Travel accounts provide both benefits and challenges to survey archaeologists. This article presents a case study, generated by the Vayots Dzor Silk Road Survey, which aims to reconstruct the medieval (tenth to fifteenth centuries ad) landscape of Vayots Dzor in the Republic of Armenia, ‘excavating’ literary accounts of its landscape. Knowledge of this region in the Middle Ages is dominated by a core text written in the thirteenth century by Bishop Step’anos Orbelyan. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the region was visited by travellers who found links between the places they visited, the inscriptions they recorded, and the events and locations attested in Orbelyan’s text. Through examples from the site list of the Vayots Dzor Silk Road Survey, the authors explore how these and other sources accumulate, creating local knowledge about places that inform archaeologists and heritage professionals. They argue for reflection on the ways that local memory, archaeology, and the physical landscape inform complex makings of place.
