Practice question · Multiple choice
Seriation orders assemblages by style without any absolute dates. What assumption about human behaviour makes the method work?
Hints
- Sketch the popularity of a pottery type against time. What shape?
- Ask what shape would make ordering by similarity impossible.
Show the answer
A. That styles rise, peak and fade gradually
Why
The battleship curve is the assumption made visible, gradual adoption and gradual abandonment mean similar frequencies imply similar dates. Abrupt replacement would give a valid but much coarser ordering, and revivals genuinely break the method, which is why seriation is checked against stratigraphy.
Practise Artifact Typology and Seriation
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More questions on Artifact Typology and Seriation
- Flinders Petrie devised sequence dating to order Egyptian graves in which decade? Set the slider to the year.
- What makes a typological "type" analytically useful?
- Order these decoration styles by the seriation once external dating fixed their direction (earliest first).
- Match each classification term to its meaning.
- Seriation can put assemblages in the right order without telling you which end of that order is the earliest.
- Order the steps of a frequency seriation.
- Sort each item: is it an attribute or a whole type?