Why prospect?¶
There are two use cases that motivated the development and design of prospect.
As a planning tool for archaeological surveys¶
Users can model different methodologies to see how they might impact artifact recovery rates or how they impact the discovery of specific features of interest. prospect can also provide estimates of the amount of time a particular survey will take and could be used to demonstrate compliance with heritage regulations, both of which are immediately useful for cultural resource management (CRM) companies.
As a heuristic device for studying and evaluating survey methodologies¶
Users can recreate the actual survey methodology used in the field and then vary different parameters to see what effects (or not) these might have had on the results. For example, one could repeat a simulation with a wide range of underlying artifact densities as a way to determine whether their methodology was robust enough to accurately estimate those densities.
This use case is also important as a way to address the impracticalities of producing reproducible field studies; controlled seeding experiments or re-surveying studies that have been used in the past are too limited in scale and scope. prospect can quickly generate thousands of surveys under wide ranges of parameters.
Other uses¶
While these two use cases were the main drivers in the development of prospect, it might also be useful in other areas. Some possibilities:
As a tool for teaching students about survey methodologies
As a gateway for teaching archaeology students to program in Python
Outside of archaeology, it could be adapted for use in planning field research in disciplines like biology, ecology, paleontology, etc.