The East Field at Isthmia

This book offers the first systematic investigation of the built-up landscape that was brought to light during the early 1970s excavations of the East Field at Isthmia. Here we attempt to understand the development of this area of the Panhellenic sanctuary: to identify the buildings, or at least the exposed parts of them; to learn something of their type and function; to determine how they developed over time; and to connect them and their histories to the sanctuary at large. At the same time, this is also a book about finding new ways to approach poorly understood and under-published archaeological sites. How can the legacy data of an older excavation, for example, be reawakened and integrated with a new architectural field survey to make a meaningful contribution to scholarship on a site? Here our case study is the East Field at Isthmia, but having now completed it, we have come to believe that similar approaches could be applied effectively to the almost countless under-studied sites elsewhere. The contribution we hope to make thus extends beyond Isthmia itself to explore new approaches—and certainly methodologies—that demonstrate the value of otherwise long-forgotten archaeological sites.