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Archaeological Fieldwork
Protecting the Past & Native American Archaeology
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ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIELDWORK

White, Joseph Courtney
1992     In the Land of the Delight Makers, pp. 1-23. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.

The simplest form of fieldwork is the survey. There are two basic types of surveys: reconnaissance surveys and pedestrian surveys. Reconnaissance survey involves a cursory investigation of the landscape, looking for sites or other signs of human occupation. They may be conducted in an airplane, on horseback, or a variety of other ways. The goal of the reconnaissance survey is therefore to obtain a preliminary estimation of the archaeological resources in an area. Pedestrian surveys are conducted on foot and provide a much more detailed record of all the sites and artifacts in an area. In the typical pedestrian survey, a team of people will walk in the same direction, spaced a few meters apart, looking at the ground. Every time one of the surveyors comes across an artifact, they will stop and plot the point on a map. Some pedestrian surveys are "full-coverage," where the entire area is covered by the survey teams. In other cases, only a sample or partial piece of the area is walked, usually because of money and/or time constraints. Students and volunteer enthusiasts (supervised by an archaeologist) are often used for this type of fieldwork.

However, archaeologists obtain new data primarily through excavation. Interpreting the artifacts and features that are discovered is a complex process, since numerous forces have acted to distort the archaeological record over time. Archaeologists must deal with two different types of context: systemic context and archaeological context. Systemic context refers to the living society that artifacts and features were once a part of, while archaeological context refers to the distorted remains that the archaeologist finds during excavation.

The changes that have been made to the archaeological record are called formation processes. There are two types of formation processes: cultural formation processes and noncultural formation processes. Cultural formation processes are the result of human actions, such as dumping trash in a room or pothunting. Noncultural formation processes are the result of natural phenomena, such as burrowing animals or volcanic eruptions. The archaeologist must carefully reconstruct the formation processes that have changed the archaeological record in order to understand the systemic context of an artifact or feature, which is the real goal of archaeology. Archaeologists are not interested in "stuff" -- they are interested in what the "stuff" can tell us about prehistoric human behavior.