Radiometric dating

Unlike the radioactive isotopes discussed above, these isotopes are constantly being replenished in small amounts in one of two ways. The bottom two entries, uranium and thorium , are replenished as the long-lived uranium atoms decay. These will be discussed in the next section.

The uranium–lead dating method relies on two separate decay chains, the uranium series from U to Pb, with a half-life of billion years and the actinium series from U to Pb, with a half-life of million years.

Whereas contextual seriation is based on the presence or absence of a design style , frequency seriation relies on measuring the proportional abundance or frequency of a design style. Contextual seriation is often used for reconstructing the chronological sequence of graves as only the presence or absence of a design style or type is important. Frequency seriation is applied in case of large quantities of objects belonging to the same style. An example are assemblages of pottery sherds each including roughly the same range of types though in different proportions.

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.