Characterizing a Region with Archaeological Field Survey

Nathan Meyer of the British School at Athens examines the methodology of archaeological field survey in the Mediterranean. Pedestrian survey at ten-metre spacing has become a disciplinary norm since the methodological debates of the 1970s to 1990s subsided, yet problems of data quality, consistency and comparability between projects remain unresolved.

Meyer engages with Michael Given's critique that pedestrian survey has become an "atheoretical disciplinary habit" and considers how human ecology, complex adaptive systems and Given's concept of conviviality might be answered in the field. Meeting that challenge within limited resources requires both full coverage to find rare sites and intensive survey to find small ones. Meyer proposes spending less effort on broad characterisation and dense concentrations, and more on theory-informed targeted search in a multi-stage design.

To test what different transect spacings recover, Meyer presents a Python simulation over an imaginary five-by-seventeen-kilometre region of varied landforms, waterways, roads, springs and flint outcrops. Across five spatial configurations of off-site scatter and site clusters, he compares pedestrian transects spaced at 5, 10, 25 and 50 metres. At the regional scale, all four intensities converge on nearly identical estimates of sherd density, period representation and ceramic functional classes, while 50-metre spacing misses most small site cores despite intersecting many halos.

Walking at 50-metre rather than 10-metre spacing in this simulated region, combined with pottery reading, saves 311 person-days. Noting caveats such as environmental variability, intrasite structure and the need for field testing, Meyer argues for combining wider-spaced systematic survey and statistical analysis with formal, hypothesis-driven intensive investigation of targeted areas.