Western Argolid Regional Project (WARP), Field Manual 2014-2016 Seasons

Summary

The Western Argolid Regional Project (WARP) is an interdisciplinary archaeological project that sought to collect and interpret evidence of human activity from prehistory to the modern day in the western Argolid, Greece. Our survey area consists of 30 km2 to the northwest of the ancient and modern city of Argos, where the fertile Argive Plain transitions into a series of mountainous valleys along the course of the Inachos River, which we surveyed over three field seasons from 2014-2016. Although Argos is an important city in virtually every period of Greek history, a systematic regional study of its hinterland had never been undertaken. WARP conducted an intensive pedestrian survey with the goals of examining not only the city’s relationships to its immediate countryside and to the communities located therein, but also the dynamic settlement histories of this seemingly liminal area.

This is a finalized manual from the Western Argolid Regional Project which was created in an effort to produce an honest version of the manual that both reflects the day-to-day practices of the project as well as our regular efforts to adapt the manual to the needs of the teams and slight shifts in our methods. As a result, this is a composite document that conflates and combines any number of adjustments offered by team leaders particularly during the first two field seasons of the project.

We also revised the introduction that provides some broader context for the project, its goals, and its methodology, and added two appendices that reproduce our unit form and provides a field guide to surface visibility and conditions. We have uploaded a list of abbreviations for artifact types within the Chronotype system, and it is available here: https://doi.org/10.6067/XCV8458237.

The goal of publishing this document is to preserve a record of our field practices as well as to offer a resources to other projects looking to follow similar methods in their work. In the interest of making the genealogy of field practices somewhat easier to trace through grey paper documents such as field manuals, we have released this under an open-access, by-attribution, share-alike license. This allows anyone to use freely the text of this manual, but requires that this manual be cited and any future documents based on this manual to be made available under a similar open access license.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Western Argolid Regional Project (WARP)

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Contact(s): Sarah James

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