The 2022 season of the Michigan State University Excavations at Isthmia, which began on 13 May and concluded on 13 July, was again devoted to the assessment and organization of artifacts and records from the past five decades or work at the site.
Nicole, Cam, and Zoe repairing the front door of the excavation house.
This year the project engaged in the following activities.
Photography exhibition: Building on the success of a gallery show in December 2021 in East Lansing, Michigan, an exhibition of photographs by Daniel Trego was installed in the Isthmia museum. Thanks to the help of Sokrates Lambropoulos from the Global Arts Studios, the ephors Yiota Kassimi and Vasilis Tassinos, and guards at the musem, the exhibition was completed in time for a well-attended opening on 19 May and will remain in the museum until the end of September. We are hopeful that this is only the first of many such creative collaborations. The images and captions can be found at https://msuisthmia.org/art/.
Opening night at the Isthmia museum.
Daniel Trego and Angeliki Kandri enjoy the exhibition.
The storage rooms with a new coat of stucco, paint and a new trellis
The overgrown entrance in 2021.
Aristides Denesakis welds the new trellis in front of the “excavation house.”
Structural improvements: During December 2021, the outer walls of the two main storerooms on the MSU Isthmia grounds were repaired. The “kouzina” was given a new coat of stucco, while the “apotheke Gregory” / “architekteion” was refinished to reveal the stonework walls. In May and June 2021, further improvements were made. Window shutters, handrails, gates and doors were all treated for rust and repainted. The wooden doors and screens in front of the dig house were repaired and refinished as well. In addition, metal trellises were installed in front of the storage rooms in order to provide shade for work outside in future seasons.
Context material: The long-lived effort to update the storage containers for all uninventoried objects was brought closer to completion. Nearly all discrete collections of context pottery have now been moved from their original, and frequently decayed, cardboard boxes, to archival plastic bags and bins. This has led to a more compact and efficient use of space in the excavation storage rooms. It is now certain that this process will be complete by the end of the 2023 season.
Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory and Cade Smith “reboxing” pottery.
Inside the “kouzina” storage room where the “reboxing” is nearly complete.
Morgan Manuszak, Daniel Trego and Nicole Grganto at the photo table
Photographic documentation of cataloged artifacts: In response to a request from the ephoreia members of the MSU Isthmia team had spent much of the 2021 season photographing almost 1300 of the individually catalogued artifacts currently stored on the shelves of the first floor of the “dig house.” That work continued in 2022 with the photo-documentation of ceramic material stored in boxes in other locations of the same rooms. Over the course of four weeks, nearly 1000 more artifacts were photographed and their current locations recorded in an online document. This represents the vast majority of objects and leaves only the stone, metal and glass artifacts currently stored beneath the first floor cabinets. It is reasonable to expect that this documentation project will be completed by the end of the 2023 season.
Digitization: The digitization of documents in the project archives continued this season. In order to support the work of individual scholars, certain notebooks, maps, plans, field photographs and weekly and season reports from the excavations in the 1960s and 1970s were prioritized. In addition, a complete audit was conducted on all line drawings currently stored in the MSU Isthmia archives.
Ulrike Krotscheck, Andrew Sharp and Zoe Dunnum digitize the archive
The old wooden shed in 2012.
The new metal storage room under construction.
New storage: Although this is not directly an MSU Isthmia project, it is important to note that the temporary wooden storage structure built behind the “excavation house” more than a decade ago was demolished and replaced by a larger, and more secure steel framed structure. This new building is intended to house the material excavated from the nearby site of Kenchries.