Redeposited material, sealed landscapes, and discontinuous or fragmentary site remains are some of the problems that must be dealt with when doing settlement archaeology in regimes of wet-rice agriculture. This article, based on research in the Nara Basin of western Japan, attempts the formulation of a methodology for analyzing the patterning of archaeological discoveries over the landscape in such a regime, necessitating a catchment approach to materials recycled through earth-moving operations, a minimalist definition of an archaeological site, and a proveniencing system of grid-square attributions.