You can download Seriation Stratigraphy and Index Fossils ebook here.
- Title: Seriation Stratigraphy and Index Fossils: The Backbone of Archaeological Dating
- Author: Michael J. O’Brien, R. Lee Lyman
- Publisher: Kluwer Academic Publisher
- Pages: 268
It is difficult for todays students of archaeology to imagine an era when chronometric dating methods radiocarbon and thermoluminescence, for example were unavailable. How, they might ask, were archaeologists working in the preradiocarbon era able to keep track of time; that is, how were they able to place objects and sites in proper sequence and to assess the ages of sites and objects? Given the important roles that chronometric methods play in modern archaeology, it is little wonder that todays students might view earlier efforts to establish chronological ordering as imprecise and unworthy ofin-depth study.
This is unfortunate, because even casual perusal ofthe large body of literature that resulted from the efforts of archaeologists working during the first half of the twentieth century reveals that they devised a battery of clever methods to determine the ages of archaeological phenomena, often with considerable precision.
This kind of chronological control is referred to colloquially as relative dating : production ofa sequence ofevents for which no fixed or alendric dates exist. Instead of knowing that a certain kind of pottery was made between, say AD 100 and AD 300, and that anotherkind was made between AD 300 and AD 600, all we know is that the latter kind is of more recent origin than the former.
The latter kind could postdate the earlier kind by several hundred years or by a thousand years, but wedonotknow this; all we know is that it is more recent. In like manner, we might know, perhaps through historical evidence, the terminal calendric date of manufacture and use ofthe laterkind ofpottery, but we might not know when on a calendric scale that kind was first made, and thus when it began replacing the earlier kind.