Survey Planning, Allocation, Costing and Evaluation (SPACE) Project: Developing a Tool to Help Archaeologists Conduct More Effective Surveys

Designing an effective archaeological survey can be complicated and confidence that it was effective requires post-survey evaluation. The goal of SPACE is to develop software to facilitate survey designers’ decisions and partially automate tools that depend on mathematical models so that archaeologists can conduct surveys that accomplish their goals and evaluate their results more easily. We aim for SPACE to be a modular and accessible web-based platform for survey planning and quality assurance, with a “front end” that has a non-threatening, question-and-answer format. Its several interacting modules will ultimately include ones for evaluating visibility, estimating sweep widths and coverage, costing, determining sample sizes, transect and test-pit intervals, allocating effort optimally for stratified samples and predictive surveys, and quality assurance. In this paper, we focus on the module for estimating fieldwalkers’ sweep widths on the basis of “calibrations” on fields seeded with artifacts, while also reviewing the overall structure of the project. Sweep widths are critical for estimating coverage, evaluating survey effectiveness and quality, and planning transect intervals.