High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Relative dating is the science determining the relative order of past events, without necessarily determining their absolute age. In geology rock or superficial deposits, fossils and lithologies can be used to correlate one stratigraphic column with another. Prior to the discovery of radiometric dating which provided a means of absolute dating in the early 20th century, archaeologists and geologists were largely limited to the use of relative dating techniques to determine the geological events.