Developing Paleolithic Excavation Methods for the Twenty-First Century

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Developing Paleolithic Excavation Methods for the Twenty-First Century" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The excavation of sites and their constituent artifacts are the main way in which primary archaeological data is produced. Despite the development of new analytical tools in the last two decades, excavation procedures, routines, and techniques remain comparatively unchanged. This is partly because new excavation methods are often regionally segregated and isolated by subdiscipline. It is therefore necessary to periodically appraise and synthesize methodological improvements across the discipline. This symposium aims to disseminate and foster new excavation developments by bringing together field archaeologists to share methodological advances and reflect on current excavation practices. Touching on topics ranging from sampling, plotting, visualization, photogrammetry, taphonomy, and preservation, our objective is to evaluate the progress in excavation practices over the past 20 years. In doing so, we hope to create a forum for field archaeologists across subdisciplines to share how to record excavation data more accurately and efficiently.