Principles of Archaeology

Course Description

Principles of Archaeology is a detailed explanation of the principles and methodology of current archaeology in the U.S., and includes a brief history and theoretical orientation development of American archaeology.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, ANT is the Anthropology prefix. UWF publishes this at 3 semester hours.

⚠ This course gates the archaeology sequence

ANT3101 is the prerequisite for ANT4115 (Method and Theory), ANT4172 (Historical Archaeology), ANT4190 (Historic Preservation), ANT4182C (Conservation), and ANT4824 (Terrestrial Field Methods), and it is one of the two routes into ANT4180L (Laboratory Methods). Taking it early is what keeps the rest of the programme open — and since UWF publishes no terms of offering, the scheduling has to be worked out with the department rather than read off the catalog.

The distinction between this course and the introductory one is that it treats method as something with a history and an argument behind it. Archaeological methods are not neutral procedures; they were developed to answer particular questions, they encode assumptions about what is worth recovering, and they have changed as the questions changed. Understanding why a technique exists is what lets you judge when it is the wrong one.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's course catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, prerequisites where they exist, and a description. It does not publish contact hours, a lecture and laboratory split, or terms of offering for any course. It does publish a material and supply fee notice on the minority of courses that carry one — and maintains a separate Material & Supply and Equipment Fees section of the catalog — so the absence of a fee notice on this entry is meaningful, while the fee amount is not published here. There is therefore no institution-stated figure to quote, and every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is derived.

The figure shown applies the standard lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit, corroborated within this prefix by the live ANT2000 (Introduction to Anthropology) at 3 credits and 45 hours. Confirm the actual meeting schedule with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe the development of American archaeology and its major phases.
• Describe culture history, processual, and post-processual orientations.
• Compare the questions each orientation was designed to answer.
• Describe research design and how archaeological questions are formulated.
• Describe sampling strategies and their consequences for what is found.
• Describe survey methodology and coverage decisions.
• Describe site definition and recording standards.
• Describe excavation strategy and the choice of technique.
• Apply the principles of stratigraphic excavation and recording.
• Describe provenience control and its documentation.
• Describe screening, flotation, and recovery bias.
• Describe typology and classification and their purposes.
• Describe seriation and other relative dating techniques.
• Describe radiocarbon and other absolute dating methods and their assumptions.
• Interpret dating results critically, including calibration and error.
• Describe site formation processes and taphonomy.
• Distinguish cultural from natural deposition.
• Describe analytical approaches to major material classes.
• Describe the role of specialists and interdisciplinary analysis.
• Describe report writing and publication standards.
• Describe curation requirements and collections management.
• Describe the legal and regulatory context of American archaeology.
• Describe professional ethics and their application to method choices.
• Evaluate a published archaeological study on methodological grounds.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe geoarchaeology and its methods.
• Describe archaeometry and materials characterisation.
• Describe spatial analysis and geographic information systems.
• Describe quantitative methods in archaeology.
• Describe household and settlement pattern approaches.
• Describe collaborative and community-based archaeology.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Development of American archaeology
• Culture history, processual, post-processual
• Questions behind each orientation
• Research design
• Sampling strategy
• Survey methodology
• Site definition and recording
• Excavation strategy
• Stratigraphic excavation
• Provenience control
• Screening, flotation, recovery bias
• Typology and classification
• Seriation
• Radiocarbon and absolute dating
• Interpreting dates critically
• Site formation and taphonomy
• Cultural versus natural deposition
• Material class analysis
• Specialists and interdisciplinary work
• Reporting and publication
• Curation and collections
• The regulatory context
• Ethics and method choice
• Evaluating published studies

Optional Topics

• Geoarchaeology
• Archaeometry
• Spatial analysis and GIS
• Quantitative methods
• Household and settlement patterns
• Community-based archaeology

