Порівняння методів

	Contextual Seriation	Harris Matrix
Галузь	Археологія	Археологія
Родина	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Рік появи	1899	1973
Автор методу	W. M. F. Petrie (sequence dating); formalized as occurrence seriation by mid-20th-century quantitative archaeologists	Edward C. Harris (with the Winchester excavation team)
Тип	Relative-chronology ordering of units by presence-absence of types	Stratigraphic recording and sequence-diagramming pipeline
Основоположне джерело	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
Інші назви	Occurrence Seriation, Sequence Dating, Incidence Seriation	Stratigraphic Sequence Diagram, Harris-Winchester Matrix, Single-Context Recording, Context Sequence Diagram
Пов'язані	3	2
Підсумок	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.	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.