Of Braudel & Beams: How Tree-ring Dating Enables the Study of Transformative Social Changes in the Ancient Southwest U.S.

Summary

Fernand Braudel said, "History may be divided into three movements: what moves rapidly, what moves slowly and what appears not to move at all." Archaeologists gravitate towards the longue durée–cultural continuities and traditions–but our most important questions have traditionally focused on transformative changes such as the rise of the state, the collapse of empires, or the origins of agriculture. Armed with imprecise dating methods, archaeologists have tended to view transformative changes as events, for which we then struggle to identify prime movers or causes. Chronological precision, however, allows us to study the past at the scale of lifetimes and generations, allowing us to understand how qualitative transformations unfold in multiple dimensions. We illustrate our point with a case study from Aztec–a monumental Chacoan complex in the Southwest United States. Earl Morris originally used stratigraphic dating to argue for rapid change at Aztec–an early "Chacoan" followed by a later "Mesa Verdean" occupation. Today, hundreds of tree-ring dates allow archaeologists to see nuanced shifts over several generations at Aztec. Chacoan building ideas were initiated by colonists, carried forward by the next generation, and ultimately translated into the McElmo style as part of a qualitative social transformation.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The short and the long of it: combining timescales

Keywords

Spatial Coverage