page_title: Archaeological excavation
section_title: Phasing
hierarchical_section_title: Archaeological excavation / Concepts / Phasing
caption_attribution_description: English: Horse burial in roman ditch on a development funded site in London. Note "out of phase" pipe intrusion left in for practical reasons.
context_page_description: In archaeology, excavation is the exposure, processing and recording of archaeological remains. An excavation site or "dig" is the area being studied. These locations range from one to several areas at a time during a project and can be conducted over a few weeks to several years.
  Excavation involves the recovery of several types of data from a site. This data includes artifacts, features, ecofacts, and archaeological context.
  Before excavating, the presence or absence of archaeological remains can often be suggested by, non-intrusive remote sensing, such as ground-penetrating radar. Basic information about the development of the site may be drawn from this work, but to understand finer details of a site, excavation via augering can be used.
  During excavation, archaeologists often use stratigraphic excavation to remove phases of the site one layer at a time. This keeps the timeline of the material remains consistent with one another. This is done usually though mechanical means where artifacts can be spot dated and processed through methods such as sieving or flotation. Afterwards, digital methods are then used record the excavation process and its results.
context_section_description: Phase is the most easily understood grouping for the layman as it implies a near contemporaneous Archaeological horizon representing "what you would see if you went back to a specific point in time". Often but not always a phase implies the identification of an occupation surface "old ground level" that existed at some earlier time.
  The production of phase interpretations is one of the first goals of stratigraphic interpretation and excavation. Digging "in phase" is not quite the same as phasing a site. Phasing a site represents reducing the site either in excavation or post-excavation to contemporaneous horizons whereas "digging in phase" is the process of stratigraphic removal of archaeological remains so as not to remove contexts that are earlier in time "lower in the sequence" before other contexts that have a latter physical stratigraphic relationship to them as defined by the law of superposition. The process of interpretation in practice will have a bearing on excavation strategies on site so "phasing" a site is actively pursued during excavation where at all possible and is considered good practice.
caption: Horse burial in Roman ditch on a development funded site in London. Note "out of phase" pipe intrusion left in for practical reasons
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