Biogeography is an integrative field of study, which seeks to understand the processes responsible for the distribution of organisms in space, and its change over time. With the development of the discipline, several analytical methods have been proposed to infer the biogeographical history of lineages through the reconstruction of events that may have affected distributions of taxa through time. These methods are based on explicit models of cost-benefit, and are used to infer ancestral areas through cost optimization of related events (vicariance, dispersal, extinction, and duplication). The development of models able to provide statistical estimates for the results makes the event-based methods interesting tools for studies in historical biogeography. In this review some methods are discussed, and an example of use with a lineage of lizards from tropical South America is provided.