Isthmia 2023: Early Days

The first days of field or lab work in any season are always filled with a certain amount of dread and a certain amount of optimism. After about four hours of work at Isthmia this year, I feel like it is split 50/50.

This summer our work will focus on two projects. First, we’re going to make a second swing at analyzing the so-called “Slavic pottery” from the site of Isthmia in Greece. Slavic pottery in this case is what we’re calling the hand-made or “slow wheel” pottery dating to the 7th and 8th century and found at Late Roman sites across the Peloponnesus and southern Balkans. The first effort to understand this assemblage was made in the 1980s and 1990s by Tim Gregory and published in a short but widely cited article: “An Early-Byzantine (dark-age) settlement at Isthmia: preliminary report” in The Corinthia in the Roman Period, edited by Timothy Gregory, p. 149-160, (Ann Arbor 1993). He offered some preliminary observations and very modest catalogue of about a half-dozen sherds.

Our hope this summer is to assess how representative his catalogue was of the hundreds of artifacts identified as “Slavic” and to produce a significantly expanded catalogue of the existing material. It will also benefit from 30 years of additional research and publication. This should be pretty straight forward.

The more complicated challenge will be to attempt to situate the “Slavic” material amid its larger assemblage. This means not only determining whether there are some “sealed” deposits where we can clearly discern assemblages of contemporary material at the site (and this is a challenge for any number of reasons), but also consistently identifying the other material that exists in these context. This is a more optimistic (or at very least hopeful) side of our work and undoubtedly the more foolhardy.

The other project for this summer is dealing with the remnants of a dump of Roman amphora sherds made by earlier excavators at the site. This dump was studied by my colleague Scott Moore and published as his dissertation. Since then, it has been in temporary storage at Isthmia and the dig director (as well as the local archaeological authorities) wants us to help move it all to a more permanent solution. This is a significant undertaking, but one that will be enjoyable because the current storage area for the dump is surrounded by stinging nettles.