Glossary Archaeological method and dating
Relative chronology
An ordering of sites, layers or objects as earlier or later than one another, without fixing them to calendar years.
Relative chronology answers the question of which came first. Its tools are stratigraphy, typology and seriation, and its product is a sequence of named periods and phases. The labels Early, Middle and Late Cypriot, and the numbered phases within them, are relative units defined by changes in pottery and other material.
Calendar dates are attached afterwards through radiocarbon and through synchronisms with dated cultures, producing the absolute chronology. The two can move independently: a phase such as LC IIC keeps its place in the sequence even when scholars disagree by decades about when it began. The Chronology of Ancient Cyprus explains how the Cypriot sequence was assembled.
Related terms
- Absolute chronology
A chronology expressed in calendar years (BCE, CE or years before present), fixed by scientific dating or by links to written history.
- Seriation
A relative dating method that arranges groups of finds in sequence according to how the popularity of their types rises and falls.
- Stratigraphy
The study of the layers in which archaeological remains were deposited, used to work out which came first and what belongs together.
- Period subphases
Codes such as MC III, LC IIC or CA II that divide each Cypriot period into numbered phases and lettered subphases for finer dating.