The South Etruria Survey is one of the largest surveys ever carried out on Italian soil, spanning a period of over twenty years from the early 1950s to the early 1970s. This archaeological enterprise started in 1954 on the inititative of John Bryan Ward-Perkins, BSR Director from 1945 to 1974, and involved numerous students, scholars, collaborators and members of the BSR who participated in gathering, assembling and examining data from a vast area of territory situated north of Rome. Initially, the survey was focused on some portions of Etruscan and Roman roads, placed in their relevant spatial and chronological context. It then extended to all parts of this historically important region to record more than 2,000 sites and document its landscape changing patterns over time.

The outset of the project was timely as it investigated an area still undeveloped and 'strangely neglected' by researchers but about to become subject to massive mechanical ploughing due to the recent land reforms aimed at transforming large areas of woodland and pasture into cultivated fields. As brilliantly pointed out by Christopher J. Smith in his essay "J.B. Ward-Perkins, the BSR and the landscape tradition in post-war Italian archaeology", the South Etruria survey builds up on the work of other scholars who explored the Campagna Romana south and east of Rome in the early 1900s, one of which is Thomas Ashby, BSR Director from 1906 to 1925. His studies, together with those of Rodolfo Lanciani and Giuseppe Tomassetti, paved the way for further research in landscape archaeology, reinvigorated also by the use of air photography in the aftermath of World War II.

Extensive reports of this survey were periodically published in the Papers of the British School at Rome. The continuation of the South Etruria survey is the Tiber Vally Project, an ambitious archaeological fieldwork programme of excavations launched between the 1990s and 2000s, which shifts the focus of research on the area of the river valley and extends its investigations to the left bank, in the Sabina territory.