Resources & Tools

• Society for American Archaeology (saa.org) — free Principles of Archaeological Ethics; read them in your first archaeology course, not your last. Student membership is inexpensive.
• Register of Professional Archaeologists (rpanet.org) — free; the eligibility criteria tell you exactly what a professional archaeologist is expected to have done, including a field school.
• Florida Division of Historical Resources (dos.fl.gov/historical) — free; Chapter 267, the permitting process, and the Florida Master Site File.
• National Park Service preservation briefs and the Section 106 guidance (nps.gov, achp.gov) — free, and this is the process most professional archaeologists work inside every day.
• Florida Public Archaeology Network (fpan.us) — free public programmes and volunteer opportunities across the state; an unusually good route to real experience for a Florida student.
• Florida Anthropological Society and its journal — regional research, and a genuine route into the state's archaeological community.
• Get to a field school. It is the entry requirement for professional work, it is what employers and graduate programmes look for first, and nothing substitutes for it.

Career Pathways

• Anthropologists and archaeologists — SOC 19-3091.
• ⚠ Cultural resource management is where the jobs are. The great majority of professional archaeologists work in compliance archaeology for consulting firms, agencies, and tribes — driven by Section 106 and state equivalents rather than by research funding. Plan for that rather than for academia.
• Field technician ("shovelbum") — the entry-level role; project-based, travelling, and the standard first job after a field school.
• Crew chief, project archaeologist, and principal investigator — the CRM progression, with a graduate degree generally needed above field technician.
• State and federal agencies — State Historic Preservation Offices, the National Park Service, the Forest Service, and the Army Corps of Engineers.
• Tribal historic preservation offices — a growing and important sector.
• Museums, collections management, and curation — SOC 25-4012 and 25-4013.
• Historic preservation planning at local and state government level.
• Postsecondary teaching and research — SOC 25-1061; requires a doctorate and is highly competitive.
• ⚠ Be realistic about the entry conditions. Field technician work is seasonal, project-based, frequently far from home, and modestly paid; benefits are inconsistent. Many people do it for a few years and then either move up, move into agency or museum work, or leave. Knowing that in advance is better than discovering it.
• A graduate degree is effectively required to advance beyond field technician in this field — plan the pathway early.

Special Information

⚠⚠ Recovery method determines what exists — and the bias is invisible afterwards

• What an excavation finds is a function of how it looked. Screen size, whether flotation was used, and where the units were placed all determine the assemblage — and none of that is visible in the resulting collection.
• ⚠⚠ Screen mesh silently removes categories of evidence. Quarter-inch screen loses small fauna, fish bone, small beads, and micro-debitage; a site excavated through coarse screen can produce a subsistence reconstruction with the fish missing entirely, and the report will not say so unless someone thought to.
• Flotation recovers what screening cannot — seeds, charcoal, and small remains — and a project without it has decided, whether deliberately or not, not to study diet and environment.
• ⚠ Sampling strategy determines what the site appears to be. Units placed where the surface material is densest find dense deposits and can miss the rest of the settlement entirely.
• State the method precisely in the report, including mesh size, sampling fraction, and what was not done — so that a later reader can tell absence of evidence from evidence of absence.
• Read older reports with this in mind. Much twentieth-century fieldwork used methods that would not now be accepted, and its negative findings frequently reflect recovery rather than the past.
• Taphonomy compounds it. Preservation differs by material, soil, and climate — Florida's acidic sandy soils destroy bone readily, so the surviving assemblage is already a filtered sample before anyone excavates.
• ⚠ Interpret to the strength of the evidence. Overreading a small, biased sample is the commonest failure in archaeological argument, and it is what the methods training exists to prevent.

