ABSTRACT
Archaeologists routinely place items of material culture into so-called "time-space" charts that depict spatial, chronological, and historical relationships among artifact classes. As long as variation was measured in terms of discrete objects, culture historians had a reasonable but intuitive way for generating hypotheses about chronology, spatial pattern, and relatedness. Stratocladistic methods use stratigraphic data to evaluate hypotheses about phylogenetic trees. Stratocladistics is a manual technique, and there is no agreement as to which solution should be given the stronger weight— stratigraphic order or cladistic analysis. The data in the original phylogenetic analysis consist of metric and morphological measurements made by combining eight characters, each consisting of two to six possible states. The graph method described here provides a means of building and testing cultural phylogenies that is complementary to methods such as cladistics. The strength of the method is that it can be used to generate hypotheses about relatedness, spatial variation, and chronological relationships of artifacts based on homologous similarity.
