Archaeological fieldwork techniques in Stone Age sites. Some case studies

Abstract

Field techniques used in the excavation of archaeological sites are rarely specified in academic publications, under the tacit understanding that fieldwork methods are standardized enough to make their description unnecessary. Although that is probably the case in commercial archaeology, it is however an unwarranted assumption as far as academic archaeology is concern, and neglects the wide range of different field techniques used during archaeological excavations by each research team. In this paper, we outline field methods used by our research group in the excavation of Palaeolithic sites in Spain and East Africa, from the selection of localities for excavation to the digital processing of the resulting spatial and archaeological data. Our aim is to contribute to consolidating a corpus of standard practices in modern research archaeological excavation, whose quality control is essential to guarantee a successful collection of data used for the interpretation of archaeological remains.

Keywords

• field techniques
• laboratory
• Datamatrix
• Photogrammetry
• GIS
• Stone Age