The Kenchreai Cemetery Project (KCP) was a program of interdisciplinary research concentrating on the burial grounds at Kenchreai, the eastern port of Corinth in southern Greece. Professor Joseph L. Rife, now of Vanderbilt University, directed KCP in 2002-2006 with the sponsorship of Macalester College. He worked under the auspices of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens with the permission of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and the oversight of the 37th Ephoreia of Classical and Prehistoric Antiquities at Archaia Korinthos. While KCP pursued its own research program with a unique administrative structure, it also collaborated on many levels with other archaeological teams in the region, including the Ohio State Excavations and University of Chicago Excavations at Isthmia, the American School Excavations at Corinth, and the Office of the 37th Ephoreia, and with the staff of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique affiliated with the Centre d'étude des peintures murales romaines in Soissons, France.

KCP currently focuses on a major cemetery of Roman date (middle 1st-7th centuries C.E.) north of the ancient harbor. The site is endangered by illicit excavation, vandalism, and dumping. Despite these dire threats to the cultural heritage, the cemetery provides important evidence for the use of funerary ritual and mortuary space in the surviving architecture, wall-painting, artifacts, inscriptions, bones, and depositional remains.

		An international team of experts in mortuary behavior, wall-painting, artifactual analysis, architecture, geology, geophysical remote-sensing, bioarchaeology and zooarchaeology, assisted by technicians and students, is documenting the rich funerary remains in their historical and natural contexts. Ironically, it is through the study of death at Roman Kenchreai that we can achieve perhaps our fullest understanding of life at Roman Kenchreai. The exploration of this one cemetery in the Corinthia can elucidate not only the internal complexity of Mediterranean port-cities during the Empire, but also the dynamic diachronic and regional variability of social structure in the Greek provinces under Roman rule.
Project staff, 2003 season