Both seriation and stratigraphy were applied early in the discipline to resolve matters of archaeological antiquity. These are relative dating methods and I will take them up shortly. Let's consider what we mean by time. For it is the dimension of time to which dating methods apply. Time is linear, non-repetitive, and continuous.
Space is another reference dimension.
We date events not things. We cannot date the thing, because the thing continues to exist today and extends back in time to a point when it came into being. Most things have a series of associated events during their life-histories. This provides the theoretical underpinning of dating methods in archaeology. Note that our understanding of these processes or mechanisms is uneven in archaeology and this introduces some uncertainty with respect to the reliability of the dating method.