Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practice (9th Edition)
by Colin Renfrew, Paul Bahn, Elizabeth DeMarrais · Thames & Hudson
The standard university textbook for the discipline, covering how sites are located, surveyed, excavated, dated and interpreted. After reading it you can explain why a given field technique is chosen and what evidence it can and cannot produce.
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More resources on Archaeological Methods
archaeological.org
The Archaeological Institute of America’s website offers archaeology news and feature articles (from Archaeology Magazine), plus teaching resources, fieldwork updates, and professional opportunities such as grants, fellowships, and events.
Digital Archaeological Record
tDAR (the Digital Archaeological Record) is a free, searchable digital repository of archaeological site reports, datasets, and images contributed by researchers and institutions, supporting data preservation and reuse for research and teaching.
Understanding the Archaeology of Landscapes: A Guide to Good Recording Practice (2nd Edition)
Historic England's free guidance on non-intrusive field survey, showing how earthworks and landscape features are located, measured, drawn and analysed, with defined Levels of Survey, drawing conventions and field-team case studies. After it you can produce and read an analytical earthwork survey.
ADS Guides to Good Practice
Open-access guidance from the UK's national archaeological data archive on creating and documenting fieldwork data: geophysics, survey, laser scanning, photogrammetry, GIS, CAD, databases and images. After working through it you can structure a project archive that stays usable and citable.
Excavation (Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology)
Roskams draws on excavating deeply stratified urban sites in Britain to explain pre-excavation reconnaissance, site evaluation, excavation process, and the recording of photographic, spatial, stratigraphic and physical evidence. After it you can justify why a recording system is designed as it is.
Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy (2nd Edition, free PDF)
The book that introduced the Harris matrix, released free by its author. It sets out the laws of archaeological stratigraphy and shows how to build a site sequence from recorded context relationships rather than from visible soil layers. Of note, the site also offers ten translations.