Two Things Tuesday: Two Hesperia Articles

This past week Hesperia 91.3 appeared. For those of you just here for the music, Hesperia is a publication of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. I generally get excited for its regular arrival in my inbox in part because I have a long-standing interest in the archaeology of Greece and, in part, because it usually is incredibly well produced and edited. In fact, it is the embodiment of a craft approach to academic publishing and a testimony to the “in house” attention to detail from a dedicated publishing staff at the American School’s Princeton, NJ offices.

This issue featured two long articles on ceramics at Corinth: one by Kathleen Slane, long the doyenne of Corinthian Roman ceramics and one by Florence Liard, Guy Sanders, Ayed Ben Amara, and Noemi Mueller. In the interest of full disclosure, I know Guy Sanders and respect his work. I have also tended to respect the work of Kathleen Slane (and have been reading through her recent volume with John Hayes on pottery from the University of Chicago excavations at Isthmia). I’m also friends with Sarah James who I have known for virtually my entire professional life and under whose occasional guidance and support (especially on the Western Argolid Regional Project), I’ve had many significant opportunities. Part of why I get excited to read Hesperia is that I not only read about material and contexts that interest me, but I know many of the authors and this issue is no different.

What made this issue particular interesting in the character of the two long articles. The Liard et al. article is a great example of how careful and minute analysis of artifacts can open new ways to understand the economic, political, and social life of Late Medieval Greece. In particular, their article combines careful study of Medieval pottery with a thoughtful conclusion that demonstrates how a “multimethod” analysis of the lead-glazed material from Corinth reveals the economic connections between Italy and Greece and the Corinthia and other regions during a time of particularly pervasive political and social disruptions. In other words, they show that the pottery present at Corinth reflects connections between the city and Florence and Venice as well as production centers in Venetian controlled Euboea. The careful attention to the detailed analysis that support these conclusions is almost a study in microhistory (in fact, I think I’m going to assign this article in my Greek History class next time I teach it as a case study for how complicated it can be to understand Medieval and Frankish Greece). 

Kathleen Slane’s article is longer and equally detailed. Much of it appears to be a response to an article published in 2019 by Sarah James that makes an effort to re-date the South Stoa at Corinth and argues for continuity between the “Greek” period at Corinth and its Roman successor without the catastrophic dislocation caused by the Mummian sack of the city. The sack of Corinth by Lucius Mummius Achaicus in 146 BC has long represented one of the most clearly delineated disasters in the archaeological record. As with many such disasters, recent research has suggested that reality is more complicated than the historical sources would have us believe and the idea that Mummius destroyed the city of Corinth and forced its inhabitants to abandon the site is undergoing a reconsideration. James’s work has been at the forefront of this reconsideration and while I don’t know enough about Hellenistic and Roman pottery (or Corinth) to speak directly to her arguments, their basic trajectory feels more than plausible (and consistent with recent trends concerning any number of other bright historical lines in the archaeological record).

It would appear that Kathleen Slane was not convinced. And after 100 pages of dense analysis, I find myself less interested in the subject than I expected and no less skeptical of the Mummian destruction and abandonment of the city. As I noted already, I’m biased both personally and professionally.

What is more interesting to me though is that Slane’s 100 page article fails entirely to situate her arguments in any larger context. Perhaps she was asked to cut the parts of the paper that reminded the reader why the South Stoa was an important (or even interesting) building. Or why the reoccupation of Corinth after the Mummian Sack is a significant topic for scholarly critique or worthy of 100 pages of analysis. Even a casual observer like myself can understand the significance of a well-excavated site like Corinth in discussions of abandonment and destruction (and the resulting formation processes) in antiquity. Moreover, the South Stoa is an imposing set of foundations at the site of Corinth and while I’m not an avid Stoa-ologist, I can imagine that it is meaningful in the history of architecture or Hellenistic urbanism. Surely, in 100 pages it would be useful to remind the reader of these larger issues even if it is just as an inducement to wade through the densely argued (and sparsely illustrated) text. As my advisor used to ask me in graduate school, does this pass the who cares? test.

In some ways, Slane’s article represents one of the most difficult elements in the archaeology of Greece: the tacit assumption that certain sites, buildings, and arguments are significant. To the casual visitor to the archaeology of Greece this can be quite baffling and even frustrating. To a more critical one, this reflects generations of scholarly inbreeding and the weight of sometimes problematic academic traditions which privilege certain periods and their material more than others. When I encounter it, I’m more disappointed and tired than anything. 

The Slane – James debate has some interesting implications for how we understand the history of the city of Corinth, the economic and social history of the Corinthia, and the formation processes associated with destruction, abandonment, and reoccupation. In many ways, the resolution of data from the Corinth Excavations offers a particularly vivid window into these matters and one worth considering in a more general way. The Laird et al. article left me hopeful that at the end of the day, the desire to produce new arguments, evidence, and hypotheses will win out over the desire to foreground critique. The Slane article reminds me that old traditions of academic thought do not change over night.