Total Station Archaeology: Digging the Dibble Way

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The methods that we use to excavate archaeological sites shape the resulting data in an unchangeable manner and have significant downstream impacts on our ability to study and interpret our data. In 1987 Harold Dibble published “Measurement of Artifact Provenience with an Electronic Theodolite” and ushered in a revolution in the quality of field data collection. Through the years, Dibble and his colleagues have shown how the precision, accuracy, and speed of find plotting with total stations significantly improves our understanding of context and the archival quality of our data. This has been done through publications that directly compare plotting with and without total stations, as well as the quality of field reports published by him and his colleagues. Inadvertently, Dibble created a quiet schism in field archaeology between those who embraced this technology and those who did not. In this paper I track the impact of this methodological improvement, suggest some pathways for the future, and call for a full commitment in Paleolithic archaeology to “digging the Dibble way.”

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part II   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35696.0