Three-age system - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The three-age system in archaeology

Archaeology

Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...

and physical anthropology

Physical anthropology

Biological anthropology is that branch of anthropology that studies the physical development of the human species. It plays an important part in paleoanthropology and in forensic anthropology...

is the periodization

Periodization

Periodization is the attempt to categorize or divide time into named blocks. The result is a descriptive abstraction that provides a useful handle on periods of time with relatively stable characteristics...

of human

Human

Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...

prehistory

Prehistory

Prehistory is the span of time before recorded history. Prehistory can refer to the period of human existence before the availability of those written records with which recorded history begins. More broadly, it refers to all the time preceding human existence and the invention of writing...

into three consecutive time periods, named for their respective tool-making technologies:

The Stone Age
Stone Age
The Stone Age is a broad prehistoric period, lasting about 2.5 million years , during which humans and their predecessor species in the genus Homo, as well as the earlier partly contemporary genera Australopithecus and Paranthropus, widely used exclusively stone as their hard material in the...
The Bronze Age
Bronze Age
The Bronze Age is a period characterized by the use of copper and its alloy bronze as the chief hard materials in the manufacture of some implements and weapons. Chronologically, it stands between the Stone Age and Iron Age...
The Iron Age
Iron Age
The Iron Age is the archaeological period generally occurring after the Bronze Age, marked by the prevalent use of iron. The early period of the age is characterized by the widespread use of iron or steel. The adoption of such material coincided with other changes in society, including differing...

Origin

The concept of dividing pre-historical ages into systems based on metals extends far back in European history, but the present archaeological system of the three main ages: stone, bronze and iron, originates with the Danish archaeologist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen

Christian Jürgensen Thomsen

Christian Jürgensen Thomsen was a Danish archaeologist.In 1816 he was appointed head of 'antiquarian' collections which later developed into the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. While organizing and classifying the antiquities for exhibition, he decided to present them chronologically...

(1788–1865), who placed the system on a more scientific basis by typological and chronological studies, at first of tools and other artifacts present in the Museum of Northern Antiquities in Copenhagen (later the National Museum of Denmark

National Museum of Denmark

The National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen is Denmark’s largest museum of cultural history, comprising the histories of Danish and foreign cultures, alike. The museum's main domicile is located a short distance from Strøget at the center of Copenhagen. It contains exhibits from around the world,...

). He later used artifacts and the excavation reports published or sent to him by Danish archaeologists who were doing controlled excavations. His position as curator of the museum gave him enough visibility to become highly influential on Danish archaeology. A well-known and well-liked figure, he explained his system in person to visitors at the museum, many of them professional archaeologists.

The metallic ages of Hesiod

In his poem, Works and Days
Works and Days
Works and Days is a didactic poem of some 800 verses written by the ancient Greek poet Hesiod around 700 BC. At its center, the Works and Days is a farmer's almanac in which Hesiod instructs his brother Perses in the agricultural arts...

, the ancient Greek

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

poet, Hesiod

Hesiod

Hesiod was a Greek oral poet generally thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. His is the first European poetry in which the poet regards himself as a topic, an individual with a distinctive role to play. Ancient authors credited him and...

, defined five successive Ages of Man

Ages of Man

The Ages of Man are the stages of human existence on the Earth according to Greek mythology. Two classical authors in particular offer accounts of the successive ages of mankind, which tend to progress from an original, long-gone age in which humans enjoyed a nearly divine existence to the current...

: Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic and Iron. Only the Bronze Age and the Iron Age are based on the use of metal:

"... then Zeus the father created the third generation of mortals, the age of bronze ... They were terrible and strong, and the ghastly action of Ares was theirs, and violence. ... The weapons of these men were bronze, of bronze their houses, and they worked as bronzesmiths. There was not yet any black iron."

Hesiod knew from the traditional poetry, such as the Iliad

Iliad

The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...

, and the heirloom bronze artifacts that abounded in Greek society, that before the use of iron to make tools and weapons, bronze had been the preferred material and iron was not smelted at all. He did not continue the manufacturing metaphor, but mixed his metaphors, switching over to the market value of each metal. Iron was cheaper than bronze, so there must have been a golden and a silver age. He portrays a sequence of metallic ages, but it is a degradation rather than a progression. Each age has less of a moral value than the preceding. Of his own age he says: "And I wish that I were not any part of the fifth generation of men, but had died before it came, or had been born afterward."

