Field Analysis:Levels

SASSA Home Page &#8658; Field Analysis Home Page &#8658; Field Recording &#8658; How to Record Soil Properties &#8658; Site, Section, Context Levels

Site, Section, Context Levels
Most of the decisions over what constitutes a site, section and context have been left to you. Archaeologists are far more astute at this than most soil scientists and this approach retains flexibility in the system for dealing with unusual situations.

Site level
Our definition of site includes landscapes and single exposures. The extent of the site is left to you to define.

Section level
The section level can just as easily be used to describe deposits exposed in plan. However, many of the decision tree queries rely on information relating to underlying deposits and boundary properties that can only be effectively analysed in section.

Context level
SASSA deals with soils analysis rather than cuts, hence the meaning of context is narrower than that employed by most archaeologists as it excludes cut features and boundaries. Issues of truncation are dealt with indirectly through the change in properties between adjacent deposits, boundary characteristics and the change in soil properties at the boundary.

What constitutes a context is left to you the user to decide. In some circumstances this may include discontinuous lenses of material. In others it may be convenient to grouping sedimentary units together.

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