History
Flinders Petrie excavated at Diospolis Parva in Egypt in the late nineteenth century. He found that the graves he was uncovering contained no evidence of their dates and their discrete nature meant that a sequence could not be constructed through their stratigraphy. Petrie listed the contents of each grave on a strip of cardboard and swapped the papers around until he arrived at a sequence he was satisfied with. He reasoned that the most accurate sequence would be the one where concentrations of certain design styles had the shortest duration across the sequence of papers (Renfrew and Bahn 1996, p. 116; Kendall 1971, p. 215; Shennan 1997, p. 341)). Whereas Petrie is considered the inventor of contextual seriation, Bainerd (1951) and Robinson (1951) were the first to address the problem of frequency seriation (Shennan 1997, p. 342)).
Read more about this topic: Seriation (archaeology)
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