The progress of Lucretius

The moral metaphor of the ages of metals continued. Lucretius

Lucretius

Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is an epic philosophical poem laying out the beliefs of Epicureanism, De rerum natura, translated into English as On the Nature of Things or "On the Nature of the Universe".Virtually no details have come down concerning...

, however, replaced moral degradation with the concept of progress, which he conceived to be like the growth of an individual human being. The concept is evolutionary:

"For the nature of the world as a whole is altered by age. Everything must pass through successive phases. Nothing remains forever what it was. Everything is on the move. Everything is transformed by nature and forced into new paths ... The Earth passes through successive phases, so that it can no longer bear what it could, and it can now what it could not before."

The Romans believed that the species of animals, including man, were spontaneously generated from the materials of the Earth, because of which the Latin word mater, "mother," descends to English-speakers as matter and material. In Lucretius the Earth is a mother, Venus, to whom the poem is dedicated in the first few lines. She brought forth mankind by spontaneous generation, a view that, removed to the molecular stage, and stripped of its anthropomorphism, is the same as in today's biological chemistry. Having been given birth as a species, man must grow to maturity by analogy with individual men. The different phases of their collective life are marked by the accumulation of customs to form material civilization:

"The earliest weapons were hands, nails and teeth. Next came stones and branches wrenched from trees, and fire and flame as soon as these were discovered. Then men learnt to use tough iron and copper. With copper they tilled the soil. With copper they whipped up the clashing waves of war, ... Then by slow degrees the iron sword came to the fore; the bronze sickle fell into disrepute; the ploughman began to cleave the earth with iron, ..."

Lucretius envisioned a pre-technological man that was "far tougher than the men of today ... They lived out their lives in the fashion of wild beasts roaming at large." The next stage was the use of huts, fire, clothing, language and the family. City-states, kings and citadels followed them. Lucretius supposes that the initial smelting of metal occurred accidentally in forest fires. The use of copper followed the use of stones and branches and preceded the use of iron.

Early lithic analysis by Michele Mercati

By the 16th century, a tradition had developed based on observational incidents, true or false, that the black objects found widely scattered in large quantities over Europe had fallen from the sky during thunderstorms and were therefore to be considered generated by lightning. They were so published by Konrad Gessner in De rerum fossilium, lapidum et gemmarum maxime figuris & similitudinibus at Zurich in 1565 and by many others less famous. The name ceraunia, "thunderstones," had been assigned.

Ceraunia were collected by many persons over the centuries including Michele Mercati

Michele Mercati

Michele Mercati was a physician who was superintendent of the Vatican Botanical Garden under Popes Pius V, Gregory XIII, Sixtus V, and Clement VIII.-Biography:...

, Superintendent of the Vatican Botanical Garden in the late 16th century. He brought his collection of fossils and stones to the Vatican, where he studied them at leisure, compiling the results in a manuscript, which was published posthumously by the Vatican at Rome in 1717 as Metallotheca. Mercati was interested in Ceraunia cuneata, "wedge-shaped thunderstones," which seemed to him to be most like axes and arrowheads, which he now called ceraunia vulgaris, "folk thunderstones," distinguishing his view from the popular one. His view was based on what may be the first in-depth lithic analysis

Lithic analysis

In archaeology, lithic analysis is the analysis of stone tools and other chipped stone artifacts using basic scientific techniques. At its most basic level, lithic analyses involve an analysis of the artifact’s morphology, the measurement of various physical attributes, and examining other visible...

of the objects in his collection, which led him to believe that they are artifacts and to suggest that the historical evolution of these artifacts followed a scheme.

Mercati examining the surfaces of the ceraunia noted that the stones were of flint and that they had been chipped all over by another stone to achieve by percussion their current forms. The protrusion at the bottom he identified as the attachment point of a haft. Concluding that these objects were not ceraunia he compared collections to determine exactly what they were. Vatican collections included artifacts from the New World of exactly the shapes of the supposed ceraunia. The reports of the explorers had identified them to be implements and weapons or parts of them.

