Sequence Dating, a relative dating method, was a method of dating developed by the Egyptiologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie. By linking styles of pottery with periods, he was the first to use seriation in Egyptology, a new method for establishing the chronology of a site. It allows the relative date, if not the absolute date, of any given Predynastic Egypt site to be ascertained by examining the handles on pottery. As the predynastic period progressed, the handles on pottery moved from functional to ornamental, and the degree to which any given archaeological site has functional or ornamental pottery can be used to determine the relative date of the site.
