The standard survey practice in the 2003 season consisted of a single team of four to six surveyors spaced 15m apart. The team swept across hillslopes following contours, and at the end of each survey transect the team would sweep around and return towards the opposite direction in the adjacent transect following a boustrophedon configuration. The survey team would assemble to investigate sites when they were encountered, although the team would not necessarily assemble for isolated finds.

Figure5-3. An example of a pedestrian survey line following a river terrace at a 15 meter interval. In this survey, only one mobile GIS unit is used. GPS units carried by the surveyors at either end of the survey line mapped the extent of all surveyed areas.

The portable equipment carried on the survey by each team member included basic day hiking equipment such as personal gear, lunch, copies of maps and a compass, and everyone had a small FM walkie-talkie. In order to map the extent of daily survey coverage, and to quantify the distances between surveyors, those hiking on either end of the survey line carried a Trimble GeoExplorer GPS logging a polyline attributed with the side of the survey that they were walking (right or left) as well as the number of surveyors hiking that day. GPS datalogger tracking devices are more widespread today (in 2006) and pair of small USB based dataloggers such as the Sony GPS-CS1 for geotagging photos are also suitable for continuous data stream mapping on either end of a survey transect. A separate mobile GIS system consisting of Dell Axim PDA with a Trimble Pathfinder Pocket GPS receiver was carried for mapping archaeological sites into Arcpad as will be described in more detail below.