Journal of Transnational American Studies

The science of dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, provides archaeologists with the most accurate, precise, and therefore reliable dates available to guide their analyses. In the 1920s through 1940s, dendroarchaeology research on “tree-time”  forced archaeologists to radically revise their understanding of the prehistoric past. However, the history of archaeological tree-ring dating has until now been woefully inadequate. This chapter is excerpted from Time, Trees, and Prehistory: Tree-Ring Dating and the Development of North American Archaeology, 1914-1950, a work that examines the impact of dendroarchaeologists’ work on the interpretation of North American prehistory and contextualizes archaeological practices from that period, demonstrating that archaeologists of this era were more analytically sophisticated than they are often given credit for, as they established the basis for revolutionary developments in archaeological theory and method for the next three decades.