Nash, Stephen Edward 1964-

PERSONAL:

Born 1964. Education: Grinnell College, B.A., 1986; University of Arizona, M.A., 1991, Ph.D., 1997.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of Anthropology, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL 60605. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Archaeological fieldwork in North America and Israel, 1986-88; University of Arizona, Tucson, Department of Anthropology and the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, researcher and instructor, 1989-97; Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL, director of the Paul S. Martin Project, 1997—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Southwest Foundation grant, 1995; National Science Foundation grant, 1995; A.E. Douglass Award, Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, 1997.

WRITINGS:

Time, Trees, and Prehistory: Tree-Ring Dating and the Development of North American Archaeology, 1914-1950, University of Utah Press (Salt Lake City, UT), 1999.

It's about Time: A History of Archaeological Dating in North America, University of Utah Press (Salt Lake City, UT), 2000.

Contributor of articles to scholarly journals, including the Journal of the Southwest, American Antiquity, Bulletin of the History of Archeology, and Geoarcheology.

SIDELIGHTS:

Stephen Edward Nash is an anthropologist who specializes in tree-ring dating. He has extensive field experience in the southwestern United States, southwestern France, and Israel. His publications focus on the history of tree-ring dating, also known as dendrochronology, a discipline that began in the United States and was central to scientists learning about the natural history of the continent. He serves as the director of the Paul S. Martin Project at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, a vast collection of artifacts collected between 1930 and 1970 in the southwestern United States, of which over 250,000 still needed to be catalogued at the time of his appointment.

Time, Trees, and Prehistory: Tree-Ring Dating and the Development of North American Archaeology, 1914-1950, Nash's doctoral dissertation for the University of Arizona—the birthplace of dendrochronology—documents astronomer-turned-anthropologist A.E. Douglass's efforts to date the Anasazi culture and other prehistoric groups of the American West and Alaska. Beyond explaining Douglass's scientific advances, Nash explores the field of archeology itself, ultimately presenting a story "of considerable human frailty, professional jealousy, intrigue, back-biting and old-fashioned ad hominem warfare all set against a backdrop of fascinating field adventures, significant discoveries and the development of a polyglot science with vast applicability to many disciplines," wrote Donald J. McGraw in the American Scientist.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Scientist, January, 2000, Donald J. McGraw, review of Time, Trees, and Prehistory: Tree-Ring Dating and the Development of North American Archaeology, 1914-1950, p. 84.*