A survey of surveys.

Witcher, Robert

Reviewing this selection of survey reports identifies any number of similarities and differences. At heart-- and in the field--they have all involved countless days walking across (mainly hot and arid!) landscapes and the collection of thousands of ceramic, lithic and other artefacts of often frustratingly limited diagnostic value. The research questions, however, are framed in significantly different ways, as are the methods for defining 'sites' and establishing regional samples and chronological frameworks (contrary to the methodological consensus assumed in Hongshan regional organization). Some of these survey reports reflect a lifetime's commitment to a particular landscape; others have been planned, executed and published within five years. Each project has also decided upon a different solution for what and how to publish its results. Perhaps surprisingly, CDs remain popular and only one of the surveys opts for an online solution.

Recurring themes include: hinterlands (the effects of cores on peripheries), agricultural and industrial activities (e.g. oil production, copper mining) and political organisation (including chiefdoms, kingdoms and empires). All of the surveys document a dramatic variation in the visibility of human activity over time, often with one period dominating the archaeological record and with other periods (sometimes immediately pre- or post-dating the dominant one) barely visible. Various explanations include collapse or abandonment (e.g. in response to climate change or invasion), changing subsistence bases (e.g. from cultivation to hunter-gathering) and problems with archaeological typologies (e.g. undiagnostic ceramics). What most clearly links these surveys, however, is perhaps the motif of impending loss. From Messenia and Cyprus to Jordan and Nevada, we find the same concerns about the threat of modern land use and development to the survival of the archaeological record. To be sure, every generation perceives a last chance to record a past on the verge of disappearance. Yet whereas development may offer the excavator new opportunities to access archaeological stratigraphy (and sometimes even funding), the landscape surveyor is confronted by the more sustained but diffuse attrition of the fragile surface record. An alternative way of looking at the problem might be to ponder whether or not future surveys, 50 or 100 years hence, will be able to produce reports as rich and diverse as those under review here.

doi: 10.15184/aqy.2015.1