Five ways we date the ancient world
Pottery and stratigraphy display from Agias Sofias Metro station in Thessaloniki, Greece. Photo courtesy Mark Wilson.
“Since its inception, biblical archaeology has been especially concerned with dating the sites, buildings, artifacts, and written records uncovered through excavation.” Thus writes Yoav Vaknin in his article “Dating Game: How Archaeologists Date the Biblical Past,” published in the Summer 2025 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review. But how exactly do archaeologists date the things they uncover? To answer this question, we take a quick look at five dating methods in archaeology, some of which have been used for centuries.
Dating the Past
When talking about dating methods in archaeology, they fall into one of two categories: relative dating and absolute dating. Relative dating is the method of dating one thing in relation to another, such as one sibling being older than another. Absolute dating is the method of dating something according to a specific range of time, such as a person being 29 years old.
Stratigraphy
When it comes to relative dating techniques, one of the most frequently used is stratigraphy. Stratigraphy dates artifacts according to the layers of soil in which they were found. In general, archaeological objects are deposited sequentially, one on top of the other, such that older things are further down in the earth than younger things. Thus, if you find two pots and one comes from a higher layer, it is probably younger than the pot found in the lower layer. Of course, natural processes and later human activities can jumble layers, but stratigraphy is still one of the most useful and commonly used dating methods in archaeology.
Typology/Seriation
Typology, or seriation, is another common relative dating technique. This method works by identifying specific characteristics of a certain type of object, such as the way the handle or rim of a pot is shaped. From this, an archaeologist can examine how that shape changed over time and use it as a temporal tape measure to identify if one pot is younger or older than another.
Dendrochronology
While not used as much in biblical archaeology, another method of absolute dating is dendrochronology. This method uses tree rings to date wooden objects, since the environmental conditions of a specific year affect how thick a tree’s rings will be in that year. Thus, by examining the rings of very old trees, archaeologists can form a sound chronological system to work back from and identify the age of wooden materials in the archaeological record. However, there are some limitations to this method, especially in the Levant, where wooden objects or features often do not survive in the archaeological record.
American chemist Willard Libby (1908–1980), who helped lead the effort to develop radiocarbon dating. Rredondo99, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Radiocarbon Dating
Another absolute dating method in archaeology is radiocarbon dating. Radiocarbon dating is a technique to measure the amount of carbon-14 isotope present in an organic sample (a seed, bone, or even piece of wood) to estimate how long ago that sample died or began to decompose. Although very effective, this method often provides a wide time frame, possibly a century or more, in which the object can be dated. Additionally, radiocarbon dating needs organic material that is not always available from a site.
Archaeomagnetism
The final dating method in archaeology is archaeomagnetism. Many ancient artifacts, such as ceramics or mudbricks, include tiny magnetic particles which, when heated to high temperatures, act like a compass needle, reflecting the direction and intensity of the earth’s magnetic field at the time of heating. Reconstructing the magnetic field over the last few millennia, archaeologists can use this data to pinpoint, with relative certainty, the date of these objects. While this method can be more precise than radiocarbon dating, it also requires specific materials from specific contexts.
Although all these dating methods in archaeology have their pros and cons, by combining multiple methods, archaeologists today can form a much better understanding of ancient events than ever before.
To learn more about dating methods in archaeology, read Yoav Vaknin’s article “Dating Game: How Archaeologists Date the Biblical Past,” published in the Summer 2025 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.
