A site, as defined in The Archaeological Institute of America Glossary, is "Any place where human material remains are found; an area of human activity represented by material culture."
A site report is a detailed report on an archaeological site and its excavation written by the people conducting the excavation.
A site report includes information on what has been found there; the site's size and chronological placement; the methods used by the archaeologists conducting the excavation; the extent to which the excavation has been completed; and conclusions drawn from (and sometimes questions raised by) the findings thus far. The report is accompanied by images and photographs, maps, and, or, tabular data, and a bibliography of resources, usually other scholarly resources, consulted in writing the report.
A site report may be published periodically, say, annually, updating you on the excavation's progress. Typically, a report is published as a journal article, a book, or a chapter in a book.
A site report is laid out like a scholarly journal article.
It includes these sections: Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results/Analysis, Discussion, Conclusion, and References.
The sections are arranged to present the study's findings, interpret its data, and then relate the study to existing scholarship.
Example of a site report (about a medieval fisherman's midden) that features this layout:
Note: A site report, like a scholarly journal article, starts off by identifying its authors and the academic institutions, or organizations, with which they are associated professionally. (Sometimes the authors' e-mail addresses are provided.) This information helps readers evaluate the authors' qualifications.
To find site reports and other primary-source articles in Wofford OneSearch or in databases, try searching the name of your country, region, site, type of site (for example, mound or midden or "kitchen midden" or shellmidden or village or temple or tomb), culture, tribe, group, or people in conjunction with one of these keyword phrases:
Sample keywords searches:
Note that it helps to put quotation marks around multi-word phrases, but you may want to search such phrases with and without quotation marks to see if your results vary, that is, to bring up resources that you had not seen before.
These scholarly journals are known to be particularly good sources of site reports. You can click on the links to these individual journals to search their respective volumes by keyword. The journals are grouped here as General, Regional, and Theoretical.
General Journals:
Regional Journals:
Journals on Theory That Yet Provide Site Reports:
Search for books in Wofford OneSearch:
Excavations (Archaeology) AND [name of site or country or region or tribe or people]
Search for books in PASCAL Delivers:
Excavations (Archaeology) AND [name of site or country or region or tribe or people]
You may want to try this same type of search in WorldCat.
Please note that searching the useful phrase archaeology fieldwork in OneSearch or PASCAL (or WorldCat) will bring up information on fieldwork practices as opposed to information on excavations at specific sites.
Identify the archaeological site that you are interested in (you may need to use a variety of names for it, as a place's name can change over time); then, using Google, identify the archaeological society for the state, country, or region that the site is in; and then, if the society has a website, search its publications using the keywords that we have identified as most appropriate for finding site reports.
Here is a sample of scholarly websites that provide site reports: