Hexamilion Research

This summer, I’m doing two projects that involve the Hexamilion Wall. The Hexamilion Wall is the famous Late Antique fortification wall that runs across the Isthmus of Corinth. It was published by my advisor Tim Gregory in the 1990s and has long loomed on the edge of my archaeological consciousness and experiences. 

(In fact, I wrote about the Hexamilion Wall just last summer on this very blog!)

This summer, I’ve had the really exciting opportunity to both look at the wall up close and to think about the relationship between the wall and the Roman Bath at Isthmia. The goal of these projects were modest, but also strangely ambitious, and in this way they offer a distinct parallel with the wall itself which is both imposing in its size, but also simple in its design.

My work over the last couple of weeks focused mainly on studying two phases of the Roman bath at Isthmia. The bath stood immediately to the south of the course of the Hexamilion Wall through Isthmia and its contributed its north wall to the Hexamilion after the abandonment of the bath. Because of this relationship, we thought it might be useful to restudy the abandonment of the bath with an eye toward both its chronology and the way in which the builders of the Hexamilion may have adapted the bath for its place in the wall.

We also studied the abandonment and adaptation of the Roman bath to provide us with a context for activity that took place in and around the building after the Hexamilion wall was built. As readers of this blog likely know, Scott Moore, Richard Rothaus and I have been studying the so-called “Slavic” settlement at the Roman bath with the goal of producing not only a more thorough publication of the finds (i.e. “Slave Ware” pottery), but also the traces of settlement present there. While I suspect our work will not introduce some brilliant new conclusions regarding the Roman Bath and its post abandonment history, it will help fill in gaps and contribute to our understand of the “long Late Antiquity” in Greece. 

At the same time, David Pettegrew and I have spent time looking at a series of features that we have associated with the eastern end of the Hexamilion Wall where it met the Saronic Gulf. Tim Gregory, when he published the wall was not entirely clear about the eastern end of the fortification. He speculated that it featured an eastern bastion and likely availed itself to one of several east-west running ridges that ended near the Saronic coast. While we don’t have definitive evidence for this final length of wall, we think that we’re on the verge of figuring it out (and with any luck, we’ll be able to reveal more detail in the next month or so).

Right now, I’m spending whatever limited bandwidth that I have thinking of ways to weave our very fine grained research at Isthmia together with our landscape based research in the Eastern Korinthia. 

Stay tuned!