I was prepared to say "yes and no", insofar as Merkle trees are more general.
But some poking around reveals that Merkle's original patent was filed in 1979, whereas Lamport's paper introducing a cryptographic hash chain (S/KEY) was published in 1981.
For an append-only linear data structure like a log or database table configured to be append-only, hash chaining is fine. I've used it for that purpose. Merkle trees are much more useful for anything that needs to fan out or (as git shows) fan in.
My real point was meant to be that these ideas predate blockchain, they don't necessarily need new names.
