Archaeology is founded implicitly on the concept of the site, making a careful distinction between sealed sites -- presumed to have complete temporal integrity -- and the surface record, which is generally considered to be without chronological resolution. While most American archaeologists focus on reconstructing events and episodes at camps, pueblos, and villages, Jim Ebert questions this distinction. Instead he characterizes the archaeological record as an accumulation of many human events superim-posed upon each other across time and distance. Using the results of work conducted in the Seedskadee area of southwestern Wyoming as a model for a distributional approach, Ebert discusses human settlement and mobility, subsistence and technological strategies, ethnoarchaeology, Great Basin ethnohistory, field survey methods, formation processes, and spatial analytical approaches. He concludes that data collection and analysis that are explicitly nonsite can be utilized to arrive at a different archaeological record based on varying scales and distributions of the actual, definable physical items occurring across large, contiguous landscapes.
