Archaeological Tolerance

Hello everybody,

this short post will focus on a topic which is very important in archaeology, at least in commercial (professional) archaeology: the archaeological tolerance.

This concept concern the level of precision and accuracy which an archaeological documentation should reach. Obviously it is not an absolute value, but is rather connected with other factors which should be evaluated by a specialist (the archaeologist) at the beginning of any project.

Archaeological Tolerance: precision VS accuracy

In normal conditions, the factor that can influence the archaeological tolerance are related with the project's specifications, (time-table, budget, dimension of the AoI, the Area of Interest, etc...), with some environmental aspects (logistics, workplace safety, etc...) and, finally, with archaeology itself (chronology of the archaeological evidences, their information potential, etc...). This last aspect is the reason why the archaeological tolerance should be evaluated by an archaeologist and not by other technicians.

I wanted to write a post about this concept because it is very important in order to define the strategy during an archaeological project. In other words, basing of different values of archaeological tolerance, the working team could decide to use very precise and accurate, but time-expensive, 3D documentation methodologies (e.g. SfM-MVS) or choose faster, but less accurate, technologies (e.g. SLAM).

I hope this post will useful to understand the processes of decision making in archaeology. Have a nice day!