More on Survey Archaeology

Michael Given has long been one of my heroes among survey archaeologists. His work with the Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project remains to my mind the gold standard for a large intensive survey project. So when he writes about survey, it doesn’t take much for me to pay attention.

Given’s article “Towards a Post-Survey Landscape Archaeology” appears in Sturt W. Manning’s edited volume Critical Approaches to Cypriot and Wider Mediterranean Archaeology which I believe is a kind of festschrift for Bernard Knapp. It offers a sweeping view of the last fifty years of intensive pedestrian survey and demonstrates the well-known disconnect between processual, method driven field projects, phenomenological approaches to understanding historical landscapes, ecological and environmental approaches, and greater emphasis on community oriented disciplinary practice. The failure of these approaches to resolve themselves into a cohesive or integrated approach to survey has left intensive survey in a bit of holding pattern lately with an intensively methodological discourse in abeyance and a new way of talking is struggling to be born. 

I’ve been blogging about some this lately.

Given stresses that the interpretative space long occupied by methods and methodology, but turned over to concepts of convivial practices. On the one hand, this conviviality offers a model for understanding the interaction between members of a survey project, in the field, in the workroom, and throughout the analysis and interpretation process. On the other hand, conviviality represents the space of interaction between the various entities that constitution the archaeological landscape. In this context, conviviality embodied the interplay between artifacts, field conditions, climate, weather, team members, local residents, archeological policies, methods, tools, and non-human creatures. This expansive view of archaeological practice and landscape may sound ambitious and complex, but it also likely familiar to anyone who has spent time walking fields anywhere in the world. What Given suggests is that survey projects pivot from their longstanding preoccupation with methodology, and embrace ways of describing what we do that recognize the wide range of contingencies from climate change to soil types, archaeological policies, local residents, scents, and vegetation cover. This more expansive view of the landscape, which Given calls an entwined “socioecology” makes it possible for us to produce new relationships between the variables that shape not only the archaeological material recovered in the field, but also the broader context for its significance. I was particularly drawn to an approach that shifted our emphasis from the rather static concept of sites to the more dynamic idea of flows.

There are some great examples of this kind of more dynamic reading of landscapes. In particular, I’ve found Catherine Kearns’s The Rural Landscapes of Archaic Cyprus (2022) which strikes me as the kind of approach that Given envisions, although she grounds most of her analysis in the restudy of data from earlier surveys. That said, her interest in defining the rural as a way to understand the emergence of cities on Cyprus in the Archaic period relies upon an understanding of the countryside that goes well beyond the conventional depictions of urban and rural as static networks of entities tied to existing urban centers. Instead, she proposes a landscape defined by dynamic flows that often leave only ephemeral archaeological traces, but nevertheless reveal the shadowy period marking out the transition from one political, economic, and settlement regime and another. You can read my blog about it here.

(As an aside, if were the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, I would be tempted to do one of their review forums on Kearns’s book. It is not only significant for the archaeology of Cyprus, an area where the JMA already has significant reputation for publishing, but this book also has a chance to exert a  significant impact on how we think about intensive survey, ancient environments, and the organization of settlement in the ancient countryside.)  

This is particularly interesting to me as the Western Argolid Regional Project team is starting to organize the final stages in publishing their book length study of their work in the upper Inachos River valley. Part of my responsibility is to publish the Early Modern and Modern material with Grace Erny. Given’s thoughts on survey, particularly his comments on flow, got me thinking about the range of depositional processes and meanings present in these landscapes, especially since the distribution of modern material — especially ceramic rooftiles — is almost ubiquitous across the survey area. It is tempting to try to understand this material less as the manifestation for certain activities in countryside and more as the manifestation of both human and natural depositional flows. In some cases, these patterns will be obvious, such as the relationship of discarded tiles, for example, to existing roads. In other cases, we might have to use the depositional patterns to suggest the presence of flows that no longer leave traces in the landscape. My feeling — not having looked at the data for a few years — is that thinking in terms of movement in and through the landscape will be more productive than more site based interpretative paradigms.