Compare methods

	Ceramic Thin-Section Petrography	Frequency Seriation
Field	Archaeology	Archaeology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2013	1962
Originator	Adapted from geological petrography; codified for archaeology by Patrick Sean Quinn	Leslie Spier; James A. Ford (developed from W. M. F. Petrie's sequence dating)
Type	Optical microscopic characterization of ceramic fabrics for provenance and technology	Relative-chronology ordering of assemblages by type proportions
Seminal source	Quinn, P. S. (2013). Ceramic Petrography: The Interpretation of Archaeological Pottery & Related Artefacts in Thin Section. Archaeopress. ISBN: 9781905739592	Lyman, R. L., & O'Brien, M. J. (2006). Measuring Time with Artifacts: A History of Methods in American Archaeology. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN: 9780803280526
Aliases	Ceramic Petrography, Pottery Thin-Section Analysis, Petrographic Fabric Analysis, Optical Microscopy of Ceramic Fabrics	Frequency Seriation Dating, Battleship-Curve Seriation, Proportional Seriation
Related	2	3
Summary	Ceramic thin-section petrography characterizes pottery by examining a wafer-thin slice of a sherd under a polarizing microscope, the same instrument geologists use to study rocks. Because most pottery is made from clay tempered with sand, crushed rock, grog, or shell, the mineral and rock inclusions visible in thin section carry a geological fingerprint of the raw materials, while the clay matrix and voids record how the pot was formed and fired. As Patrick Quinn's reference work sets out, the analyst identifies and quantifies these constituents, sorts sherds into petrographic fabric groups, and then relates each group's mineralogy to regional geology to infer where the pottery was made and how it was manufactured. It bridges the visual world of ceramic typology and the elemental world of chemical provenance.	Frequency seriation is a relative-dating technique that orders archaeological assemblages in time by the changing proportions of the artifact types they contain. Its premise is that any cultural type is introduced, gradually becomes popular, peaks, and then declines, so that the relative frequency of a type traces a single rise-and-fall curve through time. By rearranging the rows of a type-by-assemblage abundance table until every type's frequency forms one continuous unimodal sequence, the analyst recovers an ordering interpreted as chronological. Drawn as horizontal bars, these curves take the lens or 'battleship' shape that gives the method its popular name. Frequency seriation grew out of W. M. F. Petrie's sequence dating and was formalized for proportional data by mid-twentieth-century Americanists such as James A. Ford, becoming a backbone of culture-historical chronology before absolute dating was widely available.