Principles of stratigraphy / Принципы стратиграфии

Stratigraphy is one of the most demanding, fundamental, and interesting of geologic disciplines. It tries to reconstruct history with a few basic principles, requires both careful observation and wide-ranging imagination, and involves many individually fascinating subdisciplines. Yet, as the quotation above shows, this is not how it appears to many people. Stratigraphy has a poor image because it is sometimes presented only as a way of classifying and organizing strata with “codes.”
However, its basic principles are very simple and applicable in any study in which a history must be reconstructed from layers. Thus, stratigraphic principles are an essential part of archeology and even forensic science (the sequence of events during a murder, for example). They are now used to work out the history of planetary surfaces in studies that relive the early 19th century excitement in exploratory mapping and correlation (Carr et al. 1993).
This book is intended to back up a second-year university course, so I assume that students using it have already taken a basic Introductory Geology course (or its equivalent), though some material is repeated for convenience (since students tend to forget things over time). I wish to emphasize the need to: (i) know how stratigraphy developed and how this constrains current approaches and dogmas; (ii) study all aspects of modern processes and environments (including extraterrestrial ones) as a basis for paleoenvironmental interpretation; (iii) understand the principles of correlation and dating as a basis for stratigraphic reconstructions; (iv) know some basics of geophysics, tectonics, climatology, and paleobiology in order to explain the development of sedimentary basins; and (v) make field observations in person, to understand the limitations of data and interpretations. <...>