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Surface Reconnaissance
Looking for artifacts and features on the ground surface
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Cultural Deposits
Have additional material in the sediment, usually darker in color, may contain charcoal or stone not usually found in the area
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Subsurface Testing
- - Coring
- - Auger Testing
- - Shovel Testing
- - Test Excavations
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Remote Sensing
- - Satelite Imagery
- - Aerial Photography
- - Ground Penetrating Radar
- - Metal Detector
- - Soil Chemistry (e.g., phosphorus, DNA)
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Vertical Dimension Excavation
- Arbitrary Levels
- - Vertical units of equal size
- - Size decided by investigator (5cm, 20cm arbitrary levels)
- Natural Stratigraphic Layers
- - Formed by environment
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Excavation Strategies
- - Location and type depends of the problem you are trying to solve
- - Culture historians dug trenches to get at stratigraphy -> PROFILE (Time, Space, Form)
- - Cultural reconstructionists and processualists wanted to open horizontal -> PLANVIEW (Behavior)
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"Rice Chex" method
With this method you leave a balk or space on the grid between each unit; both vertical and horizontal views are discontinous
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Checkerboard method
- - Divide area to be excavated into grid; excavate every other unit
- - Horizontal view is discontinuous
- - Vertical stratigraphy is continuous, but only exposed after excavation
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