Glossary Archaeological method and dating
Archaeological survey
Also called: field survey, surface survey
Systematic searching of the landscape for traces of past activity, usually by walking fields and recording surface finds, without excavating.
Survey teams walk fields at set intervals, collect or count the pottery, stone tools and slag lying on the surface, and map where they cluster. The results reveal sites, settlement patterns and land use across whole regions, including places that will never be excavated. Surface material is dated by typology, so survey depends on well-known pottery sequences.
Survey has reshaped Cypriot archaeology; the Sydney Cyprus Survey Project, for example, discovered the Bronze Age smelting site of Politiko-Phorades (Copper Metallurgy). It also has blind spots. Philia settlements buried beneath later layers are hard to detect from the surface, and Cypro-Geometric sites are so often missed that the period has been called 'invisible' in the landscape.
Related terms
- Typology
A system for sorting objects into classes and types by shape, fabric and decoration, so that like can be compared with like and dated.
- Assemblage
A group of objects found together in one context, such as a tomb, pit or floor, and studied as a set.
- Find-spot
The place where an object was found, recorded at anything from village level to an exact position in a tomb or trench.