====== Seriation ======

**Seriation** is a relative dating method in which assemblages or artifacts from numerous sites, in the same culture, are placed in chronological order. Seriation has a rich history in archeology. Petrie (1899) was the first to use seriation as a formal method. He applied it to find a chronological order for graves discovered in the Nile area given objects found there.

You should read the Wikipedia article for a detailed explanation of [[wp>Seriation_(archaeology)|seriation in archaeology]]. Here's just the technical part, with some hints at using the ''**R** seriation'' package for seriation and generation of plots.

  * [[http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/seriation/index.html|CRAN - Package seriation]]


===== Describing your data =====

The simplest form of seriation is when your data are just presence/absence information, e.g. presence of a particular artifact inside a tomb burial.