Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 12.2 (1999) 139-168 The Hidden Landscape of Prehistoric Greece John Bintliff 1 , Phil Howard 2 and Anthony Snodgrass 3 1 Faculteit der Archeologie, Universiteit Leiden, Postbus 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands 2 Archaeology Department, University of Durham, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom 3 Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DA, United Kingdom Abstract For all-period intensive surveys in Greece, even those of very recent years, an abiding problem has been the difficulty of detecting prehistoric remains, whether at the level of nucleated sites or in the form of scatters across the landscape. The authors suggest explanations for the problems encountered in this regard, over the past 20 years, by the Boeotia Survey. They offer some first steps towards the solution of these problems, based on a reassessment of the actual results achieved, here and elsewhere, by inten- sive survey methods. Introduction When we first embarked, in 1979, on intensive survey in Boeotia, Central Greece (Figure 1), we were raining a tradition with a decided pre- historic Bias. Of the pioneer archaeological surface sul veys of Greek lands in modern times that were our models, Messenia (McDonald and Rapp 1972) was designed primarily to reveal, in unprecedented detail, the later pre- historic landscapes in its chosen region, while Melos (Cherry 1982; Wagstaff and Cherry 1982) ran concurrently with the excavation of the Late Bronze Age site at Phylakopi on the same' island. Boeotia, however, belonged to a younger generation of field surveys—Keos, Nemea, Methana, Laconia—each of them inaugurated between 1979 and 1984. These were influenced by the trend in the United States, the leading source of survey theory, towards ever more intensive fieldwalking and recording of all traces of human activity, regardless of period. Newer surveys were thus unavoidably confronted by a dense mass of sites and 'offsite' finds, in which the artefacts of historic eras were dominant. The Argolid sur- vey, begun 'unofficially' by Michael Jameson with a more traditional, topographic approach during the 1950s, but transformed into a field- by-field, intensive survey by the early 1970s (Jameso'n et al. 1994) had in fact already inau- gurated an approach to the Greek landscape that did not privilege any one phase, but focused instead on the patterns of 'sequent occupance', right down to the present day. The same can be said of the Ayiofarango Survey in Crete, from the mid-1970s (Blackman and Branigan 1977). Both in the Argolid and in the younger generation of surveys that followed, certain recurrent features became strikingly apparent in the relationship between the later prehis- toric (Neolithic, Bronze Age and Early Iron Age) and the historical (Graeco-Roman, Mediaeval and Post-Mediaeval) occupancy of what was essentially the southern, lowland Greek landscape. Prehistoric settlement 'sites'