Mercati posed the question to himself, why would anyone prefer to manufacture artifacts of stone rather than of metal, a superior material? His answer was that metallurgy was unknown at that time. He cited Biblical passages to prove that in Biblical times stone was the first material used. He also revived the 3-age system of Lucretius, which described a succession of periods based on the use of stone (and wood), bronze and iron respectively. Due to lateness of publication, Mercati's ideas were already being developed independently; however, his writing served as a further stimulus.

The usages of Mahudel and de Jussieu

On November 12, 1734, Nicholas Mahudel

Nicholas Mahudel

Nicholas Mahudel was a French antiquary interested in prehistoric research. He proposed the chronological prehistoric sequence stone age - Bronze Age - Iron Age....

, physician, antiquarian and numismatist, read a paper at a public sitting of the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres

Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres

The Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres is a French learned society devoted to the humanities, founded in February 1663 as one of the five academies of the Institut de France.-History:...

in which he defined three "usages" of stone, bronze and iron in a chronological sequence. He had presented the paper several times that year but it was rejected until the November revision was finally accepted and published by the Academy in 1740. It was entitled Les Monumens les plus anciens de l'industrie des hommes, et des Arts reconnus dans les Pierres de Foudres. It expanded the concepts of Antoine de Jussieu

Antoine de Jussieu

Antoine de Jussieu was a French naturalist.Jussieu was born in Lyon, the son of Christophe de Jussieu , an apothecary of some repute, who published a Nouveau traité de la theriaque . Antoine studied at the university of Montpellier, and travelled with his brother Bernard through Spain, Portugal...

, who had gotten a paper accepted in 1723 entitled De l'Origine et des usages de la Pierre de Foudre. In Mahudel, there is not just one usage for stone, but two more, one each for bronze and iron.

He begins his treatise with descriptions and classifications of the Pierres de Tonnerre et de Foudre, the ceraunia of contemporaneous European interest. After cautioning the audience that natural and man-made objects are often easily confused, he asserts that the specific "figures" or "formes that can be distinguished (formes qui les font distingues)" of the stones were man-made, not natural:

"It was Man's hand that made them serve as instruments (C'est la main des hommes qui les leur a données pour servir d'instrumens...)"

Their cause, he asserts, is "the industry of our forefathers (l'industrie de nos premiers pères)." He adds later that bronze and iron implements imitate the uses of the stone ones, suggesting a replacement of stone with metals. Mahudel is careful not to take credit for the idea of a succession of usages in time but states: "it is Michel Mercatus, physician of Clement VIII who first had this idea". He does not coin a term for ages, but speaks only of the times of usages. His use of l'industrie foreshadows the 20th century "industries," but where the moderns mean specific tool traditions, Mahudel meant only the art of working stone and metal in general.

The three-age system of C. J. Thomsen

An important step in the development of the Three-age System came when the Danish antiquarian Christian Jürgensen Thomsen

Christian Jürgensen Thomsen

was able to use the Danish national collection of antiquities and the records of their finds as well as reports from contemporaneous excavations to provide a solid empirical basis for the system. He showed that artifacts could be classified into types and that these types varied over time in ways that correlated with the predominance of stone, bronze or iron implements and weapons. In this way he turned the Three-age System from being an evolutionary scheme based on intuition and general knowledge into a system of relative chronology

Chronology

Chronology is the science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time, such as the use of a timeline or sequence of events. It is also "the determination of the actual temporal sequence of past events".Chronology is part of periodization...

supported by archaeological evidence. Initially, the three-age system as it was developed by Thomsen and his contemporaries in Scandinavia, such as Sven Nilsson

Sven Nilsson

Sven Nilsson was a Swedish zoologist and archaeologist, who was director of the Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet , professor of Natural history at Lund University , and rector of the university...

and J.J.A. Worsaae

Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae

Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae was a Danish archaeologist, historian and politician, who was the second director of the National Museum of Denmark . He played a key role in the foundation of scientific archaeology. Worsaae was the first to excavate and use stratigraphy to prove C.J...

