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Tree Rings—The Archaeologist's Time-Piece21

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Emil W. Haury
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Extract

Since 1929 Southwestern archaeology has stood on a much surer footing than at any other time in the history of its development. This stabilization is due to the research of Dr. A. E. Douglass of Tucson, Arizona, whose inquiries into the reaction of trees to weather, from an astronomic standpoint, led, as a ramification, to the use of the annual growth rings in trees in dating the pre-Spanish remains of man in the Southwest. From the standpoint of the archaeologist, the most significant progress date in Dr. Douglass' study was June 22, 1929. On that day ended a long search for a particular sequence of rings needed to complete the ring record. This sequence was found in a log in the Showlow ruin, and united two chronologies then extant, the one a floating series of five hundred and eighty years, the other an historic series extending from 1929 to about 1280 A.D.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , October 1935 , pp. 98 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1935

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Footnotes

21

This paper is one of three read before a symposium on “Trees: Recorders of History and Climate,” held at Santa Fe, New Mexico, on May 1, 1935, in connection with the Southwestern Division Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

References

22 Year Book No. 33, for the year 1933-34.

23 McGregor, J. C., Tree Ring Dating; Museum Notes, Museum of Northern Arizona, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1930.

24 Denoting the final layer of woody tissue grown by the tree, occurring beneath the bark.

25 Douglass, A. E., The Secret of the Southwest Solved by Talkative Tree-Rings; National Geographic Magazine, December 1929, p. 754.

26 Haury, E. W., The Canyon Creek Ruin and the Cliff Dwellings of the Sierra Ancha; Medallion Papers XIV, Gila Pueblo, Globe, Arizona, 1934.

27 The Significance of the Dated Prehistory of Chetro Ketl, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. The University of New Mexico Bulletin, Vol. I, No. 1,1934.

28 A Tree-Ring Chronology for the Rio Grande Drainage in Northern New Mexico; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 19, No. 9, pp. 803-806; 1933.