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 superimposed upon each other across time and distance.

The prehistoric Seedskadee area in southwestern Wyoming was something of a frontier: a cultural melting pot, and a transport route between the Great Basin, Great Plains, and intermontane region, where many different lifeways and adaptations have existed. Using the results of work conducted there 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. Ebert 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.
 

James I. Ebert is a consulting archaeologist with Ebert and Associates.