Archaeology Argot: Seriation

PETRIE MUSEUM OF EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY, UCL / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

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 chronology. However, when the same archaeological layer contains a datable object (e.g., coins or dated inscriptions) or can be linked to a securely dated event (e.g., a historical battle), these objects then become chronological anchors.

This dating technique was first developed in the late 19th century by the founding father of modern archaeology, William Flinders Petrie (1853–1942), during his excavations at predynastic sites in Upper Egypt and at the site of Tell el-Hesi, now in southern Israel.

Seriation is most readily useful for dating pottery and provides the best results in combination with methods of absolute dating, such as radiocarbon and archaeomagnetic analyses (see “Dating Game: How Archaeologists Date the Biblical Past”). Today, seriation is generally run by computers, which can handle astronomically large volumes of data when looking for patterns and arranging them into sequences.