Comparer des méthodes

	Ceramic Typology	Ceramic Thin-Section Petrography	Frequency Seriation
Domaine	Archéologie	Archéologie	Archéologie
Famille	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Année d'origine	1987	2013	1962
Auteur d'origine	Developed across 20th-century archaeology; synthesized by Prudence M. Rice	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	Attribute-based classification of pottery for chronology and cultural attribution	Optical microscopic characterization of ceramic fabrics for provenance and technology	Relative-chronology ordering of assemblages by type proportions
Source fondatrice	Rice, P. M. (1987). Pottery Analysis: A Sourcebook. University of Chicago Press. ISBN: 9780226711188	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
Alias	Pottery Typology, Ceramic Classification, Ware and Type Classification, Type-Variety Analysis	Ceramic Petrography, Pottery Thin-Section Analysis, Petrographic Fabric Analysis, Optical Microscopy of Ceramic Fabrics	Frequency Seriation Dating, Battleship-Curve Seriation, Proportional Seriation
Apparentées	2	2	3
Résumé	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.	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.