ANTH 202 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Oscar Montelius, Absolute Dating, Andrew E.
Document Summary
Chapter 6: chronology building: how to get a date. Developed in the early nineteenth century, the index fossil concept is often attributed to british geologist william strata smith (1769 1839). Geologists of smith"s day wrestled with how to correlate the ages of widely separated exposures of rock. Smith observed that forms of life change over time, with different fossils characterizing different rock strata. Thus, widely separated strata could be correlated and assigned to the same time period if they contained the same fossils. This simple idea allowed smith and others to make the first geological maps, and these radically altered the way geologists conceived of the landscape. For the first time, they could see broad patterns that told stories of ancient seas, mountain building, and ice ages. Similar to index fossils in geology; artifact forms that research shows to be diagnostic of a particular period of time.