ABSTRACT
Literature searches and interviews with landowners and collectors are the two methods that allow archaeologists to determine what other researchers have found before going through the effort of archaeological survey. In pedestrian survey archaeologists simply walk along, scanning the ground for artifacts that might suggest the presence of buried archaeological deposits. Aerial imagery, including photographs from airplanes and even digital images from space, can aid in the location of archaeological features. Regardless of the survey methods employed, archaeologists choose one of several strategies to conduct their surveys. Top-down strategies use random sampling or another statistically appropriate sampling method to choose areas to survey. Bottom-up strategies begin at a known site and work out from it in order to locate neighboring and related sites. Shotgun and predictive strategies use archaeologists’ knowledge of a region or a predictive model of settlement location to select survey areas that are highly likely to contain sites.
