The Past and Future of Archaeological Prospection

Summary

This is an abstract from the "2024 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Luis Barba" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological prospection refers to the identification of subsurface cultural features by non-intrusive techniques. The prospection literature exhibits a simple evolution from pioneering application of techniques to their more common use. The method developed by Luis Barba and colleagues at the Laboratorio de Prospección Arqueológica, UNAM, represents a separate prospection lineage in that it employs a whole battery of techniques systematically and synoptically, it is multidisciplinary, holistic, applicable in a wide variety of natural and cultural settings, and it can address anthropologically important problems requiring observations at scales much larger than that of excavation. We illustrate this method with an example from collaborative research in Coixtlahuaca, an urbanized region in ancient Oaxaca. Prospection is typically ancillary to excavation, but as we illustrate, in many contexts this relationship should be reversed, especially when the research problems call for data that excavation cannot produce because it would be costly, destructive, too small-scale, unethical, or illegal.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• 2024 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Luis Barba   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38593.0