In the nineteenth century, prehistorians in the Old World were already much concerned with issues of cultural chronology. Inspired by the success of paleontologists and geologists in their use of the “index fossil” concept (Daniel 1964: 33–4), prehistorians began to make use of certain stone tool types and pottery types to indicate the age of deposits in the same way (see Childe 1956: 59; Rouse 1972: 126; Brown 1982: 181). The use of type concepts therefore has a long history in the Old World (cf. Gorodzov 1933; Clark 1957: 134–8; Chang 1967: 8; Klejn 1982: 38–50). In the New World, however, it was generally supposed that the native inhabitants were fairly recent immigrants from Asia, and hence that there was no significant time depth in American culture history. Consequently, there was more interest in the spatial than in the temporal variations of culture, and for this kind of ordering type concepts were not particularly important. N. C. Nelson in the Galisteo Basin was probably the first archaeologist in North America to make systematic use of type concepts for dating purposes (Nelson 1916), and the practice did not become general until a decade later.

Once they had become aware of the possibilities, however, Americans soon made up for the deficiency in their earlier use of type concepts. The late 1920s and the 1930s witnessed an enormous proliferation of arrowhead, pottery, and other typologies; indeed, more than half of the typologies in use today were probably formulated originally during that period.