Pottery.
Since the late 19th century scholars have been cataloging pottery styles and decorative motifs. It is now quite a database of accumulated shards.
http://apd.farli.org/home/introduction
Feel free to ask your questions.
Since the late 19th century scholars have been cataloging pottery styles and decorative motifs. It is now quite a database of accumulated shards.
http://apd.farli.org/home/introduction
Quote:The father of modern archaeology and the Seriation and Typology of artifacts is Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942). While excavating in Egypt, Petrie noticed the nuances in pottery from site to site. He than realized one could notice the development and change of artifacts from various sites and thus place them in chronological order, giving a relative chronology to the site in which they were found.
Since then and as Ancient Near Eastern archaeology developed, more and more pottery assemblages and variants were found and added to our knowledge. As technology progresses, more and more tools are added to the archaeologist's arsenal of dating archaeological strata and artifacts, such as C14, dendrochronology, and thermoluminescence. However pottery typology remains as important now as it was in the beginning of the 20th century.
Feel free to ask your questions.
