Burial Depth Estimator

The rate at which sediment actually buries a site varies enormously by landscape setting — an aeolian, wind-deposited context can bury material faster than a residual, in-place soil where little new sediment ever arrives — so this calculator applies a different multiplier for each of the four settings to reflect those real differences. Two sites of identical age sitting in different landscape positions can end up at meaningfully different depths purely because of where they happen to be.

Plowing physically churns and mixes soil down to a typical depth of roughly 30 centimeters, which can scramble artifact positions, break stratigraphic layers, and mix material from different time periods together within that zone. A predicted depth that falls within the plow zone on a cultivated field is flagged as likely disturbed specifically because mechanical mixing, not just burial depth, is what threatens a deposit's integrity there.

It's a rough planning bracket rather than a statistically derived confidence interval, since real sedimentation rates fluctuate with individual flood events, droughts, and land-use changes rather than accumulating in a perfectly steady line over centuries. Sites with a long, complex depositional history or evidence of erosion events are more likely to fall outside this range than a simple, continuously-aggrading floodplain would be.

It gives a preliminary integrity assessment based purely on predicted depth and whether that depth falls within a typical plow zone, but confirming actual stratigraphic integrity requires physical investigation — test excavations, soil profile descriptions, and direct observation of whether layers are intact or have been disturbed. Use this estimate to help decide where and how deep to dig test units, not as a substitute for what those units actually reveal.