While not every regional survey seeks to address all of these questions, regional survey is one of the main tools an archaeologist has to help build a larger scale picture of how people lived in the past. Just as a cultural anthropologist can learn only so much by interviewing people from a single household or community, an archaeologist restricted to excavations at a single site can learn only so much about long-term processes of societal change. To understand key historical transitions better, a perspective from more than one vantage or scale is needed, and for that, regional surveys are part of an archaeologist's methodological toolkit. For example, our knowledge and perspective on such key questions, such as what led to the rise of cities in different areas of the world, has been greatly expanded through the implementation of regional archaeological surveys.
Regional surveys can be carried out or implemented in a variety of ways. Some archaeologists choose to focus on an important site--a Near Eastern tell, say--and extend a survey outward from it, to try to understand how the people who lived at what is now a tell used the landscape. Recent regional survey at Stonehenge has expanded our understanding of how people used Stonehenge itself over time and the various additional sacred places located nearby.
Regional survey can focus on a particular type of site or location: an archaeologist might intensively focus on the floodplains in a region, to see how they were used over time, or how the risk of flooding affected patterns of settlement.
Or regional survey can concentrate on a particular river valley or region, to get a grasp about how settlement patterns changed in this focal area over time. For such studies, it is important that the archaeologists work as systematically as possible to ensure that the patterns they find are reflective of where people in the past lived and how their patterns of behavior shifted over time.
Survey Details
Gary Feinman's survey research in China discussed in this feature was supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Luce Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Shandong University, the Rizhao Museum, the Qingdao Archaeological Institute,and The Field Museum, as well as several private benefactors.
The Valley of Oaxaca Settlement Pattern Survey was supported primarily by the National Science Foundation.
