Seriation method for analyzing data from Paleolithic complexes

This article aims at familiarizing Russian scholars with the seriation method - analysis of data which organizes objects (archaeological layers, sites, monuments, or artifacts) into a sequence along a one-dimensional continuum for revealing the regularity and patterns among the entire series of these objects in the most sufficient way. This method was originally established for creating a relative chronology when absolute dating methods were not yet available to archaeologists. After proving its usefulness as a chronological tool, the method ofseriation has been used in various fields ofscience, such as biology, statistics, cartography, and sociology, and in industrial production. In archaeological research it is very convenient for classification, attribution, and visualization of archaeological data. Counting percentages of different categories of artifacts in assemblages and assigning ranks to archaeological attributes are less efficient and informative methods. The undoubted advantages of this method include an opportunity of using it without prior training in mathematical statistics as well as using a variety of data, primarily nominative - the most common type in archaeological research, and free software for its application. The method is very helpful for structure search in archaeological data containing a large amount of information on stone industries (typological and technological sets of cores, tools, and technical spalls) or for classification of attributive data, when the description of each artifact contains information on 30-50 technologically significant attributes.