We Need Better Chronologies: Progress in Getting them

Abstract

Archaeologists have long celebrated their unique ability to deal with the long term. But we are increasingly recognizing that we can and must also understand more rapid events. They are critical for many of the questions we now consider most interesting, such as distinguishing between changes that unfolded gradually and those that happened suddenly. In considering interactions among regions, we need something better than cross-dating on the basis of resemblances in material objects. That is especially so when we would like to know where something first developed and the tempo of its spread to other regions. As one particularly clear example of the beneficial effects of finer chronologies, Robert Santley (in Sanders et al. 1979:65-73) showed how shorter phases can drastically alter our picture of the ebb and flow of settlement history in a region. When Basin of Mexico sites in the Cuauhtitlan region are dated only in broad terms to the Middle and Late Formative periods, a rather placid picture of settlement change emerges.