Phase I Archaeological Survey Workflow Checklist

A Phase I archaeological survey looks deceptively simple on paper: walk the project area, document what you find, write a report. In practice, the work that determines whether a Phase I clears SHPO review on the first pass — or comes back with revisions — happens before the crew sets foot on the ground, and again after they leave.

This guide is a field-tested checklist for running a Phase I survey end-to-end. It's organized into pre-field, in-field, and post-field sections, with the specific steps that separate a Phase I that ships in three weeks from one that takes three months.

Pre-field: the work that decides everything

The single biggest predictor of a clean Phase I is how well the pre-field workweek is run. Spend time here.

Background research

• Pull the SHPO records search results. Do not start fieldwork without knowing which previously recorded sites fall inside or adjacent to your project area.
• Pull the GLO and historical aerial imagery. Settlement patterns, structures, and disturbance histories matter for both site sensitivity and methods justification.
• Pull soils, slope, and hydrology layers. These drive your survey strategy — high-probability landforms get tighter transect spacing.
• Confirm tribal consultation status with your client. If consultation is not complete, your fieldwork timeline is not real yet.

Methods design

• Define your survey strategy in writing before mobilization. Pedestrian only? Shovel test pit grid? What spacing, what depth, what termination criteria?
• Match your methods to your state SHPO's published guidance. Not your state? Read theirs anyway — reviewers compare.
• Decide on your provenience system before the crew arrives. Site numbering, isolate numbering, and STP grid identifiers should be locked in.

Logistics

• Equipment: trowels, screens, GPS units, cameras, flagging, field forms (or tablets), batteries, water, first aid.
• Crew briefing: review the SOW, sensitivity model, methods, daily targets, and emergency protocols. Do not assume anyone read the proposal.
• Permitting: BLM, state, or tribal access permits in hand. Vehicle access agreements with private landowners signed.

In-field: the data that has to be right the first time

Field crews are recording for an audience that isn't there — the SHPO reviewer, six months from now, who has never seen the project area. Every record has to stand alone.

Site recording basics

• Every recorded resource gets a Primary Record (or your state's equivalent) with location, recorder, date, and a clear narrative description.
• Multi-component sites get the appropriate component forms attached.
• Photographs include direction, scale, and a description tied to the resource record. A photo log without those is half-useful.
• GPS coordinates are recorded for every resource boundary and every diagnostic artifact location, not just a "site center."

The discipline that pays off later

• Use controlled vocabularies. If your state SHPO uses a coded list (Nevada IMACS is the classic), do not let crew members type free-text into coded fields. Reviewers reject these.
• Photograph every isolate. Storage curation is for collections, but field photographs are for the report and stay searchable forever.
• Take a "context" photograph for every site — landscape view that shows the resource in its setting, not just close-ups of features.
• Update site forms before leaving the site, not back at the truck. Detail erodes within hours.

Tools that prevent the most common errors

A field tool that pushes crews to fill required fields, attaches GPS and direction to every photo automatically, and links photos to records as they're taken removes the most common Phase I errors. Compare the tools that actually do this.

Post-field: where Phase I reports get won or lost

Post-field is where deficiencies caught in the field can still be fixed quickly — and where deficiencies that weren't caught become permanent problems.

Day-of-return tasks

• Crew downloads or syncs all records before leaving the office. Photos, forms, GPS data — all on a backed-up server, not just a tablet.
• Field crew walks the PI through any weird finds, ambiguous calls, or methods deviations. Do this while the day is fresh; PIs writing the report from cold notes lose detail.
• Equipment cleaned, batteries charged, supplies restocked for the next day. Tomorrow's productivity is set tonight.

End-of-fieldwork tasks

• Cross-check the records: every resource on the GIS layer has a form; every form has photos; every photo has a description.
• Reconcile field provenience with your firm's permanent numbering system. If you used placeholder site numbers, swap them for SHPO-assigned trinomials.
• Generate the SHPO-format export. If you're using a tool like FieldTap with FormMap the official PDF auto-fills from your records — verify it, don't retype it.

Reporting

• Methods section matches what the crew actually did, not what the proposal said. If methods changed in the field, document why.
• Each recorded resource gets a clear NRHP eligibility recommendation with a defensible justification. "Not eligible — limited integrity, lacks data potential" is a sentence reviewers will accept; "not eligible" alone is not.
• Maps are accurate, legible, and use coordinates that match the form data. The number-one cause of resubmission is coordinate disagreement between the form, the map, and the GIS deliverable.

Where firms most often lose time

In our experience working with CRM firms, the biggest time sinks on a Phase I are predictable:

1. Photo management. Hours of post-field time renaming, sorting, and matching photos to records. Solved at the platform level — every photo should be tied to a record at capture time.
2. Form-to-PDF transcription. Filling out digital forms in the field, then retyping the data into the official state PDF. This is exactly the problem FieldTap FormMap eliminates.
3. Coordinate inconsistency. Manual data entry across the form, map, and GIS deliverable creates drift. Generate all three from a single record.
4. Late-stage methods documentation. Writing the methods section at report time, weeks after the fieldwork. Capture methods deviations as they happen, not from memory.

Related guides

• Section 106 Reporting Requirements: A PM's Checklist
• Digital Field Recording for CRM Archaeology — Buyer's Guide
• Bag Inventory and Provenience Tracking for Field Archaeology

If you're a CRM firm running Phase I work and finding that the form-to-PDF and photo-management problems eat days of project time, that's exactly what FieldTap was built for. Start a free 30-day trial — no credit card, free import from Wildnote or Fulcrum if you're switching.