Introduction
Today’s students of archaeology might find it difficult to imagine an era when modern chronometric dating methods – radiocarbon and luminescence, for example – were unavailable. How, the students might ask, were archaeologists working, say, in the first half of the twentieth century able to place objects and sites in a chronological sequence? Given the important roles that chronometric methods play in modern archaeology, together with the precision they often seem to impart, it is little wonder that students of today might view earlier efforts to establish temporal control as rather crude and outdated. Such a view, however, overlooks the fact that early archaeologists devised a battery of clever methods to determine the ages of archaeological phenomena with considerable precision. This kind of chronological control is often referred to as relative dating.
Definition
Relative dating can be defined as the production of a sequence of events for which no fixed or calendrical...
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References
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Further Reading
Browman, D.L., and D.R. Givens. 1996. Stratigraphic excavation: The first ‘new archaeology. American Anthropologist 98: 80–95.
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O’Brien, M.J. (2018). Chronological Systems, Establishment of. In: Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_1032-2
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