Relative Dating
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Relative dating is the process of determining if one rock or geologic event is older or younger than another, without knowing their specific ages—i.e., how many years ago the object was formed. The principles of relative time are simple, even obvious now, but were not generally accepted by scholars until the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries. James Hutton realized geologic processes are slow and his ideas on uniformitarianism (i.e., “the present is the key to the past”) provided a basis for interpreting rocks of the Earth using scientific principles...
Science Learn - Relative Dating
Some fossils, called index fossils, are particularly useful in correlating rocks. For a fossil to be a good index fossil, it needs to have lived during one specific time period, be easy to identify and have been abundant and found in many places...
VIVA: Pressbooks - Principles of Relative Dating
Placing of events in the order in which they occurred without any relationship to the actual time during which any one event occurred is known as relative dating. It is a qualitative way of describing the sequence of events. The sequence orders the events but provides no information to the amount of time passed or between events.