Sphakia Survey (Greece): Methods and Results Video

Synopsis

The video is designed to explain to non-specialists the methods and possible results of archaeological field survey. It takes as its focus the Sphakia Survey, which covers a long timespan, 5000 years, from the time that people arrived in Sphakia (ca 3000 BC) to the end of the Turkish period (ca AD 1900). Updated from a film originally made in 1989, the video is divided into two 25-minute sections, to be shown complete in one teaching slot, or in two different slots, each half followed by discussion.

The first section talks about the principles on which most field surveys work: the aim of reconstructing the interactions of people and the landscape over long periods of time (settlement patterns, land usage and so on); the importance of understanding the geology; the need to integrate documents and material evidence; and the ways of interpreting pottery (the main source of evidence for field surveys), including the evidence of a contemporary potter in Khania who has studied Venetian and Turkish pottery production. It also discusses the question of how archaeologists find archaeological material without excavating, and how they can be sure that what they do find is significant. Field survey, which aims to discover the patterns of past human interaction with the environment, necessarily also involves patterns of present, archaeological, investigation of that environment. Film can show the modern processes, and thus make more vivid, and plausible, the logic of inference back to the past.

The second section covers results and is exemplary rather than definitive, showing the sorts of things which field survey can establish. The results were necessarily tentative as at the time of making the film the field work was still in process. In order to give this section some coherence, it focuses on one North-South slice of Sphakia, working down from the top of the White Mountains to the coast, showing something of the changing, and interlocking, patterns of land use in the different environmental zones.

Language

English

Country

Great Britain

Year of production

1995

Subjects

Archaeology; Classical studies

Keywords

archaeological investigation; field studies; Greece - classical

Distribution Formats

Type

VHS

Price

£25.00

Availability

Sale

Duration/Size

50 min

Year

2002

Distributor

Name

University of Oxford, Educational Technology Resources Centre

Web

http://sphakia.classics.ox.ac.uk/video.html External site opens in new window

Address

37 Wellington Street
Oxford
OX1 2JF