Compare methods

	Frequency Seriation	Ceramic Typology	Contextual Seriation	Radiocarbon Calibration
Field	Archaeology	Archaeology	Archaeology	Archaeology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1962	1987	1899	2020
Originator	Leslie Spier; James A. Ford (developed from W. M. F. Petrie's sequence dating)	Developed across 20th-century archaeology; synthesized by Prudence M. Rice	W. M. F. Petrie (sequence dating); formalized as occurrence seriation by mid-20th-century quantitative archaeologists	Hans Suess (first curves); IntCal Working Group (P. J. Reimer et al.)
Type	Relative-chronology ordering of assemblages by type proportions	Attribute-based classification of pottery for chronology and cultural attribution	Relative-chronology ordering of units by presence-absence of types	Probabilistic conversion of radiocarbon ages to calendar ages
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	Reimer, P. J., et al. (2020). The IntCal20 Northern Hemisphere Radiocarbon Age Calibration Curve (0-55 cal kBP). Radiocarbon, 62(4), 725-757.
Aliases	Frequency Seriation Dating, Battleship-Curve Seriation, Proportional Seriation	Pottery Typology, Ceramic Classification, Ware and Type Classification, Type-Variety Analysis	Occurrence Seriation, Sequence Dating, Incidence Seriation	14C Calibration, IntCal Calibration, Calendar Calibration of Radiocarbon Dates
Related	3	2	3	3
Summary	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.	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.	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.	Radiocarbon calibration converts a laboratory radiocarbon measurement into a probability distribution over actual calendar years. It is necessary because the assumptions behind a raw radiocarbon age are not exactly true: the concentration of carbon-14 in the atmosphere has varied over time, so a measured radiocarbon age does not equal a calendar age. Calibration corrects for this by comparing the measurement against an internationally agreed curve — currently IntCal20 — that records the relationship between radiocarbon age and calendar age, reconstructed from precisely dated tree rings, corals, speleothems, and other archives. Because the curve wiggles, calibration typically yields an irregular, sometimes multi-peaked range of calendar years rather than a single date, and that range is the proper expression of a radiocarbon result.