ABSTRACT
Archaeological sampling of regions, sites, and even features within sites has seen extensive use since archaeologists began to experiment with rather simple spatial sampling designs in the 1960s. Modern spatial sampling in archaeology takes prior information more seriously to make the most of stratified sampling, sequential sampling, adaptive sampling, and non-geometric sampling frames, and to make rational decisions about sample sizes, re-sampling, and the reliability of sample distributions. Whether a cluster sample of artifacts from features in a site or an element sample of landforms in a regional survey, useful samples require careful attention to the likely characteristics of the population of interest, how they relate to the potentially degraded population available for study, and how best to allocate scarce resources to their study.
