David Pettegrew pointed me in the direction of K. Slane's "The End of the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on Acrocorinth," Hesperia 77 (2008), 465-496. The main goal of this article was to clarify certain issues with the ceramic chronology at the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on the slopes of Acrocorinth which had been well published by Slane, N. Bookidis, R. Stroud, and C.K. Williams over a series of Corinth volumes. In this particular article, Slane sought to reiterate her late 4th century dating of this sanctuary's abandonment despite some recent evidence that lamps similar to those found at the sanctuary could date as late as the 5th century. Holding ground on the earlier date for this pottery clearly resists the most recent trends in the study of Late Roman ceramics which tends to push pottery later in time.
The end of this cult represents one of a number of episodes in the neighborhood of Corinth that roughly marked the end of a kind of monumental paganism characteristic of formal sanctuaries and perhaps their economic, religious, and political institutions. The site seems to have suffered a violent destruction perhaps at the hands of Christians or during one of the late 4th century earthquakes. The end of ancient "monumental" paganism has, of course, represented a major moment in how we understand the emergence of Christian culture in Greece; for the Corinthia specifically attention to this phenomenon has featured in several dissertations, books, and a gaggle of articles over the past several decades.
Slane's article also sheds light on this site after its destruction and abandonment as a sanctuary. The earlier date of the ceramic material from the site maintains the gap between the site's abandonment as a sanctuary and its reuse as a cemetery and as a quarry for building material. The ceramics present on the site date to the final part of the 5th century and into the 6th, and the lamps, in particular, are associated with the burials. Slane contends that since only one lamp has a Christian symbol on it, it is unlikely that this cemetery represented a conspicuous Christian effort to "deny" the site's former sanctity (p. 492). The burials on site, however, only represent one aspect of the sanctuary post-abandonment history. There were also a definite quantity of 6th century ceramics associated with the site -- including coins of Arcadius, a 6th century African Red Slip plate, a Late Roman C ware saucer, 6th century amphoras, and cooking pots. While this material may be associated with the rituals that took place at tombs in Late Antiquity, it may also represent the everyday life of the individuals who worked to strip the site of building material and transport them elsewhere in the city. As similar finds at Late Antique Kourion have shown, the work of robbing a site of building material could have involved a rather substantial crew and extended over a significant period of time (weeks? months?). The provisioning for the crew might well involve cooking pots and transport amphora, and the occasional fineware serving dish would be a possible feature of this assemblage as well especially when these types of objects are found well away from the area of later burials.
The point of Slane's article was not to clarify the later function of the site, although establishing a definite gap between the end of cult activity at the site and later burials and activity there certainly contributes to how we understand the site's later phases. Nevertheless, the recent attention to the chronology of later material has continued to cast more and more light both on "abandonment" as a complex process and the dynamic history of site's across the entire landscape.
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