Tedlock looks at the built world with the eye of an archaeologist and ethnographer. His long experience as a fieldworker has made him acutely aware of the ways in which buildings are continuously altered by human actions and natural forces. Anthropology assigns ruins to archaeology and structures currently in use to ethnology, but Tedlock reminds the viewer that an occupied building bears marks of the same processes that produce archaeological remains. As he puts it, "Whenever I look around at the worlds humans build for themselves, I see archaeology in the making."