Relative dating

Relative dating techniques are those that can put sites, artefacts or features into their relative position within a known sequence. It is then possible to find out which items are older, or younger, than others. However these techniques are not able to give an absolute date. For example it may be possible to state ‘Pottery type A is earlier in age that Pottery type B’ but it would not be possible to state that ‘pottery type A was made in 1200 AD’.