EVALUATING EVALUATION: A STATISTICAL INVESTIGATION OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE SAMPLING

The evaluation of archaeological sites is an essential, routine, and commonplace part of archaeological practice. Evaluation is usually a preliminary step carried out prior to a decision about preservation, destruction, or more intensive investigation. In most cases, archaeologists sample sites when conducting evaluations, often to reduce the cost of the research, but also to minimize the adverse effects to sites that may be significant.
The literature on sampling in archaeology, with a few noteworthy exceptions, does not address critical issues concerning how much to sample to achieve a valid and reliable evaluation of a site, or, alternatively, how much material must be recovered for that same purpose. This thesis studies the spatial and numerical distributions of ceramic material recovered from three prehistoric archaeological sites that have undergone several phases of intensive testing to understand the variables that influence effective sample sizes for evaluation.