In a two-week preliminary campaign in 2007, the basic areas of work involved in a research programme of several years’ duration on the site were examined and coordinated. Building upon these results, in 2008 a survey campaign of five weeks' duration (5 July – 10 August) was undertaken with the work projects divided into four distinct fields: investigations on the Esplanade, presumed to be where Diogenes’ inscription was displayed; documentation of the fragments of the inscription itself; fresh study of the non-philosophical inscriptions of Oinoanda; and lastly, extensive exploration and examination of the urban terrain and its topographical surroundings.

On the Esplanade, after the initial encouraging results from 2007, topographical documentation by means of terrestrial laser scanning was continued; and this work was now expanded to cover the entirety of the Hellenistic agora and the structures surrounding it. The urban area that has now been three-dimensionally mapped covers approximately 25,000 m2. Once the results have been evaluated, they can be expected to yield essential information for the reconstruction of the urban structure of the agora and its architectural evolution. The same aim was pursued in the survey work, which recorded, by means of drawings, the remains of the buildings that once fronted the Esplanade. In the centre stood the north stoa (Fig. 1), whose architectural debris partly remains in situ, and partly was removed for the construction of an early Byzantine church (Fig. 4) in a hollow some 200m to the southwest of the Esplanade.

Once the thick vegetation had been removed from the latter area, we identified twelve capitals (Fig. 3) and a number of shaft fragments from the sturdy Doric pillars fronted with two semi-columns which once were the dominant feature of the church’s interior. At the site of the north stoa itself a priority was the measurement and documentation of the four remaining entablature fragments.
In addition to the surface work, underground imaging was carried out for the first time within a small sector of the Esplanade, using geophysical methods (Fig. 5).

Geoelectrical and geomagnetic prospection as well as use of ground-penetrating radar provided promising results. The area is otherwise empty, but underground we detected distinct contours which can be interpreted as the footprints, so to speak, of individual monuments. The geophysical investigations are therefore going to be extended next year to cover the entire area of the Esplanade.

Investigation of Diogenes’ inscription also continued with the aid of various methods. Surveys by GPS enabled us to plot and map the known Diogenes fragments with complete accuracy. Nearly 160 fragments were surveyed in this way (Fig. 6). Once this work has been completed, it should be possible to make deductions – on the basis of the dispersal of the finds – about the history of the destruction of the monument that carried the inscription and to learn more about its successive re-use in later structures. Above all, the rediscovery of the pieces in the difficult terrain will be considerably easier in future. The GPS survey data will eventually be incorporated in a web-based geographical information system, making the Diogenes fragments accessible virtually; work on this has already begun. The exploration carried out during the survey of the fragments led to the discovery of 26 new fragments of the philosophical inscription. Some of these new fragments are very small and bear only a few letters; others contain complete sentences. Particularly worthy of note is a statement of Diogenes' attitude to Plato's theory of cosmogony. The newly discovered fragments as well as a large number of older finds were documented three-dimensionally by means of the laser line scanner (Fig. 7). The quality of reproduction shown in these first results is comparable to that of squeezes. Thus it will now be possible for the first time to study the Diogenes inscription independently of squeezes – sole specimens which can be viewed only at a few places –, using a tool of comparable value. Also, thanks to the three-dimensional documentation of the stones, the epigraphic record can be closely combined with the architectural record.