Archaeological surveys have progressed from a secondary discipline to a solid and consistent working method which is evolving in tune with the goals of prehistoric research. Almost 60 years have passed since New Archaeology began to point out the importance of archaeological surveys for the study of prehistoric settlement patterns, and this issue has been discussed in many meetings and correspondence. Nowadays, it is not only individual sites that matter. In order to understand the lives of human groups, we have become aware that we also have to study their interactions with other sites and the environment in which they operated, i.e., their territory. Within this context, we began a survey aimed at documenting all the prehistoric settlements found in Sierra de Atapuerca, as well as the environments that had been preserved. A full-coverage and high intensity archaeological survey was conducted in a 314 km(2) area. The results thus obtained are the ones presented in this work, which are compared against those results that would have been obtained if a sampling had been performed. (c) 2015 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved.