Chronology 
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Dummipedia, the simplified free online encyclopedia
Chronology is a chronicle or arrangement of events in their occurrence order. It is part of periodization, and also part of the discipline of history, including earth history and geochronology dependent disciplines. The science of locating and resolving temporal sequence of past events in time is called "general chronology".[1] Though chronologies formulated before the 1960s are subject to serious skepticism today, more recent results are more robust. Bayesian inference can be applied in the analysis of chronological information, including radiocarbon-derived dates. The word "chronology" is derived from Latin chronologia, and from Ancient Greek chronos, "time", and -logia, "the study of [a certain subject]".[1]
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2. When used for specific examples, a chronology is a sequential arrangement of events, such as a chronicle or, particularly when involving graphical or literary elements, a timeline. A chronology may be either:
- relative, i.e. locating related events relative to each other; or
- absolute, i.e. locating these events to specific dates in a chronological era.
Even this distinction may be blurred by use of different calendars. In Judeo-Christian cultures, historical dates in an absolute chronology are understood to be referred to the Christian era, in combination with the proleptic Julian calendar (originally) and the Gregorian calendar respectively.
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3. Chronology is the science of locating historical events in time, and is distinct from, but relies upon chronometry or timekeeping, and historiography, which examines the writing of history and the use of historical methods. Radiocarbon dating estimates the age of formerly living things by measuring the proportion of carbon-14 isotope in their carbon content. Dendrochronology estimates the age of trees by correlation of the various growth rings in their wood to known year-by-year reference sequences in the region to reflect year-to-year climatic variation. Dendrochronology is used in turn as a calibration reference for radiocarbon dating curves.
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4. The familiar terms calendar and era (within the meaning of a coherent system of numbered calendar years) concern two complementary fundamental concepts of chronology. For example during eight centuries the calendar belonging to the Christian era, which era was taken in use in the eighth century by Bede, was the Julian calendar, but after the year 1582 it was the Gregorian calendar. Dionysius Exiguus (about the year 500) was the founder of that era, which is nowadays the most widespread dating system on earth.
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5. While of critical importance to the historian, methods of determining chronology are used in most disciplines of science, especially astronomy, geology, paleontology and archaeology. In the absence of written history, with its chronicles and king lists, late 19th century archaeologists found that they could develop relative chronologies based on pottery techniques and styles. In the field of Egyptology, William Flinders Petrie pioneered sequence dating to penetrate pre-dynastic Neolithic times, using groups of contemporary artefacts deposited together at a single time in graves and working backwards methodically from the earliest historical phases of Egypt. This method of dating is known as seriation. The study of the means of placing pottery and other cultural artifacts into some kind of order proceeds in two phases, classification and typology: Classification creates categories for the purposes of description, and typology seeks to identify and analyse changes that allow artifacts to be placed into sequences.[1]
