Abstract
Research on how archaeological fieldwork manuals, a sub-category of methods handbooks, regulate research documentation is limited. Qualitative content analysis of 25 English-language archaeological field manuals from the early 1900s to 2010s showed that they instruct how to describe the documentation work, prescribe practices and workflows, and function as often pre-coordinated descriptions of work. A manual forms a working space that is sometimes adopted as such by following the detailed advice given in some of the texts but likely more often used as a more general point of reference. The fact that many manuals do not provide exact recipes for the fieldwork as a whole means that they function as comprehensive representations and documentation (paradata) of actual fieldwork practices only when read in parallel with field documentation.
