Are Big Data Better Data? A Historical Evaluation of Dinetah Navajo Tree-ring Data

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Tree-Ring Materials as a Basis for Cultural Interpretations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The tremendous expansion of research and computing power in the past few decades has resulted in the creation of large databases in many fields, and archaeology is no exception. But what have we really learned? In the early 1990s, astronomers searched the skies with the most advanced technology of the time. They addressed such fundamental questions as the size and age of the universe with hundreds of thousands of data points and supercomputers. Their inferences, however, suffered from Malmquist bias—what they couldn’t see was just as significant as what they could see. Their inferences were overturned using new techniques and, later, more advanced technology. Is this true in dendroarchaeology? This paper is a historical analysis of dendroarchaeologically dated sites in the traditional Navajo homeland of Dinetah. Tree ring samples have been collected from these sites for nearly 100 years by scholars from a variety of agencies and institutions. The quantity of samples has increased more than 10-fold, mostly in the past 30 years. This historical perspective allows me to examine those inferences that have endured and those that have changed. Surprisingly, data quantity have not influenced tree-ring interpretations much, although data quality have had significant impacts on our inferences.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Tree-Ring Materials as a Basis for Cultural Interpretations   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51016