In archaeology, seriation is a method in relative dating in which artifacts of numerous sites, in the same culture, are placed in chronological order. In the words of archeologist Gehrard, "whoever sees one monument has really seen none; whoever has seen a thousand has only seen one." (cited in Molino 1974, p.87). The method was first developed by Oscar Montelius.
The term seriation [mise en série] was proposed for use in semiotics by Jean Molino and derived from classical philology. Seriation "invokes the idea that any investigator, in order to assign some plausible meaning to a given phenomena, must interpret it within a series of comparable phenomena. One cannot interpret what philology calls a hapax; that is, an isolated phenomenon.