Side-by-side survey

More than twenty-five years ago, John Cherry looked forward to the day when archaeological survey projects working around the Mediterranean region (the 'Frogs round the pond') would begin to compare and synthesize the information they had collected. He anticipated researchers tackling big questions of inter-regional scope in new and interesting ways, working at a geographical scale considerably larger than that of the individual survey. Was his optimism misplaced? Despite the extraordinary growth of interest in field survey projects and regional analysis, and despite the developments in survey methodology that have been discussed and implemented in the past two decades, few scholars have attempted to use survey data in a comparative mode and to answer the broad-scale questions confronting social historians. In this volume, which is the outcome of an advanced Workshop held at the University of Michigan in 2002, a number of prominent archaeologists return to the question of comparability. They discuss the potential benefits of working in a comparative format, with evidence from many different Mediterranean survey projects, and consider the practical problems that present roadblocks to achieving that objective. From mapping and manuring to human settlement and demography, environment and culture, each addresses different questions, often with quite different approaches; together they offer a range of perspectives on how to put surveys "side-by-side".