Abstract
The paradigmatic changes in archaeology during the 1960s and 1970s saw refocusing of research interests from culture-historical problems to issues of human adaptation and attendant shifts in research design, from concentration on single sites to a concern with entire regions. Early in these considerations, some archaeologists concerned with the prehistory of mobile hunter-gatherers recognized that the study of land use, adaptation, and processes leading to stability or change could not be conducted solely in terms of regional site records (e. g., Thomas 1971, 1975; Dancey 1973, 1974). Undoubtedly, those aspects of land use that contributed rather small quantities of material remains to the archaeological record that might be widely dispersed over space was an important analytic domain. They suggested instead that artifacts, all artifacts, rather than sites become the focus of discovery and analysis. We refer to this perspective as distributional archaeology, although other terms like nonsite approach (Thomas 1975) and off-site archaeology (e. g., Foley 1981a) are presently in use.
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Jones, G.T., Beck, C. (1992). Chronological Resolution in Distributional Archaeology. In: Rossignol, J., Wandsnider, L. (eds) Space, Time, and Archaeological Landscapes. Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2450-6_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2450-6_8
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