Wreading Wednesday: Off Site Scatters and Survey Archaeology

I read with some excitement the very recent article by Martina Cecilia Parini and Martijn van Leusen in the Journal of Field Archaeology titled “Analyzing Low-Density Assemblages from Fieldwalking Surveys: Hellenistic and Roman Land Use in the Sibaritide (Calabria, Italy).” The article is rich and complex like so much good methodological work is. 

The article looks at two key concepts that are fundamental to the interpretation of intensive pedestrian survey. First, it compares two datasets from the Castrovillari Survey Project (CSP) and the Raganello Archaeological Project (RAP). Second, instead of focusing on sites, this article focuses on off-site scatters and uses a comparative approach to shine new light on what was going on in the countryside.

The authors do a thoughtful job working to integrate two survey datasets developed according to very different practices and methods. While collection methods were roughly the same, the way that projects described their finds required calibration between the projects. More importantly, both projects defined sites (and off-site scatters) in the field and this effectively eliminated the tricky (and problematic) work of site definition. The downside of this, of course, is that site definition is the name of the game. If a project already calibrates its approach in the field to recognizing distinctive low density scatters as sites, then the entire category of “off-site” begins to become more complicated. This, however, is a discussion for another day, but it is worth noting that the authors of this article recognized that artifact densities and visibility were not statistically related to one another and that the diversity of low density scatters is often a useful indicator of low density activity in the past. 

The main conclusions in this article that off-site scatters in the Hellenistic and Roman period appear to hint at low-density rural activity when at lower elevations and on low marine terraces. On higher marine terraces off site material appears to follow a different pattern and is more common immediately surrounding known sites. More than that, attentiveness to the chronology of artifacts — rather than simply total densities — also suggested patterns. Hellenistic appears more common offsite which suggests to the authors that manuring may have been more common in that period than in the Roman period where less intensive agricultural regimes existed.

I like this paper. It continues work that me and my colleagues have long pondered during our time conducting surveys in Corinth, the Argolid, and on Cyprus. Moreover, it is bolstered by recent work conducted by the Roman Peasant Project which excavated rural sites and confirmed that some low-density scatters do represent low intensity activities from habitation to the more banal requirements of drainage and storage in the ancient countryside. At the risk of sounding like a pollyanna, the publication of additional survey datasets from the Mediterranean will produce more points of comparison and contribute to the kind of sophisticated analysis done by these authors.

This, of course, leads me to a critique. This is a fine article that represents a good bit of thoughtful analysis, but the data upon which their conclusions rest is not available. If this was for an ongoing survey or projects that continued to be active in some way, it is understandable to be parsimonious with data access ostensibly (at least) to protect researchers. The two projects used in this article, however, are over 20 years old and the authors themselves refer to them as a legacy projects. It would have been amazing if the authors could have made them available for researchers who want to critique or expand their conclusions.