Relative Dating: Stratigraphy and Seriation

Today's students of archaeology might find it difficult to imagine an era when modern methods of keeping track of time—radiocarbon and luminescence, for example—were unavailable. One might ask, without those methods, how could archaeologists place objects and sites in proper chronological order? Given the importance of those methods in modern archaeology, archaeologists might view earlier efforts to establish temporal control as rather unsophisticated and outdated. Such a view, however, overlooks the fact that early prehistorians devised a battery of clever methods to determine the ages of archaeological phenomena with considerable precision. This kind of chronological control is often referred to as relative dating. Two methods—stratigraphic excavation and seriation—are examined here from a historical point of view.