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The advent of AI-based imagery survey presents the opportunity to explore new kinds of questions about large scale archaeological distributions. Such questions are not only different in degree (scale) but in kind; they require new modes of inquiry, not unlike how “distant reading” of texts en masse is a different mode of textual analysis from traditional textual reading and hermeneutics. Here, we explore distant reading of the archaeological record by first delineating categories of inquiry, such as human ecodynamics and human-environment coupled systems approaches, settlement pattern analysis, and network-based analysis. We present initial results from our large AI-Assisted imagery survey spanning much of the Andean region, which documented in excess of a million features via object detection techniques, and mass characterization of archaeological landscapes via semantic segmentation techniques. These prospects toward continental-scale views of patterns and processes would be impossible in the absence of such continuous coverage beyond the scale of field-based methodologies. We thus advocate for the value of such perspectives as complementary and additive rather to traditional archaeological modes of analysis.