INTRODUCTION TO ARCHAEOLOGY Nancy White - Touro Institute

excavation must take place in the path of proposed construction. American archaeologists,
especially those working in cultural resources management, differentiate among the levels of
investigation as follows: Reconnaissance survey usually involves walking around the project
area looking for surface materials and doing the historical background work to see what might
have been there and what is already known or found. Phase I survey is more intensive and
involves subsurface methods such as shovel testing and writing a more comprehensive report.
Phase II test excavation may be done after survey has identified the sites in an area, to place
formal test units at those sites suggested to be significant. Significance is often difficult to define.
It can be understood in local to international terms. A significant site will have undisturbed
cultural deposits that have good potential to produce new information about a past people. This
usually includes features, good intact midden soils, diagnostic artifacts, and so on. An
internationally significant site will usually be a major monument. Phase II excavation can even
include stripping off disturbed soils with heavy equipment such as a front end-loader to see if
undisturbed features such as refuse pits or house
patterns are present below.
Phase III excavations, also known as salvage or data
recovery, might take place at the sites determined
during Phase II to be significant but destined to be
destroyed by whatever construction is planned. During
Phase III more extensive excavation units are dug and
as much information and material as possible is
recovered, since this will be all that is retrieved from
the site (usually) before it is gone. There is obviously
the ethical consideration, again, of digging and thus
destroying too much of a site if it is NOT destined to
be disturbed or destroyed. Furthermore, it is always
better to conserve instead of dig. Good cultural
resources management strategies often involve
working with those planning the construction to avoid
site destruction. For example, after surveying and
Phase II testing in the path of a housing development
in Florida, we might find a few sites that are
significant. We might persuade the developer to move
planned buildings away from the site, change the
design of the entire plan, or dump some loads of fill
dirt over the site and preserve it as a park or green
space, maybe even with an outdoor display describing
the prehistoric people who once lived here (good public relations for the developer, as well!).
Archaeological Classification and Analysis