Julian Steward (1938) wrote the baseline ethnography on 
aboriginal Shoshone and Paiute groups of the Basin-Plateau 
culture area. The ethnography summarized subsistence and 
economic patterns, tools and technology, plant and animal 
resources, socio-political organization, settlement and residence 
patterns, and demography. Steward included a lot of supporting 
detail. Thirty years later David Hurst Thomas (1968) asked the 
question, " If  the behavior patterns Steward summarized for the 
historic Shoshone and Paiute were the same for prehistoric peoples
in the same area, whoever, they were, how would we expect the 
artifacts to "fall on the ground"? In other words, if men hunted 
antelope and other big game in the Fall, if people dispersed into 
extended family groups and gathered grass seeds and roots in the 
Spring and ground the dried materials for grinding and cooking
later on, if people gathered pine-nuts in the Fall and 
established aggregated winter villages near the pine-nut groves,
what would the frequency and distribution of artifacts and 
debitage look like? Furthermore, if a prediction is made about 
what that distribution look like, and the actual distribution 
turns out to closely resemble the model, does that
resemblance document the probability that Stewards 
picture of life in the Basin-Plateau area is applicable 
not only to the historic period, but also to the prehistoric 
period? Thomas answer was "yes".

On analogy to that methodology, then, we ask the question, 
"If the behavior we suggest actually did take place, what 
would the distribution of artifacts  in this case ceramics
  look like in collections assembled nearly completely from 
donated material?

Steward, Julian H.

1938	Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Socio-Political Groups.
Bulletin Number l20. Bureau of American Ethnology. 
Washington: Government Printing Office.