Seriation: A Step by Step Discussion of the Dating Technique

Seriation, Step 3: Assemble Your Battleship Curves

For the next iteration you switch around the junkyard data until each column resembles a battleship, narrow at both ends, when the media shows up less frequently in the deposit, and fatter in the middle, when it occupies the largest percentage of the junkyard deposits. In this example, Junkyard B was likely the first opened, because it has the largest quantity of the oldest artifact, and lesser amounts of the others; and Junkyard F is likely the last, because it has none of the oldest type of artifact, and a preponderance of the more modern types. What the data doesn't provide is absolute dates, or length of use, or any temporal data other than the relative age of use.