Building Cultural Chronology in Eastern Washington: The Influence of Geochronology, Index Fossils, and Radiocarbon Dating

Until the early 1950s, it was believed that the archaeological record of eastern Washington state did not exceed 4000 years. That belief changed in the middle 1950s after discovery of the Lind Coulee site (45GR97), originally dated to the Holocene on the basis of geochronological data and subsequently dated via radiocarbon to 8700 B.P. Geochronology and geoarchaeology provided temporal control and resulted in archaeological time being measured discontinuously as stratigraphically associated sets of artifacts were stacked one upon the other. Percentage stratigraphy and frequency seriation played no role in the measurement of time or the construction of cultural chronologies. Local cultural chronologies originally constructed on the basis of chronostratigraphic marker horizons were not significantly altered in the 1960s and 1970s because few radiocarbon ages were run and the chronological validity of the ages was questioned. The increased intensity of cultural resource management in the 1980s witnessed a marked increased in the production of radiocarbon ages, but extant cultural chronologies have not been significantly altered in structure or appearance. 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.