Using interval graphs to find authorship disputes
I'll explain shortly the "archaeology example" your excerpt refers to. It seems that the authorship dispute problem is really no different from it, and any practical application would face similar problems as I will describe.

Around 1900, Flinders Petrie formulated a problem known as sequence dating while studying 800 types of pottery found in 900 Egyptian graves. To each artifact, we associate a time interval (unknown) during which it was used, and to each grave a time point (unknown) when its contents were interred. Then, the problem is to figure out the time relationships between the artifacts and the graves.

Now consider a graph $G$ whose vertices correspond to distinct artifacts. There is an edge between two vertices if they were found in some common grave. Assuming each pair of artifacts whose usage intervals intersect are to be found together in some grave we have that $G$ is an interval graph. Furthermore, an interval assignment for $G$ is a candidate for the usage intervals of the artifacts. However, of course in practice, it might be that we have incomplete data so the assumptions do not hold, and in any case, we need additional techniques to choose the correct interval assignment.