Seriation: A Step by Step Discussion of the Dating Technique

Seriation as a dating technique in archaeology was first used, and probably invented by the archaeologist Sir William Flinders-Petrie in 1899. Seriation (also called sequence dating) is based on the idea that artifacts change over time. Like fins on the back end of a Cadillac, artifact styles and characteristics change over time, coming into fashion, then fading in popularity.

Generally, seriation is manipulated graphically. The standard graphical result of seriation is a series of "battleship curves," which are horizontal bars representing percentages plotted on a vertical axis. Plotting several curves can allow the archaeologist to develop a relative chronology for an entire site or group of sites.

Assume you are studying six junkyard deposits, and you are interested in determining how old each of the junkyards are, relative to one another; i.e., which was opened first, which second, etc. You notice that each junkyard has a collection of discarded musical recordings, ranging from 78 rpm record fragments right up through CD-Roms. You count all the musical data from each junkyard, and work out the percentages of each type of recording.