, was grafted onto the traditional biblical chronology. But, during the 1830s they achieved independence from textual chronologies and relied mainly on typology

Typology (archaeology)

In archaeology a typology is the result of the classification of things according to their characteristics. The products of the classification, i.e. the classes are also called types. Most archaeological typologies organize artifacts into types, but typologies of houses or roads belonging to a...

and stratigraphy

Stratigraphy

Stratigraphy, a branch of geology, studies rock layers and layering . It is primarily used in the study of sedimentary and layered volcanic rocks....

.

In 1816 Thomsen at age 27 was appointed to succeed the retiring Rasmus Nyerup as Secretary of the Kongelige Commission for Oldsagers Opbevarung ("Royal Commission for the Preservation of Antiquities"), which had been founded in 1807. The post was unsalaried. Thomsen had independent means. At his appointment Bishop Münter said that he was an "amateur with a great range of accomplishments." Between 1816 and 1819 he reorganized the commission's collection of antiquities. In 1819 he opened the first Museum of Northern Antiquities, in Copenhagen, in a former monastery, to house the collections. It later became the National Museum.

Like the other antiquarians Thomsen undoubtedly knew of the three-age model of prehistory through the works of Lucretius

Lucretius

, the Dane Vedel Simonsen, Montfaucon

Montfaucon

-Places:*In Switzerland**Montfaucon, Switzerland, in the canton of Jura*In France** Montfaucon, Aisne, in the Aisne département** Montfaucon, Doubs, in the du Doubs département** Montfaucon, Gard, in the Gard département...

and Mahudel. Sorting the material in the collection chronologically he mapped out which kinds of artifacts co-occurred in deposits and which did not, as this arrangement would allow him to discern any trends that were exclusive to certain periods. In this way he discovered that stone tools did not co-occur with bronze or iron in the earliest deposits while subsequently bronze did not co-occur with iron - so that three periods could be defined by their available materials, stone, bronze and iron.

To Thomsen the find circumstances were the key to dating. In 1821 he wrote in a letter to fellow prehistorian Schröder:

"nothing is more important than to point out that hitherto we have not paid enough attention to what was found together."

and in 1822:

"we still do not know enough about most of the antiquities either; ... only future archaeologists may be able to decide, but they will never be able to do so if they do not observe what things are found together and our collections are not brought to a greater degree of perfection."

This analysis emphasizing co-occurrence and systematic attention to archaeological context allowed Thomsen to build a chronological framework of the materials in the collection and to classify new finds in relation to the established chronology, even without much knowledge of their provenience. In this way, Thomsen's system was a true chronological system rather than an evolutionary or technological system. Exactly when his chronology was reasonably well established is not clear, but by 1825 visitors to the museum were being instructed in his methods. In that year also he wrote to J.G.G. Büsching:

"To put artifacts in their proper context I consider it most important to pay attention to the chronological sequence, and I believe that the old idea of first stone, then copper, and finally iron, appears to be ever more firmly established as far as Scandinavia is concerned."

By 1831 Thomsen was so certain of the utility of his methods that he circulated a pamphlet, "Scandinavian Artifacts and Their Preservation, advising archaeologists to "observe the greatest care" to note the context of each artifact. The pamphlet had an immediate effect. Results reported to him confirmed the universality of the Three-age System. Thomsen also published in 1832 and 1833 articles in the Nordisk Tidsskrift for Oldkyndighed, "Scandinavian Journal of Archaeology." He already had an international reputation when in 1836 the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries published his illustrated contribution to "Guide to Scandinavian Archaeology" in which he put forth his chronology together with comments about typology and stratigraphy.
Thomsen was the first to perceive typologies of grave goods, grave types, methods of burial, pottery and decorative motifs, and to assign these types to layers found in excavation. His published and personal advice to Danish archaeologists concerning the best methods of excavation produced immediate results that not only verified his system empirically but placed Denmark in the forefront of European archaeology for at least a generation. He became a national authority when C.C Rafn, secretary of the Kongelige Nordiske Oldskriftselskab ("Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries"), published his principal manuscript in Ledetraad til Nordisk Oldkyndighed ("Guide to Scandinavian Archaeology") in 1836. The system has since been expanded by further subdivision of each era, and refined through further archaeological and anthropological finds.

