ABSTRACT
The Real Mesoamerican Archeologist doesn’t like probability sampling. He regards it as a waste of energy, too time-consuming, not as reliable as his intuition, and not applicable to complex societies. He even has reservations about applying it to such “simple” political units as Formative villages. Probability sampling is particularly useful in archeological settlement pattern studies in Mesoamerica, where archeologists rarely have the time, money, or desire to study the entire land area that is the subject of their investigation. Sampling designs and methods may be compared both statistically and nonstatistically. Nonstatistical criteria for comparison vary with the purpose of the research. Statistical means also may be used for comparing different sampling techniques. A sampling design or sampling method is more “efficient” than another design or method if its squared standard error is less than the squared standard error of the other technique.
