1. Field Methods and Techniques
Context, Provenience & Excavation

2. Context: Sediments Artifacts Ecofacts Features
Relationship of Deposition
Types of Deposits:
Sediments
Artifacts
Ecofacts
Features

3. Stratigraphy and Deep Time
Geological Time:
Earth forms 4.6 billion years ago
The first mammals appear 225 million years ago
The first hominins appear 6-7 million years ago
Genus Homo appears 2.5 million years ago
Homo sapiens appears 200 thousand years ago
Geological Periods:
Pleistocene – 1.8 million to 10,000 years ago
Holocene – 10,000 years ago until present

4. Provenience
Horizontal and vertical location of artifacts, ecofacts, features and sediment changes

5. Coordinates Geographic and Projected Coordinates
Geographic: Modeled on a Geographic Spheroid
Projected: Assumes an Arbitrary Point of Origin

6. Surveying with GPS

7. Total Station

8. Surveyor’s Level

9. Elevation Map from Provenience

10. Introduction
An artifact’s provenience, or the location relative to a system of spatial data collection, is the most important thing about the artifact.
Provenience is essential to recording an artifact’s context, the relationship of an artifact, ecofact, or feature to other artifacts, features, and geological strata in a site.
This information is crucial to knowing what an artifact has to tell us.

11. The Folsom Site and Humanity’s Antiquity in North America
Pleistocene, a geological period from 1.8 million to 10,000 years ago, which was characterized by multiple periods of extensive glaciation.
Artifacts with bones of animals living during the Pleistocene proved that humans had been in N. America for at least 10,000 years.

12. Excavation
A fluted Folsom spear point lying IN SITU between the ribs of an extinct species of bison at the Folsom site

13. The Folsom Site and Humanity’s Antiquity in North America
In situ, from Latin, meaning “in position”’ the place where an artifact, ecofact, or feature was found during survey or excavation.
The association between the spear points and extinct bison remains confirmed the presence of people in the Americas since at least the end of the Pleistocene, some 10,000 years ago.

14. The Folsom Site and Humanity’s Antiquity in North America
Discovered by George McJunkin ( ), who spotted bones protruding from walls of arroyo
The Folsom site in 1998.
A bison skull is uncovered in
the excavation unit.

15. Outline Excavation: What Determines Preservation?
Principles of Archaeological Excavation
Precision Excavation
Sifting the Evidence
Cataloging the Finds
Conclusion: Archaeology’s Conservation Ethic: Dig Only What You Must