Hi folks! Sorry for the sabbatical, but in the Korinthia I only had a dial up connection, so there was no way to blog.
I have now returned to the comfortable confines of Grand Forks to get my research and life together to return to Athens in August. I hope to have a chance to update the PKAP interactive map and develop an interactive map for the Korinthia Survey (EKAS). David Pettegrew and I have begun to put together an Eastern Korinthia website that will feature the methods and results of the EKAS as well as information on its related projects. We hope that it will not only serve as a place for the public to familiarize themselves with the project, but it will also make material available for teachers who might find some of the data, analysis, and methods useful in the classroom. David, will likely use some of the Korinthia material in his Classical Archaeology class at Messiah College. I will post a link to it here once we get it up in beta.
As a follow up on a post I made some months ago on abandonment in the North Dakota countryside, there was an interesting article in the July issue of Harper on abandoned spaces in downtown Detroit. In particular, it discusses how lots made vacant through urban decay, depopulation, and arson are sometimes converted to community gardens and "green spaces". This trend, of course, is will known both in other modern cities, but perhaps more interestingly (for me) in antiquity. The accounts of Medieval Constantinople, for example, where large stretches of the city within the Theodosian walls has reverted to orchards and gardens are well known. This perspective reinforces the idea that abandonment is simply an part of the historic narrative that topographers, archaeologists and historians construct to understand landscapes rather than the rigidly ahistorical end points that punctuate older narratives drawing upon more traditional paradigms.
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