The issue is not ‘why excavate?’, nor is it whether or not to excavate sites. Nor is it the numerous ancillary considerations mentioned at the round table and in the papers – too many sites, too few resources, too large a backlog of unpublished sites, or saving sites for future techniques. All – excavators, archaeologists, curators and cultural heritage managers – would agree. If there is a unique world-class site that will be destroyed in a few weeks, it should be excavated. One needs to excavate to preserve the heritage, information, artefacts and context.
The issue is which specific sites should be excavated and which should not. How does one prioritize particular sites for excavation? Furthermore, what criteria determine these priorities? In short, archaeologists must rationalize the decision process for determining site excavation. A diagnostic system for making the decision is required.
Given a surplus of sites and limited resources to excavate, a methodology similar to the triaging system that was developed for emergency care is appropriate. Battlefield medics and hospital emergency rooms have an analogous surplus of patients and limited set of resources to apply to saving lives.
Triaging creates four categories – one category of no priority and three categories of diminishing priority. Hence the name triage. Although there are different scales, the system essentially divides patients into lost (dying, dead and no-priority), cannot wait and needs immediate treatment, has to wait but needs treatment, and minor injuries for which treatment is not necessary.
Thus archaeological sites would similarly be divided into four groupings.
There are those sites that are in such bad shape or in such impossible situations that no matter what you do they are lost. Next, there are those sites that need immediate excavation. These, in turn, are followed by sites where excavations may be delayed. Finally, excavation may not be necessary at all for some sites.
From this ‘rationalizing process’ some corollaries become clear:
a) Triage criteria should be objective, transparent, equitably applied and publicly disclosed. Their ethical implications need to be explored.
b) Triage criteria need to reflect scale. The criteria that apply to a single site, a group of sites as a unit or an entire prehistoric culture are different.
c) Incident-management systems that exercise authority and direction over excavation resources are necessary.
d) A triage committee or officer is necessary to apply the inclusion or exclusion criteria. This role must be separated from the excavator or the archaeological administration in order to prevent conflicts of interest.
e) In some cases (usually exclusion decisions), self-triaging is appropriate and the decisions of the researcher, cultural heritage manager, and the excavator not to put their sites into the higher-priority categories are honoured.
f) There are a number of balancing issues. For example, how does one balance the competing claims of saving the emergently important versus the presently important? Or what are the interests of one iconic site, a type-site, versus the variability of multiple sites showing the distribution and diversity of artefactual material?
g) Triage systems need to be locally specific but also need to conform to provincial, national and international standards.
This rationalization process also provides the data for evidence-based appraisal. One collects comparative data on a wide variety of measures to evaluate the triaging process and its effectiveness. For example, the average time to excavation (tte); the time to complete excavation (ttce); ratio of expected pre-triage results to actual post-triage results (the er/ar ratio); and comparative data among facilities, provinces and nations provide meaningful evaluations. As in the case of other triaging systems, a variety of scoring systems are available for assessing the appropriateness of excavation of sites. The different scoring systems will need to be tested for predictive accuracy and efficiency.
Given this scenario one must train specialists to do excavation triage. They will be the gatekeepers. ‘Interrateability’ is desired. When faced with similar sets of sites, the inclusion and exclusion decisions should be the same independent of the decision-maker. Although training is necessary to use the right diagnostic tools to make the right diagnosis, it need not be done on actual sites for it has been shown that simulations work remarkably well for triaging health, fire and disaster. As in case of doctors, others (nurses and medical corpsmen) when appropriately trained are able to make the triage decision. Similarly, well-trained non-archaeologists should be able to make these decisions.
Finally, there are risks to such a system. For example, one may overtriage or undertriage. Undertriage is the result of underestimating the severity of the need to excavate a site. An example of this would be categorizing a site as not needing excavation when it actually needs excavation but can wait. In the medical fields historically acceptable undertriage rates have been as high as 5 per cent. Overtriage is the process of overestimating the category. Not surprisingly, overtriage rates frequently are much higher than undertriage rates. This is the result of making an effort to avoid undertriaging.
Today, as one looks across the archaeological landscape, one sees a range of archaeologists. At one extreme there are ‘hyper-’excavators. Their raison d'être is to excavate. They travel from one site to another and every intellectual and training problem is solved by excavation. No summer is complete without at least one excavation. At the other extreme are the infrequent excavators. They may excavate once in a lifetime or a decade. For all, the two extremes and those between, judicious planning and adoption of protocols for excavation triage are necessary to optimize outcomes during the site-discovery pandemic in which archaeologists find themselves.
