When you started this little exercise, you really had a "jumble" of houses and you could not tell that the occupation areas would shift over time. By doing the seriation - comparing amounts of design styles found on the floors of these house - you can, as an archaeologist, begin to make sense out of what happened here. The site began with Feature 14 and people began to build more houses on the east side of that house. For some reason (something that is not apparent to us), the occupants of this site shifted building to the western side. There they constructed a series of houses facing in different directions. Gradually, the site built up the record that we excavated, but it happened over a rather long period of time. What we still do not know, is how long it took for people to accumulate the archaeologic record. Was it 200 years? Or perhaps it was 500 years? May longer? To find out, we need to move from what is now a relative sequence of events (relative dating of the site) to a more absolute basis from measuring time. This requires us to look at chronometric (absolute) dates that were extracted from these features. NEXT PART-