Sampling with transects inside archaeological sites. A rapid action protocol based on statistical analysis of diagnostic collections and quantitative records

Abstract

The paper proposes a two stage-sampling strategy for surface surveys. The suggested approach has two stages. First, an intensive survey is undertaken across linear transects, georeferencing the position of each item, and then supplementary diagnostic artefacts between the linear transects are collected. The main objective of the paper is to save time in the first stage of fieldwork. The key claim is that this approach would provide a representative sample of the surface scatter using just one selected transect. The proposed method is applied to the examination of two sites in the Municipium Flavium Baesuccitanum, a Roman municipality from the 1st century CE, located in the upper Guadalquivir valley, in the south of Spain, where a total survey was previously carried out. To assess the reliability of this approach, a simulation study was conducted at these two sites, selected by intensive sampling. These sites were chosen because they are real cases with different singularities, which facilitates analysis of how the proposed protocol would behave in different scenarios. In both cases, the statistical results confirm the plausibility of the hypothesis of similarity between the distributions of the whole site and the candidate transect.