The savagery and civilization of Sir John Lubbock

It was to be a full generation before British archaeology caught up with the Danish. When it did, the leading figure was another multi-talented man of independent means: John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury

John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury

John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury PC , FRS , known as Sir John Lubbock, 4th Baronet from 1865 until 1900, was a polymath and Liberal Member of Parliament....

. After reviewing the Three-age System from Lucretius to Thomsen, Lubbock improved it and took it to another level, that of cultural anthropology

Cultural anthropology

Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans, collecting data about the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. Anthropologists use a variety of methods, including participant observation,...

. Thomsen had been concerned with techniques of archaeological classification. Lubbock found correlations with the customs of savages and civilization.

In his 1865 book, Prehistoric Times, Lubbock divided the Stone Age in Europe, and possibly nearer Asia and Africa, into the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic

Neolithic

The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BC in some parts of the Middle East, and later in other parts of the world. It is traditionally considered as the last part of the Stone Age...

"That of the Drift... This we may call the 'Palaeolithic' Period."

"The later, or polished Stone Age ... in which, however, we find no trace ... of any metal, excepting gold, ... This we may call the 'Neolithic' Period."

"The Bronze Age, in which bronze was used for arms and cutting instruments of all kinds."

"The Iron Age, in which that metal had superseded bronze."

By "drift" Lubbock meant river-drift, the alluvium deposited by a river. For the interpretation of Palaeolithic artifacts, Lubbock, pointing out that the times are beyond the reach of history and tradition, suggests an analogy, which was adopted by the anthropologists. Just as the paleontologist uses modern elephants to help reconstruct fossil pachyderms, so the archaeologist is justified in using the customs of the "non-metallic savages" of today to understand "the early races which inhabited our continent." He devotes three chapters to this approach, covering the "modern savages" of the Indian and Pacific Oceans and the Western Hemisphere, but something of a deficit in what would be called today his professionalism reveals a field yet in its infancy:

"Perhaps it will be thought ... I have selected ... the passages most unfavorable to savages. ... In reality the very reverse in the case. ... Their real condition is even worse and more abject than that which I have endeavoured to depict."

The elusive Mesolithic of Hodder Westropp

Sir John Lubbock's use of the terms Palaeolithic ("Old Stone Age") and Neolithic ("New Stone Age") were immediately popular. They were applied, however, in two different senses: geologic and anthropologic. In 1867-1868 Ernst Haeckel

Ernst Haeckel

The "European War" became known as "The Great War", and it was not until 1920, in the book "The First World War 1914-1918" by Charles à Court Repington, that the term "First World War" was used as the official name for the conflict.-Research:...

in 20 public lectures in Jena

Jena

Jena is a university city in central Germany on the river Saale. It has a population of approx. 103,000 and is the second largest city in the federal state of Thuringia, after Erfurt.-History:Jena was first mentioned in an 1182 document...

, entitled General Morphology, to be published in 1870, referred to the Archaeolithic, the Palaeolithic, the Mesolithic and the Caenolithic as periods in geologic history. He could only have gotten these terms from Hodder Westropp, who took Palaeolithic from Lubbock, innovated Mesolithic ("Middle Stone Age") and Caenolithic instead of Lubbock's Neolithic. None of these terms appear anywhere, including the writings of Haeckel, before 1865. Haeckel's use was innovative.

Westropp innovated the Mesolithic and the Caenolithic in 1865, almost immediately after the publication of Lubbock's first edition. He read a paper on the topic before the Anthropological Society of London

Anthropological Society of London

The Anthropological Society of London was founded in 1863 by Richard Francis Burton and Dr. James Hunt. It broke away from the existing Ethnological Society of London, founded in 1843, and defined itself in opposition to the older society...

in 1865, published in 1866 in the Memoirs. After asserting:

"Man, in all ages and in all stages of his development, is a tool-making animal."

Westropp goes on to define "different epochs of flint, stone, bronze or iron; ..." He never did distinguish the flint from the stone age (having realized they were one and the same), but he divided the Stone Age as follows:

"The flint implements of the gravel-drift"
"The flint implements found in Ireland and Denmark"
"Polished stone implements"

These three ages were named respectively the Palaeolithic, the Mesolithic and the Kainolithic. He was careful to qualify these by stating:

"Their presence is thus not always an evidence of a high antiquity, but of an early and barbarous state; ..."

