Determining when an object or artifact was created is one of the main concerns of archaeology. Among the earliest techniques used to date ancient artifacts is seriation, which assumes that specific types of material culture evolve over time, changing their form, manufacturing techniques, and decorative styles. Seriation analyzes and compares artifacts of a particular type and places them into chronologically ordered series. Dating based on seriation does not provide absolute dates but rather indicates where an artifact belongs relative to other artifacts of a given type. Known also as artifact sequencing, seriation is thus a technique for establishing a relative […]
