Next, we break apart the bars, and align them so that all of the same colored bars are positioned vertically next to the others. Horizontally, the bars still represent the percentages of musical recording types in each of the junkyards. What this step does is create a visual representation of the qualities of the artifacts, and their co-occurrence at different junkyards.
Notice that this figure does not mention what kind of artifacts we're looking at, it just groups similarities. The beauty of the seriation system is that you don't necessarily have to know the dates of the artifacts at all, although it helps to know which is earliest. You derive the relative dates of the artifacts--and the junkyards -- based on the relative frequencies of artifacts within and between sites.
What the early practitioners of seriation did was use colored strips of paper to represent the percentages of artifact types; this figure is an approximation of the descriptive analytical technique called seriation.
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.
