The Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey: integrated methods for a dynamic landscape: introduction.

INTRODUCTION

Corinth was one of the great cities of the ancient world, in large measure because of its location near strategic crossroads to the east. (1) The Isthmus of Corinth provided overland passage from southern to central Greece, and linked the Corinthian Gulf, leading to Italy and the west, with the Saronic Gulf, giving access to the Aegean Sea, Anatolia, and the Levant to the east (Fig. 1). The site of ancient Corinth has been excavated for more than 100 years by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. (2) Much archaeological and topographic work has been undertaken in the city's eastern hinterland, including excavations at the Panhellenic Sanctuary of Poseidon at Isthmia, (3) the Saronic port at Kenchreai, (4) and the two major prehistoric sites of Korakou and Gonia, (5) as well as extensive studies of the built environment as it relates to historical sources. (6) A few unsystematic reconnaissance surveys were also undertaken, the most thorough being James Wiseman's walking survey of the entire Corinthia in the 1960s. (7)

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Between 1997 and 2003, the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS) investigated a 350-[km.sup.2] region east of the ancient city of Corinth; the underlying methodology of the project and preliminary findings are detailed below. For two decades prior to the survey, Timothy Gregory and other EKAS archaeologists produced a large body of work on the Corinthia, focused particularly but not exclusively on the Roman, Byzantine, and Frankish periods. (8) With this extensive archaeological and historical sequence, we have been able to firmly affix our study to a chronological framework covering more than 8,000 years, from the establishment of Early Neolithic communities to the present (Table 1). Nevertheless, previous research has offered only limited understanding of the territory in which these sites were found, including the locations of habitation and nonhabitation sites, road networks, and patterns of resource distribution and exploitation. (9) EKAS has thus been both a natural outgrowth of ongoing research and a specific means to address these gaps in knowledge, using modern survey methods unavailable to previous investigators.

The eastern Corinthia, or the territory lying east of ancient Corinth, offers a unique opportunity to investigate the changing relationships among urban, "sub-urban," and rural entities from prehistory to the present. Prior to EKAS's work, a number of settlements, industrial and exploitative areas, and other sites were already known outside ...