” (material, features, strata, contexts) that allow for definitive knowledge.

Finally, these reports are… weird. They’re neither fully post-modern studies in archaeological description and narration nor explicitly anachronistic reports for the public. They don’t seem to advance the career of graduate students or a scholar looking to establish the viability of this project in the discipline. They offer impressive illustrations and photographs of finds, but without contexts, these finds are often just curiosities or meant to demonstrate the presence of particularly notable artifacts rather than make a chronological argument of any substance. 

This weirdness, though, is consistent with the weirdness of the American School in general. It’s a place that still has daily tea time, ouzo hour, and until recently rang a little bell to mark the end of a meal at Corinth. At the same time, the ASCSA trains generations of archaeologists (and Classicists) and conducts methodologically rigorous excavations. It feels like these reports embody this weirdness. They’re rigorous, but also traditional, hint and post-modernity, but are thoroughly conventional in form, and more than anything speak in subtle ways to the culture at the ASCSA.

There are some cool things in this report.

The excavations of the road, for example, hints at how much road surface levels can change over centuries as each repayment includes both new surfaces with associated drains. and pipes.

The well preserve Late Roman and Byzantine table wares are lovely to see even if they lacked the kind of definitive context that adds to our understanding of use or chronology. They’re aesthetically attractive to me, if nothing else.

Finally, and most thrilling of all, they discovered a ceramic Byzantine GRENADE. It’s insane. The excavator proposes that it was designed “for propelling incendiary liquid.” It was found hidden, perhaps, in a small pit and apparently it is not the first example of this unusual kind of vessel that they have found at Corinth.

This brings me to my final point. I hate to beat an ailing horse, but Corinth excavations have done all this work to make their digital archive available at ascsa.net. While these preliminary publications offer little in the way of context, they do lean heavily on earlier excavations at Corinth. It seems like it makes sense to link these preliminary publications to their massive archive of both published and unpublished material and contexts. The infrastructure is there. They just have to make the connections.