what do archaeologists call an excavation dig within a site?

Answer 1

An archaeological dig IS an excavation.

The 'hole' they dig is called a trench.

An emergency dig when a site is being redeveloped is called a 'rescue dig'.

Your question isn't really clear enough.

Answer 2

Okay, so there's the site, which is the area you're studying. There's a variety of methods of digging within the site. There are trenches, which involves a backhoe and a, well, trench being dug as an exploratory method. There're units, which are those 1x1 meter squares that you see that make that cool checkerboard pattern. Those are dug carefully with shovels and trowels as another, more gentle and careful exploration. You may also have features. Features are dark (well, darker. sort of) stains in the ground that indicate where something like a hearth, a storage pit, a burial, or anything else that disturbed the soil was. These are excavated carefully, usually with trowels, and they tend not to be the most regular shapes. They're generally kinda roundish, or ovallish, depending on what it was.

We also have various methods for naming the sites. The most common uses numbers and letters to indicate what state and county the dig was in. For example, a site may be called 23LE27. The 23 refers to Missouri, the LE refers to Lewis County, within Missouri, and the 27 is that it's the 27th named site found in that county. We generally have an internal numbering/lettering system for trenches, blocks (any large area of open ground, whether backhoed to see features or dug as a series of units), units and features. You might be working on Feature 5 in Unit 24, Block A, at 23LE27, for instance. That stuff is not universal, like the site numbering. They try to keep it somewhat organized between various phases of a dig, but, if different companies do them, it all gets terribly confusing.

Since I'm not sure exactly what you want to know the name of, I'm not sure how useful any of this was to you. I hope it was, and that it wasn't too confusing.

Answer 3

A site is the entire limits of what you are researching archeologically. An excavation is the area you are digging. You don't always excavate an entire site.