The impulse to keep excavating, set against widespread failures to publish in a timely manner, has created a crisis of confidence for archaeology. This is especially so in Europe and North America, where contract archaeology has witnessed dramatic growth in recent decades, but it is not universally the case. Far from being the defining practice of the discipline, excavation is not the only technique for generating data relevant to archaeological problems and, ideally, should be deployed as one element in multi-stage, multi-scalar fieldwork strategies. In any given situation in different parts of the world, many locally specific factors affect the role and relative importance of excavation. Examples are given from the author's recent fieldwork in Greece, southern Armenia and the eastern Caribbean.