Off-site archaeology: an alternative approach for the short-sited

My research has shown that the type of regional archaeological data analysis required by landscape archaeological approaches is an area where both theory and method are still in their infancy. High-level theories about the occurrence, scope, and effects of processes such as centralization, urbanization, and Hellenization/Romanization cannot yet be supported by middle range theory, which itself cannot be developed until the basic business of generating information of sufficient quality about the archaeological record has been tackled. Currently, archaeological data can be made to fit almost any interpretation generated, ultimately, on the basis of the ancient written sources. If we are to escape from this selfreinforcing cycle, research should perhaps no longer be focused on the classical themes generated by culture-historical approaches, but should seek its own proper field of operation. In the area of methods and methodology, I have demonstrated the pervasive influence of systematic research and visibility biases on the patterns that are present in the archaeological data generated over the past 50 years or so. There are mechanisms at work, both in the traditional archaeological interpretation of limited numbers of excavated sites and historical sources, and in the landscape archaeological approach, that cause the systematic undervaluation of unobtrusive remains. The significance of systematic biases in both the coarse site-based data sets resulting from desktop and ‘topographic’ studies and the more detailed site-based or ‘continuous’ data resulting from intensive field surveys has become much clearer as a result of the studies reported here. This should have practical consequences for the ways in which we study the existing archaeological record, plan future landscape archaeological research, and conduct field surveys. Site databases, the traditional starting point for regional archaeological studies, can no longer be taken at face value; rather, they require careful source criticism before being used to support specific arguments and hypotheses about settlement and land use dynamics. My studies have also shown that future data collection, whether through field survey, excavation or other methods, has to take place in a much more methodical manner if we are to produce data that are sufficiently standardized to be successfully exchanged, compared, and interpreted by others – guidelines for which should become embodied in an international standard defining ‘best practice in landscape archaeology’.

Tracing Linear Archaeological Sites, Symposium held in Pitești, 1st of July 2017, E.S. Teodor (ed.), 15-24

Beyond historical problems raised by the clusters of settlements recorded in Bratcov Valley, this short communication aims to stress the caducity of the concept of ‘archaeological site’. These three cases – Urlueni, Săpata and Bratcov – provide plenty of reasons to question some practical issues of the archaeological practice. Where is ending the northern settlement from Urlueni? Near the gates of the larger fort, or hundreds meters further, where Roman sherds still popping up? Of course, no one would spend money to dig into the agricultural hinterland of a settlement (at least not in Romania); but does this knowledge matter? It is not the ‘archaeological landscape’ a much fitted concept in order to understand the resources a community use in order to live? Transferring such data in a repertoire, how do we’ll manage the information about the ‘upper’ settlement from Urlueni, and the cluster of households from below? Are they two different ‘archaeological sites’? Probably yes, because there is an apparent 200 m gap in between. In fact – no, because we know that all clusters of living inside a certain radius (one mile? one leuga?) around the fort make together a single community – the followers of the militaries from a garrison. The short life span of Limes Transalutanus is helpful in understanding that all those clusters are pretty much contemporary. Săpata case is stressing another issue: two halves of a civilian settlement located on the opposed banks of a small valley, corresponding to different administrative territories from our days. Of course, for practical reasons they have to be separately recorded, into the national database, although the research would need a unique plan of investigation, although dealing with two different territorial authorities. Bratcov presents the most confusing landscape. It have been identified on the field several clusters of archaeological remains, split conveniently in 5 settlements inside one square kilometre. They are not connected to any known fort, thus they would be ‘independent’ settlements. Nevertheless, due to the fact that they are granted as contemporary, on a span time no longer than two decades (or so), the natural resources at hand barely could provide the resources for living. The settlements noted Bratcov 1 to 3 are lined along the first phase embankment, burned and abandoned. The first and the second settlements are separated only by the course of Bratcov rivulet. Between the second and the third – there is no gap, but a very diffuse occupation; is this one settlement or two? The distribution of the main clusters of remains is suggesting rather two, because the middle of a settlement cannot be almost empty. The other two – numbered 4 and 5 – are located across the valley, eastward. Their middle area is still denser than in the cases from the opposite bank, but again the main clusters are suggesting two different settlement cores. Obviously, the traditional concept of ‘archaeological site’ cannot deal properly with such realities. Getting off the ‘site’ is revealing, most of the time, that outside is life and many shades of used territory, in former ages.

