This entry is adapted from materials previously posted on the Krateros Instagram page.
As part of our series of posts on material from the Agora excavation of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, today we’re going down a virtual rabbit hole for a single fragment: Agora I 16b.
If you were sitting in the Meritt Library and wanted to research Agora I 16b, you might start by going down our wall of squeezes and pulling out the box with squeezes for fragments Agora I 1-49. When you had retrieved our two squeezes of Agora I 16b, you could then open the card file we discussed in our previous post and pull out the relevant notecards.
These cards would not only give you a small photograph of the inscription, but all the archaeological information you could want along with a physical description of the fragment. However, unlike the notecards at http://ascsa.net, our notecards were not kept updated with bibliographical notes; those notes were put into Meritt’s notebooks.
So off we go to Meritt’s notebook, where we would find several pages on Agora I 16-18 (which are all associated, as well as Agora I 93). One of Meritt’s notes indicates an initial publication of the inscription in Hesperia II (1933); we’re fortunate to have bound copies of Hesperia in the Meritt Library, but the American School has generously made pre-2011 issues of Hesperia publicly accessible at https://www.ascsa.edu.gr/publications/hesperia/open-access.
We’ve got a lovely picture here of our well-loved physical copy, and two of the relevant pages as we flip through the volume. Of course, this would only be the beginning; there are more bibliographical notes in Meritt’s journal, and one would certainly want to look through the SEG, but that’s a story for another day…
Notes from Krateros 