Terah L. Smiley papers

Correspondence, reports, and articles relating to Ted Smiley’s field of geochronology including interests in dendrochronology, paleontology, geochemistry, palynology and paleoecology. His correspondents include university administrators, graduate students, fellow scientists throughout the world, and his colleagues on committees of professional organizations. Earlier correspondence contains more exchanges of scientific information while later correspondence is mostly administrative.

Letters to Andrew E. Douglass relate his work organizing files and specimens at the Tree-Ring laboratory in the late 1940s and early 1950s. There is correspondence with other laboratories about the mechanics of starting work on Carbon14 dating. Also present is a 1949 project to compile a map of sites where tree-ring dating samples had been collected.

A small amount of correspondence, 1960 to 1967, relates to Smiley’s work, using tree-ring dating for the Navajo Tribe and testifying at the Navajo-Hopi boundary hearing before the Indian Claims Commission. His presentation was later published as a book in 1968, An Introduction to Tree-Ring Dating, with co-author Marvin A. Stokes.

His active involvement with scientific organizations is documented with correspondence and lectures. Organizations include the International Quarternary Association (INQUA), the American Association for the Advancement of Science Committee on Arid Lands.

Typescripts of lectures and manuscripts, research drafts and notes concern various topics related to his field. There are materials on Sunset Crater, the Petrified National Forest, and other areas in Arizona as well as more general scientific topics.