Lubbock's savagery was now Westropp's barbarism. A fuller exposition of the Mesolithic waited for his book, Pre-Historic Phases, dedicated to Sir John Lubbock, published in 1872. At that time he restored Lubbock's Neolithic and defined a Stone Age divided into three phases and five stages.

The First Stage, "Implements of the Gravel Drift," contains implements that were "roughly knocked into shape." His illustrations show Mode 1 and Mode 2 stone tool

Stone tool

A stone tool is, in the most general sense, any tool made either partially or entirely out of stone. Although stone tool-dependent societies and cultures still exist today, most stone tools are associated with prehistoric, particularly Stone Age cultures that have become extinct...

s, basically Acheulean handaxes. Today they are in the Lower Palaeolithic.

The Second Stage, "Flint Flakes" are of the "simplest form" and were struck off cores. Westropp differs in this definition from the modern, as Mode 2 contains flakes for scrapers and similar tools. His illustrations, however, show Modes 3 and 4, of the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic. His extensive lithic analysis leaves no doubt. They are, however part of Westropp's Mesolithic.

The Third Stage, "a more advanced stage" in which "flint flakes were carefully chipped into shape," produced small arrowheads from shattering a piece of flint into "a hundred pieces", selecting the most suitable and working it with a punch. The illustrations show that he had microliths, or Mode 5 tools in mind. His Mesolithic is therefore partly the same as the modern.

The Fourth Stage is a part of the Neolithic that is transitional to the Fifth Stage: axes with ground edges leading to implements totally ground and polished. Westropp's agriculture is removed to the Bronze Age, while his Neolithic is pastoral. The Mesolithic is reserved to hunters.

Piette finds the Mesolithic

In that same year, 1872, Sir John Evans

John Evans (archaeologist)

Sir John Evans, KCB, FRS was an English archaeologist and geologist.-Biography:John Evans was the son of the Rev. Dr A. B. Evans, headmaster of Market Bosworth Grammar School, and was born at Britwell Court, Buckinghamshire...

produced a massive work, The Ancient Stone Implements, in which he in effect repudiated the Mesolithic, making a point to ignore it, denying it by name in later editions. He wrote:

"Sir John Lubbock has proposed to call them the Archaeolithic, or Palaeolithic, and the Neolithic Periods respectively, terms which have met with almost general acceptance, and of which I shall avail myself in the course of this work."

Evans did not, however, follow Lubbock's general trend, which was typological classification. He chose instead to use type of find site as the main criterion, following Lubbock's descriptive terms, such as tools of the drift. Lubbock had identified drift sites as containing Palaeolithic material. Evans added to them the cave sites. Opposed to drift and cave were the surface sites, where chipped and ground tools often occurred in unlayered contexts. Evans decided he had no choice but to assign them all to the most recent. He therefore consigned them to the Neolithic and used the term "Surface Period" for it.

Having read Westropp, Sir John knew perfectly well that all the former's Mesolithic implements were surface finds. He used his prestige to quell the concept of Mesolithic as best he could, but the public could see that his methods were not typological. The less prestigious scientists publishing in the smaller journals continued to look for a Mesolithic. For example, Isaac Taylor

Isaac Taylor (canon)

Isaac Taylor , son of Isaac Taylor, was a philologist, toponymist, and Anglican canon of York .- Life :...

in The Origin of the Aryans, 1889, mentions the Mesolithic but briefly, asserting, however, that it formed "a transition between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic Periods." Nevertheless Sir John fought on, opposing the Mesolithic by name as late as the 1897 edition of his work.

Meanwhile Haeckel had totally abandoned the geologic uses of the -lithic terms. The concepts of Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic had been innovated in the early 19th century and were gradually becoming coin of the geologic realm. Realizing he was out of step, Haeckel started to transition to the -zoic system as early as 1876 in The history of creation, placing the -zoic form in parentheses next to the -lithic form.

