I thought that Tom Crist might comment on this, but since he has not, I'll offer a couple of cents worth.

In my experience, the level of effort required to excavate and record burials is directly effected by the condition of the human remains.

At the 10th Street First African Baptist Church Cemetery (Philadelphia), excavated under my direction in 1990, we spent approximately 2.5 days with a team of 2 persons on each burial, after it had been identified - i.e., approximately 40 hourts.  We spent additional time in the field identifing burials not included in this estimate. These were fairly well-preserved, complete remains.

At the African Burial Ground in New York, (I was John Milner Associates' project manager) excavation effort was closer to 2 weeks for a team of 2 on each burial, i.e., 160 hours.  These were fairly complete, if rather poorly preserved, remains.

Recently, in excavating a family plot in northern Virginia, we excavated 5 very poorly preserved graves with a team of 6, from which only a few fragments of bone were recovered, in considerably less than 8 hours per burial.

Accordingly, there is no hard and fast rule regarding level of effort/length of time required to excavate burials and the human remains they contain.  The condition of the remains and what one hopes to learn are the determinates.

Hope this is addresses the original question,
John

John P. McCarthy, RPA
Project Director
Applied Archaeology and History Associates, Inc.
Annapolis, MD 21401

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