The Corinthian Landscape

This past week, I spent some time going through past volumes of the journal Hesperia in an effort to identify a small and cohesive group of articles focusing on the Corinthian countryside (as opposed to the extensive research done on the urban center) and suitable for binding together and distributed as an edited collection of reprints. The decision by Hesperia to release almost the entire past contents of their journal online, for free, made this process infinitely easier. At the same time, the availability of the articles for free put added pressure on me and my collaborators to prepare a collection of articles that somehow were worth more then their component parts.

As I thought through this process, I began to come up with a series of rules that would shape our collection. First, the articles had to be the primary publication of the site or a particular method for documenting the countryside. In other words, there could not exist a more definitive, final publication of the material or the site. Next, the articles had to focus on a series of key features in the countryside: routes and places of travel (roads, paths, harbors), fortifications, and settlements and rural land use (quarries, cemeteries, aqueducts, et c.).  Finally, we had to be able to present a synthetic introduction both to the entire volume and to the individual sections which contextualized the articles and “adds value” to the assembled re-prints.

Over the next few weeks, I hope to roll out the collection of articles to be included in this reprint volume. Additions, critique, and comments are, of course, welcome!