ABSTRACT
The authors return to North America, to discuss the increasing pre-occupation with chronology, culture history, and artifact ordering that developed during the 1930s. They also discuss some of the major changes in archaeology that emerged during the 1930s and 1940s: a new concern with ecology and economic archaeology, with cultural ecology, and with settlement patterns. While dendrochronology became the established chronological method for the Southwest, others devoted themselves to developing new taxonomies for North American archaeology. But the greatest advances were in ecological archaeology, much of it in the hands of the Cambridge archaeologist Grahame Clark. After initial efforts to study ancient human behavior, epitomized by his Ancient Life in Kentucky, 1928, Webb turned to culture history and minutiae of artifacts in his later career. The authors describe the development of North American culture history and its preoccupations with artifact classification and chronology, which resulted in the development of dendrochronology.
