Guidelines for the Field Collection of Archaeological Materials and Standard Operating Procedures for Curation Department of Defense Archaeological Collections

We provide a review and synthesis of existing federal and non-federal guidelines for collecting archaeological field data and curating archaeological collections. Based on the review, we found a great deal of variability in existing guidelines, if at all present. Thus, using these variable guidelines, we fashioned Department of Defense (DoD) wide guidelines for collecting archaeological field data and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for curating DoD archaeological collections. The review process consisted of interviewing federal archaeologists, State Historic Preservation Offices, state Department of Transportation archaeologists, and technical experts from a sample of universities, museums, and archaeological contractors. Agency or institution based personnel responded to a questionnaire where they were encouraged to provide comments and suggestions toward developing standardized methods.

Interview data were used to construct a proposed two-stage strategy for archaeological fieldwork on DoD installations. The first stage consists of intensive prefieldwork research that comprehensively documents previous land uses. The second stage uses an archaeological fieldwork research design that emphasizes a statistical (probabilistic) sampling framework where estimates on precision and accuracy can be determined.