When an archaeological site is encountered during survey in this Arcpad system the site must be delimited first, using the Site-A polygon, and then loci located within the site are delimited and described as related in two accounts (Tripcevich 2004;Tripcevich 2004). The locations of individual artifacts of interest are mapped and bagged separately using a Lithic_P or Ceramic_P geometry type. These include diagnostic artifacts or other materials of specific interest.

Table 5-6. Locus and Site artifact density definitions.

Pin flags were used to delimit these features of interest, and generally in the case of most medium and high density loci, the result is a "fried-egg" model of artifact density polygons. In recording these polygon features, one generally went from the geographically largest to smallest entity because, as is also true in desktop GIS, features that are created later appear "on top" of features created earlier and thus larger, later features would visually obscure earlier features. This condition has to be corrected back in the laboratory and thus it was simply easiest to map largest to smallest. When a feature is mapped in Arcpad with the GPS then, subsequently, an attribute form appears that allows for explicit description of the feature.