For this seriation demonstration, we're going to assume that we know of six junkyards (Junkyards A-F), scattered in the rural areas around our community, all dated to the 20th century. We don't have historical information about the junkyards--they were illegal dumping areas and no county records have been kept on them. For a study we're doing on, say, the availability of music in rural locations during the 20th century, we'd like to know more about the deposits in these illicit junkyards.
Using seriation at our hypothetical junkyard sites, we will try to establish the chronology--the order in which the junkyards were used and closed. To start out, we will take a sample of the deposits in each of junkyards. It isn't possible to investigate all of a junkyard, so we'll pick a representative sample of the deposit.
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We take our samples back to the laboratory, and count the kinds of artifacts in them, and discover that each of the junkyards have broken pieces of musical recording methods in them--old broken records, pieces of stereo equipment, 8-track cassette tapes. We count the types of musical recording methods found in each of our junkyard samples, and then work out the percentages. Of all the music recording artifacts in our sample from Junkyard E, 10% are related to 45 rpm technology; 20% to 8-tracks; 60% are related to cassette tapes and 10% are CD-Rom parts.
The figure on this page is an Microsoft Excel (TM) table showing the results of our frequency count.
Sources and Further Information
- Timing is Everything: A Short Course in Archaeological Dating Techniques
- Sampling in Archaeology
- Stratigraphy
See the bibliography for a list of sources and further reading.
