Purposive Vs. Sampling Survey
Archaeological field surveys can also be characterized as either purposive or sampling surveys. The former, sometimes also called "archaeological prospection," involves cases where archaeologists are searching for a particular site or a particular kind of archaeological material. For example, they might be searching for a particular shipwreck or an historic fort whose exact location is no longer certain. However, they may also be searching for archaeological materials in particular locations to test hypotheses about past use of those spaces. Sampling surveys, on the other hand, have the goal of obtaining a representative sample of some population of sites or artifacts in order to make generalizations about that population. This involves some probability sampling of spatial units, such as random or stratified random sampling of geometrical (often square) or irregular spatial units.
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