Sikyon’s Contribution to Survey Methodology

When the Sikyon Survey Project began fieldwork in 2004, relatively few urban centres in the Mediterranean had been the targets of intensive archaeological field survey. The reasons for this are relatively straightforward and have been documented elsewhere, but essentially most large-scale urban sites had either been early targets of excavation, or lay beneath modern settlements. 1 Those sites that had seen some early archaeological surface survey during the ‘New Wave’ of survey that swept the Mediterranean in the 1980s and 1990s2 often exhibited an architectural or topographical focus; these include Palaikastro in Crete, the old survey of Tanagra in Boeotia, Peñ aflor in southern Spain, and Kythnos in the Cyclades.3 So while cities have long been the principal focus of archaeological research in the classical world, this research has most often followed the antiquarian tradition of documenting monuments, sites, and features mentioned in textual sources, seeking out architecturally noteworthy structures from an architectural or art-historical viewpoint, or conducting targeted excavation of single buildings or parts thereof.