Archaeological Field Sampling

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Abstract
The residue of an archaeological site, which represents a collection of cultural and noncultural materials, provides quantitative information from which some indication of cultural practices and ecological and chronological relationships can be extracted. If quantitative methods of analysis are to be successfully applied to archaeological remains, the archaeologist must either totally excavate a site, recovering all the elements in the residue, or he can devise some system of sampling it. Total excavation is seldom possible or feasible because of limited resources. Consequently, he resorts to the process of sampling, that is, excavating only a portion of the whole site. His field objective is to collect as representative a sample of elements as possible with a minimum expenditure of time, labor, and money. Achieving this objective depends upon following a sampling procedure. Stratified-cluster sampling is a method proposed to achieve this objective. A sampling design of 13 steps is presented to serve as a guide to this method.