Compare methods

	Contextual Seriation	Ceramic Typology	Frequency Seriation	Harris Matrix
Field	Archaeology	Archaeology	Archaeology	Archaeology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1899	1987	1962	1973
Originator	W. M. F. Petrie (sequence dating); formalized as occurrence seriation by mid-20th-century quantitative archaeologists	Developed across 20th-century archaeology; synthesized by Prudence M. Rice	Leslie Spier; James A. Ford (developed from W. M. F. Petrie's sequence dating)	Edward C. Harris (with the Winchester excavation team)
Type	Relative-chronology ordering of units by presence-absence of types	Attribute-based classification of pottery for chronology and cultural attribution	Relative-chronology ordering of assemblages by type proportions	Stratigraphic recording and sequence-diagramming pipeline
Seminal source	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	Rice, P. M. (1987). Pottery Analysis: A Sourcebook. University of Chicago Press. ISBN: 9780226711188	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	Harris, E. C. (1989). Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy (2nd ed.). Academic Press. ISBN: 9780123266514
Aliases	Occurrence Seriation, Sequence Dating, Incidence Seriation	Pottery Typology, Ceramic Classification, Ware and Type Classification, Type-Variety Analysis	Frequency Seriation Dating, Battleship-Curve Seriation, Proportional Seriation	Stratigraphic Sequence Diagram, Harris-Winchester Matrix, Single-Context Recording, Context Sequence Diagram
Related	3	2	3	2
Summary	Contextual seriation, also called occurrence or sequence seriation, is a relative-dating method that orders discrete archaeological units — typically graves or closed deposits — using only the presence or absence of artifact types within them. Its logic is the lifespan assumption: each type is introduced, used continuously for some span, and then disappears, so the contexts in which a type occurs should form an unbroken stretch of the sequence. By permuting the rows and columns of a presence-absence matrix until every type's occurrences cluster into a single contiguous block, the analyst recovers a one-dimensional ordering interpreted as time. The technique originates with W. M. F. Petrie's sequence dating of Egyptian predynastic graves and remains a standard tool for chronology where only incidence data, not abundances, are available.	Ceramic typology is the systematic classification of pottery into named groups — wares, types, and varieties — on the basis of shared attributes of form, fabric, surface treatment, decoration, and manufacturing technology. Because pottery is durable, ubiquitous, and changed rapidly in style, it is the archaeologist's most powerful tool for ordering sites and layers in time and for linking material to cultural traditions. As Prudence Rice's standard sourcebook sets out, a typology is built by recording consistent attributes, partitioning the assemblage into defined types, and arranging those types in a nested hierarchy that can then be quantified and compared across contexts. The resulting type frequencies become the raw material for relative dating, seriation, and the interpretation of trade, identity, and chronology.	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.	The Harris matrix is a method for recording and diagramming the stratigraphic sequence of an archaeological site as a partial-order diagram of individually defined contexts. Devised by Edward C. Harris at the Winchester excavations in 1973 and codified in his Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy, it treats every deposit, cut, and interface as a separate stratigraphic unit and reduces the tangle of physical relationships among them to a minimal directed acyclic graph that expresses only relative temporal order. By distinguishing physical superposition from temporal sequence and stripping away redundant relationships through transitive reduction, the matrix turns the three-dimensional complexity of a dig into a single, auditable diagram. It is the structural backbone of single-context recording and the standard interface between excavation and chronological modeling.