A Radical Rethink on Approaches to Surface Survey and the Rural Landscape of Central Greece in Roman Times

Abstract

The Boeotia regional project began in 1978, and on completion of the final fieldwork campaign in 1997 had mapped some 250 rural sites and four larger, urban sites (for a recent cumulative bibliography cf. Bintliff, 1998). This paper will focus on the rural hinterland of the largest city site examined-ancient Thespiae. The city itself was completely surface-surveyed in 1985-6, and proved to be surprisingly large-over 100 hectares densely occupied. Although the final mapping of urban surface finds by date is still in process, preliminary plotting of a representative portion of the data (Bintliff, Snodgrass, 1988a; Snodgrass, Bintliff 1991) showed that the town reached its maximum occupation size in Classical Greek times (later Archaic to Early Hellenistic phases), then shrank to between 1/2 and 1/3 of its surface by Early Roman times, to remain at that size throughout the Late Roman period (5th-6th centuries AD). In subsequent years of our project fieldwork , surface survey of the city's rural hinterland to the south was carried out over an area of 5.2 sq.km (figure 1), resulting in the discovery of 18 locations designated as 'sites' by field-teams (on the basis of unusual quantity and/or quality of surface finds, primarily of pottery and tile). These sites had a very specific chronological profile: none were initially recognised to be prehistoric, one had a major Medieval phase, and 17 of the 18 were Greco-Roman in date. On a re-valuation of the nature of the taphonomic processes affecting prehistoric sites we are now inclined to see some half-dozen of these sites as vestigial small farmsteads in Bronze Age times (Bintliff, Howard, Snodgrass, 1999). In this paper, however, we shall focus on the much more abundant and representative ceramic finds of Greco-Roman times and the nonetheless equally complex problem of their interpretation in activity terms. The most obvious question one might ask is whether surface 'sites' are quantitatively denser than surrounding fields where past human activity is argued to have been lighter and non-focussed. The Boeotia Project used a 'non-site' survey methodology (Bintliff, Snodgrass, 1985) where the density of surface artefacts was recorded continuously across the entire surveyed landscape, together with measurement of variable soil visibility to allow for density corrections. With the help of GIS (Arch-Info and Arch-View in our case) it is relatively easy to compare