Cultural Affiliation dating is complex. There is no one way to go about using this technique. If a community of people uses Cultural Affiliation to gauge its history, they might be differently attached to a place, body, or artifact. In addition to this, sometimes there are different levels of Cultural Affiliation. Debates are also made as to which kind of Cultural Affiliation is the best.

The different levels of Cultural Affiliation are known as temporal levels. Native peoples of the Southwest have a few different types of these levels. The first type is the Mythic Period, which was the time before the creation of fully formed humans, and even has some continuation into the present. The next type is the Traditional Period. This Affiliation has fully formed humans living where they are now. Historic Period Affiliation follows, and began when the first European person, animal, tool, grain, or disease arrived. Next is the Aboriginal Period. This is defined by the U.S. Indian Claims Commission as when Indian ethnic groups lost their land to the U.S. federal government. And the last is the Contemporary Period, which is where Indian peoples are living today.

Debates about the uses of Cultural Affiliation have come about in the last few decades. One of the first debates was trying to decide whether Native American origin stories, or scientifically known migrations are more accurate. Particular language groups are studied to see how a certain group of people has moved from place to place. The same goes with ethnography and archaeology, which both take similar cultural traits and material culture and use the information to determine the movement of a people. One of the newer methods, physical anthropology, takes DNA patterns and looks for similarities of groups to determine movement.

Bibliography

http://www.library.arizona.edu/users/jlcox/class/cnotesold16.html