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.

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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.