Continuity and Change in a Greek Urban Landscape

This intensive, full-coverage survey was conducted by the Universities of Nottingham and Amsterdam in conjunction with the British School at Athens between 1983 and 1988.

It covered a territory of just over 70 sq km in central Laconia, extending from the east side of the River Evrotas, close to Sparta, up into the foothills of the Parnon range.

The Survey identified over 400 sites, the great majority of them previously unknown, dating variously to the Neolithic, Bronze Age, Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and Veneto-Turkish periods.

The new information makes possible a re-evaluation of the settlement history and rural economy of Sparta and Laconia.

This is presented in Volume I, in which the ecology and geomorphology of the region set the scene for period by period analyses of the results and implications of the Survey.

Volume II assembles the primary data, including a pottery series for each period and separate studies of chipped and ground-stone artefacts, inscriptions, architectural fragments, other finds, and the results of geophysical survey.

The site catalogue is complemented by a new gazetteer of archaeological sites in the rest of Laconia.

Vol I - Methodology and Interpretation. Chapters cover the survey methodology (Cavanagh, Shipley, Crouwel), soils (Fiselier, van Berghem), historical ecology (Rackham), prehistory (Cavanagh, Crouwel), the archaic-classical period (Catling), the hellenistic-Roman (Shipley), the Byzantine-Ottoman (Armstrong), and modern settlements (Wagstaff).