The survey team was composed of Giulia De Nobili, Giorgi Khaburzania, and Bidzina Murvanidze. Its activities concentrated on the Khashuri district, an area of about 550 km², and were carried out during the whole field season, between the 26th of August and the 23rd of September. The main purposes of the survey were:
a) to identify the exact position of sites known from literature or on the basis of unpublished materials resulting from casual discoveries by the local farmers, now stored in the Khashuri Museum, information about which was provided by Bidzina Murvanidze;
b) to find people who brought archaeological materials to the Khashuri Museum in past years, and to collect from them information about the location of possible sites;
c) to interview the local people in order to collect new information about casual findings and about other possible archaeological sites;
d) to check the presence of sites spotted through the analysis of aerial photos (Soviet period photos of the 1950ies kindly provided by the Centre of Archaeology of the Georgian National Museum, and photos taken in 2000 kindly provided by the Tbilisi’s Geolab) and satellite images;
e) to investigate in detail the fields surrounding the site of Natsargora in order to determine the entity of the “lower town” settlement.
    During 20 working days, the team walked the landscape for a total of 340 Km visiting all the main valleys in the district. A total number of 146 sites have been identified and recorded in detail in a dedicated database (Fig. 9). The pottery collected during the survey was preliminarily analysed in order to identify the periods of occupation of each site; diagnostic sherds were recorded in a database and will be used to create a reference typology for future surveys in the area. In different occasions the team worked together with the expedition’s geologist and geoarchaeologist, in order to better understand the studied landscape.
    From the survey’s results it is possible to draw the following preliminary conclusions:
1) most of the recovered material can be dated to the medieval period; most of it was unearthed on the occasion of works undertaken in churches and cemeteries.
2) most pottery sherds were collected in ploughed areas, in corn fields and in other cultivated areas, since in other places the surface soil was mostly covered by very dense and high vegetation. In addition, many interesting hills are not cultivated, thus making it very difficult to identify sherds on the ground.
3) the hypothetical Late Bronze sites are mostly located between 700 and 900 meters above sea level, on small hills near water sources, generally small streams.
4) as we already observed last year in the Kaspi district, Bronze age sites are mostly characterised by the presence of Late Bronze pottery, while Early Bronze sherds are only seldom found. Our general impression is that Early Bronze layers are usually deeply buried in the ground, covered by the later occupation, and are therefore not easily visible from surface sherds collection.
    In spite of these difficulties, potentially interesting sites have been located at Meligora (Fig. 10), Koditskharo, Ghvriatskali and Kemperi. Further investigations in the forthcoming years might help to get clearer ideas about this mounds. We also expect to gain additional information on the other sites we visited by further study of the collected ceramics.