ABSTRACT
Since the adoption of the treaty of Valetta in 1992, in situ preservation of archaeological remains should have become the guiding principle for threatened archaeology in Europe. For this reason, in the Netherlands an Archaeological Monitoring Standard (SAM) was developed in 2005 (Smit et al., 2006). In this standard, degradation
parameters for several types of archaeological remains were defi ned. In addition, an outline was given for setting up a monitoring scheme for sites. The emphasis of this work was on the technological part of in situ preservation and created a new specialist, the geoconservator. In the SAM the focus was primarily on specialist laboratory research on the degradation of archaeological material, or measuring degradation indicators in the fi eld such as Eh and pH. This has led to the situation that in the process of conservation of a site, the assessment of a site is performed by the archaeologist. After that, the geoconservator decides independently what the risks of degradation are and what kind of monitoring should be applied. In the actual monitoring stage, the archaeologist is not involved.
