First Day at Isthmia

The first day at a new site in the summer is always a bit abrupt. Even as I took time to prepare for the transition, it still caught be a bit off guard! (I have a theory that as a younger scholar, I was more able to switch gears between projects than I am now, but that might not entirely be true). At Polis, we mostly study material from the 1980s; at Isthmia we’re studying material from the 1970s. Scholars have nibbled around the edges of this material and some of it is even “known,” but it has not really been published fully and the various strands connecting the mentions of material — often in footnotes — had made making sense of the latest phases at Isthmia challenging. On the flip side, I’ve wanted to see whether I could make our work at Isthmia relevant to ancient history more broadly or even the larger discipline of archaeology. Scholars working at Isthmia — from David Pettegrew to the current director Jon Frey’s work on spolia, to Richard Rothaus’s contributions to how we…