This paper has a twin methodological and interpretative focus. It presents the use of geospatial technologies applied to archaeological surveying. We use the high-resolution spatial and temporal data obtained from the study of the ancient Protohistoric and Roman landscape in the eastern area of the Iberian Peninsula (present-day Alicante province, Spain) to illustrate the methodological proposals. The observed spatial patterns allow us to infer certain aspects relating to the ancient use of the land, transformations in settlement patterns and the intensification of landscape use. 1. Rural landscape and surface record Studies of the ancient rural landscape face major challenges in identifying and explaining the archaeological vestiges. Most of the difficulties encountered during this type of research have been described in works devoted to that subject and it is beyond the possibilities of this paper to comment on and explain them (Alcock and Cherry, 2004; Mayoral and Sevillano, 2013). Nevertheless, along those initial lines we would like to refer to certain factors that, from our point of view, affect the question of the surface record. The first variables we find are natural and include soil conditions and topographic, climatic and edaphic particularities, as well as the vegetation, all of which condition the way in which the surface is seen. The impacts on surveys range from the soil visibility conditions caused by vegetation to the effect on slope topography of landslips that lead to greater surface dispersion. Another set of factors that conditions surveys is human secular establishment in rural environments and on farmland. Repeated occupation of the same niches blurs or erases earlier traces, making them difficult to identify and analyse. This particularly affects Mediterranean highland areas where terraces and banks have been built to parcel out farmland, mainly during the mediaeval and modern periods. Finally, we refer to ancient establishment methods, the intensity of land use and the properties of the surface archaeological record formed over the centuries. These formation conditions affect such aspects as the survival of building remains, movable find density and the way in which wider or narrower dispersions were formed. These factors sometimes lead to areas with a high density of surface archaeological record. These are places with high levels of dispersed remains consisting of thousands of fragments that often form virtual carpets of pottery remains covering hundreds of hectares. Sometimes they result from the superposition of pottery remains from different periods as a result of a dense historical stratification of rural sites. On occasions those extensive zones of finds are dated to a single period, which presents us with post-depositional processes and farming practices that have led to the formation of such complex spatial distributions of remains. These circumstances make it necessary to use archaeological surface investigation methodologies with multiple techniques with the aim of increasing the spatial and chronological resolution of the data obtained. Only by refining the procedures will we be able to progress in our understanding of the ancient rural landscape. In the following article we present the methodological proposals for surveying, analysing and interpreting these zones with a high density of surface remains. Based on specific cases from the Protohistoric and Roman periods in our study area we illustrate the methods and proposals for the archaeological interpretation of the evidence. The study area is the River Serpis valley, a mountainous region in the north of the present-day province of Alicante (Spain). In antiquity it was a territory presided over by fortified centres of a certain size from which a dense dispersed rural occupation was organised. These rural communities d basically farms and small villages d are fundamental to our understanding of the ways in

2013

Postprint of a chapter in Bevan, A. and Lake, M. (eds.), Computational Approaches to Archaeological Spaces, Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. 1. Introduction While distribution maps are nearly as old as the discipline of archaeology itself, most archaeologists still rely on personal intuition with regard to their assessment both of the spatial patterns they recover and the environmental processes and human behaviours that might be behind these patterns. To some extent, this general preference for intuitive readings of space in the archaeological record probably reflects several decades of disillusionment with quantitative spatial methods, after a flurry of early interest during the 1970s (e.g. Hodder and Orton 1976; Clarke 1977), and a continuing wish to prioritise the study of cultural spaces as subjectively experienced and meaningfully constituted by their human inhabitants (e.g. Gregory and Urry eds. 1985). Interestingly, even the enthusiastic uptake of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) from the 1990s onwards did little to change this situation with regard to spatial pattern analysis, as most off-the-shelf GIS software was targeted at data management and querying, digital cartography and enhanced visualisation, as well as certain focused modelling agendas (e.g. terrain, visibility and movement). Effectively, the study of distribution maps in archaeology merely carried on as it was, with a healthy dose of expert intuition, and perhaps in slightly richer visual form. However, while human involvement in the act of interpretation is undeniably a crucial and enduring aspect of archaeological research, there remain good reasons to characterise spatial distributions in more formal, quantitative ways. This paper focuses on a set of point pattern and process models that, we argue, now puts archaeologists in a position to return to the analysis of spatial pattern and process with renewed ambition, especially with regard to distribution maps. The first section below considers current theoretical approaches to point distributions and subsequent sections then address three cases studies that highlight some important conceptual issues and new analytical opportunities. 2. Theoretical Perspectives 2.1 Point-based Simplifications A dot on a map is usually a considerable simplification. Whether our concern is about the proper 2-or 3-dimensional representation of a real world entity, its more complicated expression in space-time, or the possible webs of cultural meaning that might envelope it, we certainly risk much by this kind of spatial abstraction. There are also further trade-offs to do with how we record such points, between time and effort on the one hand, and any possible archaeological insights we might derive on the other. Do we require great spatial accuracy (such that measured coordinates are close to the actual absolute values), great spatial

Digital information is nowadays pervasive to all aspects of archeology. Despite its ubiquity, many archaeologists still regard with some (or much!) suspicion studies that rely on the manipulation of digital representations questioning whether they have epistemic value and/or are appropriate within certain theoretical frameworks.

There has been a long-standing debate in academic archaeology on how to study the surface archaeological record. The debate has centered around whether to interpret the record as consisting of discrete sites and isolates or as continuous distributions of artifacts, features, and deposits. Historic preservation laws, however, focus on discrete sites as the properties that need to be discovered, recorded, and evaluated. As more research is done within a heritage management framework, the outcome has been to focus on the site as the unit of analysis almost to the exclusion of the study of spatial behaviors that transcend discrete sites. To achieve the objectives of heritage preservation and to examine spatial human behavior that is unconstrained by the site concept, new methodologies are needed. As a move in this direction we use GIS to create hypothetical archaeological landscapes based on assumptions of human behavior that can be tested and refined with survey and excavation data. In this process we collect detailed surface data that GIS algorithms use to define discrete sites and, at the same time, to analyze continuous distributions of cultural materials. We illustrate this approach with a several examples from North America and West Africa using different field methodologies.

New Developments in Italian Landscape Archaeology. Proceedings of a three-day conference held at the University of Groningen, April 13-15, 2000 , 2002

Polish Journal of Landscape Studies, 2018