Director Christine Shaw
The student by now should have gained an appreciation of the differences in the nature of factors which influence the outcome of experiments, through these pages and the paper The Nature of Experiment in Archaeology. Therefore, this introduction will merely remind students of the division of factors into controlled and uncontrolled, which forms the basis of this and the companion page.
The essential nature of a controlled factor is that the level may be set largely at will (with logical constraints and boundaries) for the purpose of experiment.
It is almost certain that no experiment would ever be contemplated in which the effect of only one controlled variable would be studied on its own, simply because to do so would be completely inefficient in terms of time and resources. There are a number of available standard experimental designs which are statistically valid and examples of these are given in standard texts on experimental design, to which students should refer. Needless to say, the work at Butser Ancient Farm uses such approaches. Thus, the headings given on this page are provided in order to isolate discussion on one topic or another but the experimental results may or certainly will have come from multi-factor experiments.
Planting Time and Sowing Rates
Created 01 August 2001 - Updated 21 January 2002