and it was to be expected that in due course it would affect British archaeology in the Mediterranean. By the 1970s, the impact was clearly visible and rather abrupt, as different questions began to be asked and different priorities advanced. For the classical archaeologist, this followed closely on another, more traumatic change, the equally sudden eclipse of classics as the supreme discipline in the humanities. It was no longer enough to color in the black-and-white picture book of text-based classics; every discipline was faced by demands to justify its existence, and archaeology began to formulate answers that could be used in the classical field as well. A much wider range of environmental evidence began to be studied alongside the artifacts, quantification and scientific aids began to appear, and new approaches in the field were proposed as alternatives to both the expansive excavation of the early era and the speculative soundings of more recent years.

The most obvious, intensive regional survey, developed easily from the long British tradition of regional topographical study. As in the work of Leake and Ashby, there was an emphasis on the rural rather than the urban aspect of ancient life and on the lateral extension of the classical cultures rather than the highest pinnacles of their achievement. What was new was the aim of neutrality and objectivity on the part of teams of field-walkers in assessing the landscape instead of aiming for the known or visible features of ancient origin, searching the whole landscape for the previously invisible. In this regard, they enjoyed the same advantage that had attracted the excavators a century before—the unique artifactual richness of the Mediterranean past.

Just as the buried structures and their contents had yielded work for whole generations of catalogers and analysts, so the Mediterranean environment, with its 5,000 years of more or less continuous agriculture, proved to have left on the surface of the landscape a quite unexpected wealth of discarded artifacts. These were undeserving of individual study but collectively very informative about past exploitation of the soil. Ancient city sites, if they had been fortunate enough not to remain centers of habitation, had left huge “shadows” of pottery, stone, and tile on the surface. Thus, a technique that had been pioneered for archaeologically impoverished landscapes in other parts of the world was transplanted to the terrain of Italy, Greece, and a number of other Mediterranean countries with outstanding success. Regions, rather than parts of an individual site, became the targets for investigation. Since such a technique is wasteful if it concentrates on a single period, an interesting by-product has been the resurgence of interest in periods that had been relatively neglected in traditional fieldwork, including the Hellenistic and especially the late Roman and early medieval periods.

Intensive survey is merely one tangible outcome of the new, theoretically conscious approach in Mediterranean archaeology. But in every area of activity, from the new style of small-scale, problem-oriented excavation to the generalized social or environmental analysis, there has been change of such rapidity that it belies the tradition-bound reputation of classical archaeology.

Certain lasting characteristics can nevertheless be seen in the British approach over the past two centuries. A constant theme, and ostensibly a purely negative one, has been the chronic reference to the shortage of funding by comparison with the other industrially advanced nations. Some of the consequences of this indeed appear negative, the most obvious being the absence of official, century-long excavations at notable classical sites and the resulting excavation reports that run to thirty or forty volumes. Yet the long-term effects are not necessarily unfavorable. If the indefatigable topographers of earlier years had been tied down to major site publications, they would hardly have ventured on their journeys; if the Artemis Orthia excavation at Sparta had yielded lavish works of art and architecture, and continued for forty years instead of four, the pioneering stratigraphic observations that so distinguish it among the early sanctuary projects might never have been made. The common thread running through the past two centuries has been one of cautious innovation, and there has been the serendipity that often rewards the pursuit of the unfashionable.

Anthony Snodgrass