Published: Dec. 10, 2018

Portrait of Sarah A JamesWe are delighted to announce that Sarah James has won a CHA Faculty Fellowship for 2019-20. She will be working on the manuscript for her second book, entitled The Archaeology of Hellenistic Economies: Corinth and Mediterranean Trade in the 4th-1st centuries BCE.  This book marks a new direction in her research career. Most of her publications to date have focused on reconstructing the history of Corinth and its environs, but with this project she takes a Mediterranean-wide approach to understanding ancient trade patterns and how they change over time. The ancient Greek city of Corinth was located at an ideal crossing point between the Aegean and Adriatic Seas and thus connected the eastern and central Mediterranean. We know from ancient Greek shipwrecks that pottery was a common part of most cargoes, often as a valuable space filler for larger shipments of agricultural goods or metals or as packing containers themselves. When found at Corinth, this imported pottery offers good proxy data for the origin point and date of shipments. Sarah began research for this project in 2016 with the help of a semester-long NEH grant and at that time completed the first stage, which involved collecting data on more than 700 imports at Corinth. This initial work constitutes half of the total research required for this project and will form about one-third of the total length of the planned manuscript, which the American School of Classical Studies at Athens’ Princeton press has already agreed to accept it for review as part of its Hesperia supplements series.