...Chapter four digs deeper into the practices of excavation and fieldwork. Being the most distinctive feature of the archaeological being, excavation nevertheless has remained ambiguous in the formation of our identity. Providing archaeology with its trivialized popular image of exploration...

...This chapter shows that ostraca occupied a central place in the patterns of everyday writing in the Graeco-Roman East—not merely in Egypt, but all through this cultural zone—which has sometimes been obscured by two types of archaeological variability, one a matter of the practice of excavation...

...This chapter assesses how key deposits in the cave (Pit, DMNH Velvet Room excavation, CM Velvet Room excavation, Badger Room) relate temporally to each other, to some other localities in the cave, and to the chronologic time scale. It describes the application of acid racemization for relative age...