⚠⚠ Excavation is destruction — this is the discipline's founding constraint

• An archaeological site can be excavated once. Removing an artefact destroys its context permanently, and context is where nearly all the information is — an object without its associations is a curiosity rather than evidence.
• ⚠ Which is why recording is the actual work. The excavation produces notes, drawings, photographs, elevations, and samples; the site itself is gone, and the record is all that survives of it. A dig with poor records has destroyed a site and produced nothing.
• ⚠⚠ Do not excavate what does not need excavating. Modern practice presumes preservation in place: survey, non-invasive methods, and leaving the deposit for better techniques later are frequently the professionally correct answer, and a research question that could be answered without digging should be.
• Sample deliberately and leave some of the site intact where you can, so future archaeologists with better methods have material to work with. Everything we can do now, someone will do better in fifty years.
• ⚠ Excavation without a curation plan is destruction with extra steps. See the curation note below — artefacts that cannot be housed, catalogued and kept accessible have not been saved.
• Publish, or the destruction was for nothing. Unpublished excavation is a recognised and serious failure in this discipline, and a substantial amount of twentieth-century fieldwork sits unreported in boxes.
• Record what you did not find as well as what you did. Negative evidence is evidence, and it is routinely discarded.
• ⚠ Stratigraphy cannot be reconstructed after the fact. If the layers were not recorded as they were removed, the sequence is lost, and with it the chronology.

⚠⚠ The antiquities market, human remains, and the curation crisis

• ⚠⚠ Do not buy, sell, or appraise antiquities. The professional societies' ethics principles treat commercialisation of the archaeological record as incompatible with the discipline, because market demand is what funds looting — and looting destroys context, which destroys the information, permanently.
• An artefact with no provenance is frequently a looted artefact, and authenticating or publishing one raises its market value and rewards the destruction that produced it.
• ⚠ Human remains require consultation, not just permits. Descendant communities have legitimate authority over the treatment of their ancestors, and the discipline's history here is genuinely bad — remains were collected, measured, and retained without consent for well over a century.
• Consult early and continuously, not at the end. Consultation presented as a formality after decisions are made is not consultation, and it is recognised as such.
• Treat remains with the care you would want for your own relatives, including in photography, in storage, and in how they are discussed.
• ⚠⚠ The curation crisis is real and it is the discipline's quiet failure. Repositories across the country are full; excavated collections sit uncatalogued, inaccessible, and in some cases deteriorating, and some institutions will no longer accept new material. Curation is expensive, it is permanent, and it must be funded before excavation, not after.
• Budget for curation in the project, and confirm a repository will accept the collection before a trowel goes in the ground.
• Existing collections are an underused research resource. A great deal of publishable work can be done on material already excavated and never analysed — and it costs no new destruction.
• ⚠ Archaeology has been used to support political claims about land and identity, sometimes disastrously. Interpretations carry consequences beyond the discipline, and stating the strength of the evidence honestly matters.

⚠⚠ Archaeology is heavily regulated — and most American archaeological work exists because of it

• The National Historic Preservation Act, and particularly its Section 106 process, requires federal agencies to consider the effects of their undertakings on historic properties. ⚠ This is the single largest driver of archaeological employment in the United States — the great majority of professional archaeologists work in compliance, not academia.
• The Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) governs archaeological resources on federal and tribal land, requires permits for excavation, and makes unauthorised excavation, removal, and trafficking a federal offence with substantial penalties.
• ⚠⚠ NAGPRA — the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act — governs human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. It creates consultation and repatriation obligations and it changed the discipline profoundly. Understand it as a legal requirement and as an ethical correction to a real history, not as an obstacle.
• ⚠ Florida: Chapter 267, Florida Statutes vests authority in the Division of Historical Resources and declares archaeological resources on state-owned land and on state-owned submerged land to be state property. Collecting from them without a permit is unlawful.
• ⚠⚠ Florida section 872.05 makes it a felony to knowingly disturb an unmarked human burial. Unmarked burials are common on Florida sites, and if human remains are encountered, work stops and the process defined by that statute is followed — this is one of the most important things a Florida archaeologist knows.
• The Florida Master Site File is the state's inventory of archaeological and historical sites; recording sites into it is a professional obligation, and consulting it is the first step of any project.
• State and local permits, and tribal consultation, apply on top of the federal framework.
• ⚠ Metal detecting and surface collecting are restricted on public land and prohibited on many sites; a hobby elsewhere is an offence here.
• ⚠ Rule 11 applies. Preservation law, regulations, and tribal consultation requirements change — verify with the State Historic Preservation Office and the relevant agency rather than relying on this guide.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement — and it is live across this prefix, most of which sits at the upper-division levels.

ANT3101 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida. ⚠ It gates most of the upper-division archaeology sequence — take it early and plan the rest with the department.