7/8 - Corinth Forum pt. 2 and Musuem, Ktima Palivou Winery, Nemea, Palamidi Fortress

We woke up - and when I say “We” I mean I woke up and then made Luke put both feet on the ground before I left - and went to breakfast, which was a pretty comparable affair to the spreads at other hotels we've been at thus far. Then it was onto the bus and back to the Corinth Forum and associated museum. We arrived when the site was still in the slumber of early morning and the adorable stray dogs were still dozing as well. We milled around the museum courtyard like ducks in a pond until we were greeted by our morning lecturer, Dr. Guy Sanders.

Guy’s style of lecture was a pretty radical departure from the majority of talks we have heard on the trip. Instead of focusing on specific monuments, he talked more about landscapes and contexts. That's not to say that no one has ever done this, but Guy really widened our awareness of the context of what we were looking at. We talked for a long time about the strategic advantages that Corinth had, from its water resources which exist largely due to their clay resources (hydrograpy is awesome), to the strategic position of Acrocorinth that enabled it to dominate the isthmus from on high. The soft limestone that could be worked by woodworking tools enabled Corinth to be at the forefront of stone architecture as early as 900 BCE.

Then we shrank the scale a little smaller and moved to the area near the Sacred Spring. We talked about the placement of the spring and the theater nearby. There's a peculiar triglyph + metopes construction at ground level there that places the scene, according to Guy, in a cthonic place below the ground. Abi also postulated that the scene could put the action on the roof of a temple, suggesting a more airy location, which Guy said was interesting but needed a little more fleshing out to be a narrative he'd buy.

The next phase of the talk was a little puzzling, so I recommend Guy’s scholarship on the matter to really get a full picture of what was said. It began with a discussion of the national identity of characters in literary sources. Agamemnon, for example, probably lived closer to Corinth given that his realm was bounded by Mycenae and a more northern city. And then we turned to Helen, whose identification with Demeter and Persephone due to abduction can be seen as an alternative way to start the cycle of seasons. In addition, Helen is similar to Persephone in that each of their guardians created a tremendous loss of life when they were kidnapped. And in both cases, this was necessary to relieve the burden that an overpopulation of humans was placing on Gaea. That's what I managed to muddle out of it, but please, do not take this an an authoritative restating.

Finally we got to a medieval complex that was exposed and not removed. Here Guy said that the building was teaching him, and I quote, that “I'm a complete blithering idiot,” with no further qualification. After our laughter had died down, he launched into a series of anecdotes about how the archaeology had been gotten wrong before and how he and others were just now learning how to recognize their errors. For example, there were early 1300s coins found in the complex then covered by a destruction deposit. This would put the building at the time of the last coins. But below those, an even later banker’s token was discovered. This would seem contradictory, but in reality the coins were tossed out due to a shif in the coinage system from French to Italian currency. The other thing that he pointed at were ceramic pots, which he initially believed to be the good of a poor person. But the low reusability of the pots combined with their cost made them much more of a luxury good than he had initially realized. So where are the metal pots of the poorer people? Well, Guy postulated, they sure wouldn't have been left behind.

Finally, Guy talked about bones. The graves found in the area reveal severe and myriad ailments that afflicted the population. Dental abscesses, brucellosis, violent trauma from defensive wounds, and various other illnesses really give us insight on the things that happened to the “little people” in history. Guy concluded that he'd rather look at bones because they told him about people.

I've detailed the previous talk in depth but that's because I was so struck by it. Guy was self critical, almost to a fault, introspective, and eloquent about the relationship between archaeology and the surrounding area beyond any of the talks we've gotten so far. More on conversation with Guy later, because after our last talk he discussed the amazing ideas he has for modernizing the site and making it more accessible.

We were the introduced to Ioulia Tzonou-Herbst, the assistant director of the investigation and woman in charge of the museum. We moved through several galleries relatively quickly, focusing on how Corinth remained a crossroads for people and cultures throughout history. We also had a longer discussion of the statues of the grandsons of Augustus and how they're portrayed in the nude, which is a decidedly Greek thing to do and raises questions about whether the statues are post mortem or not. Or whether or not they are associated with Castor and Pollux, but that's a question for another time.

We walked into the Asklepion room to a peculiar sight - two trays of artifacts sitting on the ground. We all sat in a circle and Ioulia discussed each object in turn, passing them left and right. This was real ancient material!!! There were curse tablets we had heard about the previous day from the Demeter sanctuary, a mold for for creating the toes of a sculpture, fish scales from fish native the ATLANTIC OCEAN that had been traded to Corinth after being filleted and packed in salt in Spain contained in Punic (North African) amphorae (international trade is actually so exciting), and an entire sculpted foot! While we discussed the artifacts, Ioulia also told us about the awesome outreach that the Corinth excavation is doing in the form of lesson plans and education for students both here in Greece and abroad. She talked about demystifying the often obtuse archaeological reports and making information more easily accessible to the world at large. The excavation has also done touch sessions with other groups, who have given universally positive feedback. Just plain cool. I left the room beaming from exuberance. I got to interact with artifacts!! In a tactile way!! It may seem childish but the whole process made me so happy.

Part of an ancient sculpture mold.

