The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology


precision

precision [Ge].
In archaeological science, precision is the degree to which random errors effect a set of measurements; high precision means that the overall random error is small and that replicated measurements will provide closely similar results. A random error in this sense is one which, when averaged, tends to zero as the number of measurements averaged is increased. High precision does not, therefore, mean that the measurements will necessarily be close to the true value; systematic errors may give low accuracy. In other words, precise results are not ecessarily accurate results and vice versa. compare ACCURACY.

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