ABSTRACT
In the last chapter, I made the point that archaeology is like doing research in a library where you burn each page after you read it-all you have left is your notes. In this chapter, we learn what kinds of notes archaeologists take when they excavate a site. There are two key points to archaeological recordkeeping: recording context and redundancy. Recording context is the most important job archaeologists have. As I have stressed several times, an artifact or ecofact without context is often meaningless, and several standard systems have been devised to ensure that the context of all artifacts and ecofacts on a site is preserved.
