Abstract
The Antikythera Survey Project was an interdisciplinary programme of fieldwork, artefact study and laboratory analysis that considered the long-term history and human ecology of the small Greek island of Antikythera. It was co-directed by Andrew Bevan (UCL) and James Conolly (Trent), in collaboration with Aris Tsaravopoulos (Greek Archaeological Service), and under the aegis of the Canadian Institute in Greece and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture. Its various primary datasets are unusual, both in the Mediterranean and beyond, for providing intensive survey coverage of an entire island’s surface archaeology.
Highlights
Instead ofassigning each find a categorical date in the traditional way (e.g. “Hellenistic, or possibly Late Roman”), specialists agreed on a rough percentage confidence that the artefact belonged to a particular phase or phases (e.g. c.70% Hellenistic, c.30% Late Roman) and this is the dating method included, for example, in the pottery dataset
Stage-two grid collections prioritised prehistoric scatters and we have have only catalogued prehistoric sherds for these — comparative spatial analysis across a wider set of chronological periods should work primarily with the finds from stage-one survey
License Creative Commons CC-BY 3.0. Due to their unusual coverage of an entire landscape, these datasets would provided a good basis for developing a tutorial on survey, GIS and/or spatial analysis in archaeology
Summary
The Antikythera Survey Project was an interdisciplinary programme of fieldwork, artefact study and laboratory analysis that considered the long-term history and human ecology of the small Greek island of Antikythera It was co-directed by Andrew Bevan (UCL) and James Conolly (Trent), in collaboration with Aris Tsaravopoulos (Greek Archaeological Service), and under the aegis of the Canadian Institute in Greece and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture. The project sought to standardise the recording of the spatial location of all material culture, regardless of the survey method by which it was observed, such that all finds and observations had an effective spatial precision of ±10 m, rather than some, for example, only being resolved to the resolution of a larger survey unit (e.g. Bevan and Conolly 200910) Third and it was the first substantial fieldwork project, to our knowledge, to adopt a probabilistic approach to assigning dates to individual collected artefacts (for the details of this method, see below and Bevan et al forthcoming[1]).
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