Two Weeks at Isthmia

As my time working at Isthmia hits the two week mark, our routine of ceramic analysis is giving me the bandwidth to start to think more broadly about the situation at Isthmia.

For those who don’t read the blog regularly, I’ve been working with my colleagues Richard Rothaus and Scott Moore to analyze the after life of the Roman bath. To do this we’ve studied the way in which people used the bath not only for the construction of the Hexamilion Wall, but also for other activities including eventually settlement at the site.

The elephant in the room, of course, is the wall itself. Not only would it have loomed figuratively over the ruined bath, but also literally.

I continue to struggle to think about how the wall (and the bath) shaped the experience and behaviors of the individuals living in its ruins and shadow. As a way to think about this differently, I followed a tip by University of Virginia graduate student James Razumoff who suggested that I read some of Lori Khatchadourian’s work and provided me with a copy of “Life Extempore: Trials of Ruination in the Twilight Zone of Soviet Industry” from Current Anthropology 37.2 (2022), 317–348.

This article features how two Armenian informants leveraged the ruins of Soviet industrialization to make a living in the 21st century. Khatchadourian introduced the concept of “trails of ruination” which described the efforts to make a living from ruins when “time and temporality, matter and materiality rebuff with opposing force.” She deploys this concept to understand the tension between Soviet and capitalist forms of engagement with the materiality and time. 

At a site like Isthmia, of course, there are fewer traces of ideological change much less the kind of abrupt ideological change that occurred with the collapse of the Soviet empire. One wonders, however, how the memory of a particularly vibrant phase of Roman building in the Corinthia (and the institutional apparatus that made such a phase possible) lingered in the wall (and the earlier bath). 

This summer, I’ve spent far less time thinking about the wall and the bath and more time thinking about the material from individuals “lots” or stratigraphic (loosely defined) units. The finds from each unit will help us be able to tell the larger story of the post-Roman bath. Thus far, we have studied almost 2000 sherds from context pottery and over 100 inventoried finds from the bath. Our plan is to produce the definitive publication of the bath’s afterlife with a thorough, if not complete, artifact catalogue.

Stay tuned for more!