Then we were out into the courtyard, where we had a brief impromptu presentation from Karen Garnett, who studies lamps. Lamps are awesome! They're available over a broad time period and their iconography is very informative of the time period in which they are made. Karen had whole boxes of lamps and we discussed all sorts of varieties. It was an off the cuff presentation in the courtyard of the museum and I felt engaged the whole time.

One more thing and then I'll get off Corinth and get moving. At the end of his lecture in the forum and continuing after the lamp presentation, Guy explained part of the multilateral management plan that the excavation is looking to help implement to make the site more open and interactive for visitors. Creating a bigger and more popular attraction would be a boon to the local economy, and so far the local businesses and hotels seem to be on board. Digital integration was the focus of our talk after the lamp presentation as Guy described the process of attaching endless metadata electronically to the excavated material of Corinth. Frankly, it sounds like the future of archaeology. We got a whiff of this when we learned about iDig at the Agora, but having a more layperson friendly guide program similar to that would do wonders for people who don't have the Director of Excavation to walk them through the site. Just the concept of stratigraphy and the fact that all of these buildings can exist concurrently in the same place is very foreign to people.

But archaeology needs to work a little bit so that the average layperson can get the rest of the way and pierce the veil that shrouds a lot of these sites. The sites need to be seen and experienced with as much context as possible. The trick is to put that context together in a way that allows the layperson to look for what they want that's understandable. Guy made the point that writing and publishing an article on a find will probably be read by less than 100 people in the entire world who share that specialty. But break that information down, make it searchable, able to be cross referenced, and delivered in a more manageable form and orders of magnitude more people will be able to get excited about it. Look at me. Yes I'm already invested in the classics, but if some of this stuff can literally have me jumping Archaeology needs the layperson to stay relevant. The good thing is, if I may allude to Robocop, we have the technology. And Guy seemed very interested in getting these thing implemented. I hope his replacement is willing to do the same.

Alright, that was some stuff near and dear to my heart, now back on the road! We rolled up to the vineyard of Ktima Palivou precisely at our scheduled appointment time of 1330. We took a brief look at the vineyard, the machinery, and the storage facilities on site before heading to the tasting tables. A word of advice for the wise: since I am a non-drinker, be at my table during tastings. You'll get more wine that way. Anyways, I enjoyed the conversation as the group sampled three wines and I enjoyed the delicious palate cleansing ice water by the glass. The appointment was fairly brief and soon after we were back on the road towards Nemea.

The two tables at the tasting.

At Nemea we were met by Dr. Kim Shelton, director of the excavation. We started in the museum, which includes items returned after being looted and shipped to the United States. Apparently the auction was advertised in the New York Times, which alerted academics who in turn were able to involve enough government agencies to eventually compel their return to Greece. We had the first really serious discussion of looting thus far in the trip, with Kim talking about the difficulty of defending the sites from looting with limited funds. Thus far, local outreach and awareness programs have proven the most effective way to set up a more constant watch, but it's a battle that continues to be fought across the world.

Also, hysplex video! The starting mechanism for the games here is pretty different than the one at Isthmia, and I personally prefer the Isthmian one a bit more, the torsion involved in the Nemean hysplex is pretty cool. If there are more extant examples, I'd love to know and investigate them. Ancient engineering is awesome and a little mysterious to me.

Shot from inside the Greek bathhouse.

Up next was the bath complex, which, given my fascination with drains thus far on the trip, hit the spot. My mantra thus far has been: Water is weird. People who can mess with it are smart. And that's interesting. From what started as a joke on Crete about repeatedly asking about drains has evolved into an actual interest. Thank Abi for that. We also looked at the Temple of Zeus at the site, which has not one, not two, but three columns still standing from ancient times! There are also a bunch of restored columns standing and Kim explained the process behind putting them back up. There are even plans on paper for an additional set of restorations, but those are € 2 million from coming to fruition at the moment.

The Temple of Zeus at Nemea.

Finally, we headed to the stadium. We walked through the long entrance tunnel and saw graffiti from previous contestants etched on the walls. Then we were on the flat hard surface, complete with original starting blocks. Naturally we had to have a race. About half the group took their marks, Sally acted as starter, Abi got on the finish line, and Jessica policed the toes of the contestants. The final standings for the first ASCSA Summer Session II 2016 Nemean Footrace were as follows.

Matthew (yours truly)
Luke Madson
Jason Hansen
Sophie Smith (beating the rest of the group’s women by quite some distance)

A rematch is planned for Olympia.

The runners nearing the finish line. Picture credit Abi Ferstman.

Our last stop of the day was Palamidi Fortress, which dominates Nauplio and the coastline. While we only had half an hour on site, I made the most of it by scaling up and down a steep hill face to access the posterns, exploring the old cistern, and snapping loads of pictures from the bastions. At the end of the visit I nearly fell hard moving too quickly on some stairs while looking for Luke, but all's well that ends well. And I'll go slower in the future.

Yours truly atop a Palamidi bastion

The final stop was at our hotel and then out for dinner and gelato. All the food was fantastic and the company so pleasant. Seriously, I feel extremely lucky to be in a group with all of these people.

Tomorrow is Epidauros, among other things, where we’re seeing the Oresteia on stage. I'm very excited. These past two days have been fantastic and things show no sign of slowing.

Thanks for reading. This one was long but I hope you were able to either engage with those parts or just skim them and keep moving.