Urban Survey: Different modes of engagement with the topography of an ancient (urban) site.
Lessons from Phlius, Kerkenes, and elsewhere
- Traditional archaeological interest in urban sites (mid-19th c. onwards)
- Evolutionary models place urbanization coincide with state formation, social complexity, craft specialization, invention of writing, emergence of symbolic expression. Mostly discredited.
- Prioritization of one "original" urban form, or the "height of the city's history". False. Misleading.
- Landscape archaeology and the challenge to the urban center (esp. Braudel and the Annales school)
- Locating the city in the world, in the landscape, as a place, an address: where is the city?
- Understanding urban history in terms of the broader scale settlement processes and human interactions in/with the environment.
- Archaeology as the "salvage project"
- Return to urban survey with new techniques: non-invasive techniques
- Destructiveness of large scale excavation: these-called "horizontal exposures"
- Increasingly costly and labor-intensive activity
- Diiferent places require their own set of "localized" methodologies, appropriate for them.
- Different kinds of information obtained from excavation and survey, different kinds of interpretation through different "modes of engagement"
- The appearance of the (ancient) city in the (modern) imagination in a multiplicity of forms, its diversities, its hybridities. (Another critique of the Millon map?)
Excavations at Tepe Gawra, NE Iraq. 1930s.
Annie's Kerkenes PresentationThe source of the images below is the Kerkenes Archaeological Project Website
Running Trimble GPS equipment at Kerkenes Dag.
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| Geomagnetic data collection at Kerkenes Dag | Electric Resistivity Survey |
Topographic survey with an EDM (Electronic Distance Measurer)
Architectural survey of excavated remains.
