3. A New Approach: the East Isthmia Archaeology Project and its methodology
A new approach was clearly needed to interpret the structural remains in the East Field, one that employed the existing data from earlier excavations but without being bound by previous interpretations of them. Established in 2005, the East Isthmia Archaeology Project has recently completed the first of three phases of research at the site that will ultimately determine what kinds of buildings occupied the area to the east of the Temple of Poseidon; what was their size, shape and spatial arrangement; when they were in and out of use; and what kinds of activities were conducted among them. The results will lead towards a clearer understanding of the daily operation of a Panhellenic sanctuary (see Ellis forthcoming). The three phases of the research are as follows:
Phase 1 of the project consisted of two procedures, both intended to establish the structural and spatial shape of the site and its buildings. The first was an on-site architectural field survey, of the structural vestiges from previous excavations, to record information for each wall, especially their Stratigraphic Relationships, into a database tied to a GIS. The second procedure involved the digitisation of the original notebooks of Clement and his team, and of their photographic archive; and the reformatting of this massive body of legacy data to integrate with our own datasets, so that they could be more easily and more powerfully managed. This first phase of our research, now complete, is the focus of the remainder of this article.
Once identifiable buildings, and their relative chronological sequences, can be distinguished from the maze of walls our second phase of research will focus more intently on fully reintegrating all the legacy data. This might ordinarily be the first step in working at a site with legacy data, but the lack of spatial information in the original excavation notebooks makes their effective use limited. In this phase we hope to be able to refit the original data - particularly the finds, their contexts, dates and usages - with the actual rooms and spaces of the buildings.
The third phase of research will largely depend on the success of the second, but we anticipate, tentatively, that it will involve some selective stratigraphic excavations to establish a tighter chronological, as well as functional, understanding of the landscape. This phase of research will naturally combine a new Total Station architectural survey with a geophysical survey of the entire area to ascertain its spatial relationship to the nearby Isthmian theatre and temenos of the Temple of Poseidon (Figure 1).