Survey Archaeology and Modern Greece: More Notes

I’m kind of playing around with the paper that I’m planning to give next month at the CHAT conference in Patras, Greece. I have an idea, but not really a paper. As my colleague pointed out when I sent him a draft: I’m not sure what you’re arguing here… which was a very fair assessment.

That said, I like the ideas in this draft and I’m mildly convinced that I can wrangle this draft into some kind of argument in the next week or so.

I’m making two arguments, I think (which is probably too ambitious for a 15 minute paper).

First, I want to argue that intensive survey in Greece as practiced in Greece is not well-suited to document the most obvious expression of modernity in the Greek countryside: the village. The techniques associated with intensive survey are calibrated to detect traces of the past in the landscape and are too readily blown out by the hyper abundance of modern material. More than that, survey archaeologists struggle to discern the difference between material in systematic and archaeological contexts. Fenced yards, hostile animals, and paved spaces and other features of village life make conducting survey impossible. 

Second, this paper will argue that focusing on the traces of the modern period in more rural spaces does more than merely document material susceptible to intensive survey methods. Instead, it reveals traces of modern life that exists outside of the modern notes of the village.

Here’s some more draft notes:

Intensive pedestrian survey of the kind practiced by Anglo-American archaeological projects in Greece represents a kind of survey defined largely by its methodological commitments. Survey archaeologists walk units spaced 5 to 15 meters apart, we could artifacts on the surface, we collect a sample of the artifacts, and we produce maps that reflect the distribution and density the artifacts that we sample. In most cases, intensive survey is diachronic and seeks to recognize the relationship between periods in the past and changes in settlement and land use over time. 

Most of the rather expansive methodological discourse has emphasized the value of this approach to documenting hidden landscapes in the Mediterranean countryside. Archaeology, myself included, has spilled untold amounts of ink on topics such as artifact recovery rates, survey unit size, surface visibility, and so on in an effort to calibrate our field procedures. Ideally, this allows us to produce maps of our survey area that reflect data collected in a consistent and even comparable way. It perhaps goes without saying that archaeologists have celebrated this method for its ability to document at scale even the most elusive and ephemeral traces of past activities: fleeting farmsteads, seasonal settlements, aceramic activities, and material from periods often obscure even in excavated contexts. In this way, intensive pedestrian survey fulfills the role of archaeology — in metaphor and method — in revealing traces of the past that the present has obscured. If excavation removes overburdens that obfuscate our understanding of the past, intensive survey teases out the traces of the past hidden in plain sight. If excavation affirms the division between the present of the archaeologist and the past of material defined as archaeological, survey relies on the obscurity of the past in the present to situate the archaeologist in relation to their object of study. I like to think that Freud would be satisfied with this.

This way of thinking is particularly significant for the archaeology of Greece where archaeology played a key role in defining the “topographies of Hellenism,” in Artemis Leontis elegant turn of phrase. Archaeological excavations revealed the presence of Greece as the metaphorical and literal foundations of the modern state. It situated the material traces of Ancient Greece in the modern state, but not of the modern state which confirmed the emergent or immanent character of Greekness without challenging the linearity of modernity. As both metaphor and method, Freud would recognize this. 

When studying the modern or contemporary period, then, survey archaeologists confront challenges that strikes to the core of their methodology. Some of these challenges are practical. During the first season of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey our field procedures included a form call the “modern sweep.” This form sought to document modern material present in units. After a season of documenting modern material in the agricultural fields between Ancient Corinth and the Saronic Gulf (including nearly every field producing “scattered trash”), the project abandoned the form as an awkward and time consuming exercise of questionable analytical value. Indeed, any archaeologist who has spent time in the Greek countryside can imagine the futility in documenting discarded water bottle lids, modern bricks, wooden pallets, and other detritus of modern life. 

On a more theoretical level, there are also issues. Archaeology relies on its methods to establish the epistemic distance necessary to analyze a past that is separate from the present. Survey archaeologists, in the Anglo-American tradition at least, have calibrated their methods to document material that is not ubiquitous, visible, and familiar. Intensive survey also tended to avoid built up areas near modern villages where locked yards, skeptical landowners, and, most significantly, the blurred lines between systemic and archaeological contexts makes systematic recording difficult or impossible. When confronted with the unique character of modernity — material abundance, private property, the existence of administrative, economic, and social nodes — our finely calibrated archaeological methods struggle to cope. 

This is not to suggest that intensive survey archaeology is incapable of documenting modern landscapes, of course. Historical archaeology, at least in its American form, emerged at roughly the same time as intensive survey archaeology in Greece. A generation of scholars have recognized that archaeology represented a valuable tool for interrogating what Charles Orser referred to as the four “haunts” of the field: colonialism, Eurocentrism, capitalism, and modernity. In other words, archaeology could turn its modern lens on its own age and recognize the intertwined relationship between archaeological practices and modernity, capital, and colonialism. Intensive survey with its ready adoption of aerial and satellite imagery, GPS units, industrial forms of organization, and various mapping technologies demonstrates how our approach to the landscape often mimics colonial practices designed to map and establish landscapes of control and exploitation. In fact, the tools of archaeology overlap with the key technologies that make “seeing like a [modern] state” possible. 

What I’m proposing, rather, is that archaeology of the modern period in the context of intensive pedestrian survey in Greece occupies an interesting place. Our methods even when mediated by modern tools appear ill-suited for documenting the material culture associated with modernity in Greece. In response, survey projects generally look to data generated by the modern state when documenting the modern period. Data produced by demographers, agronomists, economists, geographers, and anthropologists often replace archaeological methods for the study of modern landscapes by survey projects. The quantitative data used by survey projects to situate their work in the Greek landscape often centered on modern villages which throughout most the 19th and 20th century represented the focus of state attention outside major urban centers. The narrative that these projects present often focuses on the decline in traditional village life. Thus survey archaeologists thread the needle: the village in decline transforms this feature in the landscape from an expression of modernity to a persistent feature of the past and thus marks the village as an institution and physical structure within archaeology’s remit. The diachronic emphasis of intensive survey, even when it deploys different methods to document the modern period, reifies the past as culminating in modern period even if some of the modern institutions themselves falter under contemporary pressures.