Comparer des méthodes

	Frequency Seriation	Ceramic Typology
Domaine	Archéologie	Archéologie
Famille	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Année d'origine	1962	1987
Auteur d'origine	Leslie Spier; James A. Ford (developed from W. M. F. Petrie's sequence dating)	Developed across 20th-century archaeology; synthesized by Prudence M. Rice
Type	Relative-chronology ordering of assemblages by type proportions	Attribute-based classification of pottery for chronology and cultural attribution
Source fondatrice	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
Alias	Frequency Seriation Dating, Battleship-Curve Seriation, Proportional Seriation	Pottery Typology, Ceramic Classification, Ware and Type Classification, Type-Variety Analysis
Apparentées	3	2
Résumé	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.