Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

316 12. land, labour and settlement
regional surveys of standing remains (where they survive), and through the
practice of field-walking, which involves the systematic plotting and dating
of lost settlement sites by the recovery on the surface of pottery and other
datable items. Surveys of this kind have filled out the map of the Roman
world with thousands of villages and scattered rural settlements, whereas
before only the larger and more spectacular sites were generally known to
scholarship. However, there are still vast areas of the empire where systematic
survey has never been carried out (for instance, in the whole of Asia
Minor, modern Turkey); and even amongst those surveys that have been
published there are enormous differences in the sophistication of the work
and in the consequent quality of the results. For example, surveys in the
near east seldom discuss the way the data have been collected, and generally
brand all ‘late’ sites as ‘Byzantine’, without any attempt to subdivide the
huge date range from a.d. 300 to 700�, and they give little consideration
to the size of individual settlements. On the other hand, state-of-the-art
surveys, such as that carried out in Boeotia in Greece, discuss these important
matters in exhaustive detail. 3
Field-survey is a very good tool for charting the distribution and even
the size of settlement in periods, such as the Roman, when material
goods are both abundant and often readily datable. However, as we shall
see, it is less successful in providing a clear picture of rural settlement in
periods when material objects are much scarcer. It is also, of course, only
indirectly informative about the fields that were cultivated from these
settlements and about what was grown on them – though some reasonable
inferences can always be made on the basis of the possibilities and
limitations dictated by soil, climate and prevalent market-conditions
within the surrounding territory. However, only rarely do we get more
direct and detailed information about agricultural methods and products
– where ancient field-systems have survived and been studied, as on the
moors of south-west England or in the wadis of the Libyan pre-desert;
or where careful modern excavation and subsequent analysis have produced
evidence from a site in the form of bones and carbonized or
waterlogged vegetable material, of the particular plants and animals consumed
on it.
Archaeology finds ‘things’, and from these things it is often possible to
reconstruct the human processes and structures that brought them about.
However, some aspects of human life can only be very tentatively and insecurely
explored from material evidence. In particular, the social structures
that bind people together, willingly or unwillingly, are not normally revealed
very explicitly in their houses and rubbish-dumps. For instance, there is as
3 Throughout this and the following chapter I use ‘near east’ to describe the eastern provinces
between Egypt to the south and Asia Minor to the north. For Boeotia: Bintliff (1985).
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