Vox clamantis in campo: Further thoughts on ceramics and site survey

Archaeological survey has made great strides since the Colloquium on Archaeological Surveying in the Mediterranean Area was held in Athens in 1981. There, the practitioners of this burgeoning field were exuberant about its potential. Jerry Rutter offered a more restrained perspective and reminded us that while survey work was gaining momentum and popularity, it still had a number of methodological obstacles to overcome. These included the relative visibility of ceramic types encountered by survey projects and the comparability of different surveys to each other. Since then, Mediterranean surveys have become a model of sophisticated research design and interdisciplinary scientific work, yet Rutter’s prescient concerns have not been adequately addressed. This paper revisits those caveats and proposes one technique that may bring us closer to achieving the task Rutter put to survey archaeologists thirty years ago.