David Pettegrew (R) and Tom Henderson (L) working in the Corinth Excavations in 2005
Corinthian Matters is a new and exciting electronic resource and blog created by David Pettegrew an Assistant Professor at Messiah College in Pensylvania and member of the ASCSA. David’s work in the Corinthia is long standing from 1999, having worked on the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS) as part of the field crew and eventually team leader. In 2005, while a member of the School, he excavated in the Panayia Field in Ancient Corinth. With his dissertation (Ohio State 2006), Corinth on the Isthmus: The End of An Ancient Landscape, and several publications on Corinthian topics he is perhaps uniquely qualified to publish this rich blog.
David writes:
My goal with Corinthian Matters has been to add content slowly and post some of the most interesting material as blogs; on the other end, some blog entries like the Corinthiaka post are not substantive enough to add to the links features, etc… I integrate the most interesting material into the website and am slowly building it into a resource. A good example is my account of the Byzantine admiral Niketas Ooryphas, the short version run as a series of blogs, the full source material integrated into the website.
I wanted to put together something that would be useful for people interested in Corinth, because Corinth draws enormous public interest on account of its archaeology and especially the apostle Paul’s visit. Surprisingly, with the exception of organization websites like the ASCSA and a few New Testament blogs, there is not much information available online for someone interested in first century Corinth, the gap between archaeology and the New Testament, the later Roman city, and monuments like the Lechaion basilica and the diolkos, among others. New developments in scholarship are reaching the public very slowly, which is why there exists widespread popular misunderstandings of the city (e.g., Corinth the sex center in the early Roman era). So the site intends to make archaeological and historical research a bit more accessible.
My inspirations for the blog include colleagues who have been blogging Greece for the last few years including Bill Caraher’s Archaeology of the Mediterranean World, Kostis Kourelis’s Objects-Building-Situations, Diana Wright’s Surprised by Time, and one of my colleagues at Messiah College, John Fea, whose blog The Way of Improvement Leads Home daily draws 500 visitors.
