Beyond the Dates: Reconstructing the Social Histories of Southeastern Utah Cliff Dwellings with Tom Windes

Summary

For over a dozen years, Tom Windes and his Woodrat crew have been scampering in and out of the canyons of the Cedar Mesa area, mapping hard to reach cliff dwellings and taking tree-ring samples from archaeological wood in intact structures. Beyond just obtaining tree-ring dates during this work, Tom has developed new dendroarchaeological sampling methods, trained a new generation of researchers in these techniques, and pushed the limits of standard tree-ring analysis and interpretative methodologies. More than just dating ancient structures, Tom and his colleagues are developing new ways of reconstructing the social histories of cliff dwellings and ancient communities in Southeastern Utah based on detailed architectural documentation, tree-ring dating of structural timbers, and landscape level analyses. This presentation outlines Tom's various contributions to the dendroarchaeological sciences, his undying support of a new generation of researchers, and some of the new methods Tom helped to inspire that are pushing and challenging interpretive frameworks of Southeastern Utah prehistory.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Its About Time: Contributions in Honor of Thomas C. Windes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage