Corinthian Countrysides: Linked Open Data and Analysis from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey

Corinthian Countrysides presents the datasets, analysis, and results of a large-scale intensive survey in the eastern territory of Corinth between 1997 and 2003. Carried out under a permit of the Greek Ministry of Culture granted through the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey investigated the Isthmus west of the Corinth Canal, a highly-connected transport corridor and densely settled area from prehistory to the present day, and sampled parts of the mountainous and coastal districts of the southeast Corinthia. Researchers recorded a rich body of evidence for habitation and land use covering all periods of human history and documented a materially abundant and varied landscape with few parallels in Greece or the Aegean basin.

In Corinthian Countrysides, David K. Pettegrew offers the first comprehensive introduction to the project’s history, methods, analyses, and results in connection with primary online datasets published at Open Context. He provides a critical overview of the project’s major discoveries about the history of the Corinthian countryside and a case study of the new kind of data-centered distributional survey that has proliferated in the eastern Mediterranean in recent decades. Pettegrew shows how artifact-level survey and data-centered analyses open up new ways of rethinking Greek landscapes in terms of their most basic fundamental elements—the atomic traces of objects and features in distribution. In his outline of methods, categories, datasets, and source criticism, Pettegrew prepares readers to experiment, tinker, and play with open data as a process of making meaning about the Greek countryside.

Corinthian Countrysides comprises an important critical edition of a new archaeological resource for understanding the history of Corinth’s territory.