Thinking about Sites in Survey, Part 1

I was mired in a manuscript that I was reading for peer review so I didn’t have the chance to read much beyond that this weekend. I did, however, make time to read a few recent articles including an intriguing, very recent article by Nathan Meyer in the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 35.2 (2022), “Finding Sites in Mediterranean Survey.”

Twenty years ago, when I was first starting out as an archaeologist, Nathan worked with us in the Corinthia designing the sampling strategies that supported the “Chronotype” system of ceramic identification that we implemented during the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey. I’ve had the pleasure of corresponding with him from time to time since he returned to graduate school after a sojourn in the private sector. I expect that this article is part of his ongoing doctoral research at Cal.

He gets a lot right in this article and there are a few things that I think I might question in his assumptions. Here are six things that his article pushed me to consider.

(When I started writing this I decided, buckle-up, this is going to be a two parter!)

1. Methods and Siteless Survey. He makes the great observation that intensive survey has started to buckle under the weight of its own methodological awareness. I suspect our preoccupation with methodology had a good bit to do with the skepticism with which excavators received traditional intensive survey practices. More than that, because intensive survey was not destructive in the same way as excavation, survey practitioners could deploy a wider range of methods in their effort to meld efficiency, data collection, and confidence levels across the landscape. These two factors, criticism from excavators and methodological freedom, created ample space for survey archaeologists to experiment.

One of the outcomes of this experiment was siteless survey. This constitutes a very intensive, “artifact level” survey that eschewed sites as the principle object of investigation and instead focused on the distribution of artifacts. Siteless survey projects tend to proceed with a consistent method in the field, often walking all units at the same 10 m spacing, employing the same artifact sampling strategies, and collection the same contextual data. By doing this, they recognize that “sites” are often not visible during field work owing to the complexity of surface conditions, the existence of complex overlapping patterns of artifacts, and the challenges of analyzing artifacts in the field. Sites only appear after artifact analysis and data entry is complete and the complicated patterns of overlapping assemblages can be pulled apart and sometimes re-combined to reveal the complexities of the surface record.

This approach tends to privilege consistency in collection over large areas rather than in-field identification of sites that might trigger more intensive collection techniques. In fact, as Nathan noted we have shown that more intensive techniques particularly of the kinds of high density scatters traditional recognized as sites tend to produce largely redundant information about the dominant components of the scatter and produce assemblages that are difficult to compare with those produced by the traditional field walking.     

2. Sites and Comparisons. The sites produced through this siteless method often resist the tidy definition of sites produced through techniques that privilege more intensive site-based collection strategies. On the one hand, this reflects the tendency of siteless survey to use the survey unit as the basic spatial unit of analysis and this has a tendency to render sites in a kind of low spatial resolution. Siteless survey advocates will argue that this reflects the inherent spatial ambiguity of the formation processes that produce surface assemblages. Site-based projects, however, argue that this is an assumption that requires testing regularly in the field and varies depending on the site.

The result of the close association of methods and site definition is that comparing sites across different survey projects remains a challenging task. Despite the quantitative bent that most survey projects embrace, our methods are unlikely to produce the kind of “big data” style regional analysis where we crunch the data from multiple survey projects to produce sweeping new interpretations. Instead, we will have to proceed on the basis of the sites identified by individual projects, using various approaches, and at various scales. In other words, we’ll have to use some discernment when comparing the results of different projects.    

3. Visibility, Artifact Recovery, and Presence. A key consideration for all projects is how surface and geomorphological conditions shape artifact recovery rates. Erosion, vegetation, background disturbance, ploughing, and even the time of day have had significant impacts on sampling strategies. We have suggested some relatively simple ways to mitigate some of the more superficial conditions impacting artifact recovery such as surface visibility. For example, as surface visibility declines, a project might walk the field using more intensive methods. We also acknowledge that this is a bit of a kluge and that different conditions impacting surface visibility not only make this approach more or less viable and more or less appropriate. 

In any event, a key point from Nathan’s work (and a conclusion reached in our own) is that field survey produces evidence for the presence of certain kinds of artifacts in certain situations and does not provide evidence for the absence of artifacts in various contexts. The most intensive, most sophisticated, and most rigorous approaches to surface collections cannot change this. The surface of the ground is simply too complex a context to support arguments for absence.