The Caution Bay project field and laboratory methods

This chapter reports on the personnel, research structure and analytical methods employed in the Caution Bay project, constituting the sum of the various phases of field and laboratory research at Caution Bay. We stress that from the onset our approach has been to investigate through excavation the character of the archaeological record at a landscape scale, rather than more detailed investigations of a handful of sites that would have provided limited spatial understandings across the whole of the study area. That is, limited excavations at numerous sites were favoured over large-scale horizontal excavations of a few sites. This choice of strategy has arguably been vindicated by the discovery of rich cultural deposits that would have been entirely missed had we focused on the ‘best’ surface sites, none of which possess the treasured and then-unexpected Lapita horizons subsequently found at depth following excavation at sites with minor post-Lapita surface cultural deposits. Be that as it may, we present here baseline details into the analytical methods used for all of our excavations and laboratory research, critical background information that
details how 122 Caution Bay sites have been excavated and analysed, towards publication in a sequence of forthcoming monographs.