The gauntlet was officially thrown down before Sir John by J. Allen Brown, speaking for the opposition before the Anthropological Institute

Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland

The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland is the world's longest established anthropological organization, with a global membership. Since 1843, it has been at the forefront of new developments in anthropology and new means of communicating them to a broad audience...

on March 8, 1892. In the journal he opens the attack by striking at a "hiatus" in the record:

"It has been generally assumed that a break occurred between the period during which ... the continent of Europe was inhabited by Palaeolithic Man and his Neolithic successor ... No physical cause, no adequate reasons have ever been assigned for such a hiatus in human existence ...."

The main hiatus at that time was between British and French archaeology, as the latter had already discovered the gap 20 years earlier and had already considered three answers and arrived at one solution, the modern. Whether Brown did not know or was pretending not to know is unclear. In 1872, the very year of Evans' publication, Mortillet

Louis Laurent Gabriel de Mortillet

Louis Laurent Gabriel de Mortillet , French anthropologist, was born at Meylan, Isère.-Biography:He was educated at the Jesuit college of Chambéry and at the Paris Conservatoire. Becoming in 1847 proprietor of La Revue indépendante, he was implicated in the Revolution of 1848 and sentenced to two...

had presented the gap to the Congrès international d'Anthropologie at Brussels

Brussels

Brussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...

"Between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic, there is a wide and deep gap, a large hiatus."

Apparently prehistoric man was hunting big game with stone tools one year and farming with domestic animals and ground stone tools the next. Mortillet postulated a "time then unknown (époque alors inconnue)" to fill the gap. The hunt for the "unknown" was on. On April 16, 1874, Mortillet retracted. "That hiatus is not real (Cet hiatus n'est pas réel)," he said before the Société d'Anthropologie, asserting that it was an informational gap only. The other theory had been a gap in nature, that, because of the ice age, man had retreated from Europe. The information must now be found. In 1895 Piette stated that he had heard Lartet

Édouard Lartet

Édouard Lartet was a French paleontologist.-Biography:Lartet was born near Castelnau-Barbarens, of Gers, France, where his family had lived for more than five hundred years. He was educated for the law at Auch and Toulouse, but having private means elected to devote himself to science...

speak of "the remains from the intermediate period (les vestiges de l'époque intermédiaire)", which were yet to be discovered, but Lartet had not published this view. The gap had become a transition. However, asserted Piette:

"I was fortunate to discover the remains of that unknown time which separated the Magdalenian age of polished stone axes ... it was, at Mas-d'Azil in 1887 and 1888 when I made this discovery."

He had excavated the type site of the Azilian

Azilian

The Azilian is a name given by archaeologists to an industry of the Epipaleolithic in northern Spain and southern France.It probably dates to the period of the Allerød Oscillation around 10,000 years ago and followed the Magdalenian culture...

Culture, the basis of today's Mesolithic. He found it sandwiched between the Magdalenian and the Neolithic. The tools were like those of the Danish kitchen-middens, termed the Surface Period by Evans, which were the basis of Westropp's Mesolithic. They were Mode 5 stone tool

Stone tool

s, or microlith

Microlith

A microlith is a small stone tool usually made of flint or chert and typically a centimetre or so in length and half a centimetre wide. It is produced from either a small blade or a larger blade-like piece of flint by abrupt or truncated retouching, which leaves a very typical piece of waste,...

s. He mentions neither Westropp nor the Mesolithic, however. For him this was a "solution of continuity (solution de continuité)" To it he assigns the semi-domestication of dog, horse, cow, etc., which "greatly facilitated the work of neolithic man (a beaucoup facilité la tàche de l'homme néolithique)." Brown in 1892 does not mention Mas-d'Azil. He refers to the "transition or 'Mesolithic' forms" but to him these are "rough hewn axes chipped over the entire surface" mentioned by Evans as the earliest of the Neolithic. Where Piette believed he had discovered something new, Brown wanted to break out known tools considered Neolithic.

The Epipaleolithic and Protoneolithic of Sterjna and Obermaier

Sir John Evans never changed his mind, giving rise to a dichotomous view of the Mesolithic and a multiplication of confusing terms. On the continent, all seemed settled: there was a distinct Mesolithic with its own tools and both tools and customs were transitional to the Neolithic. Then in 1910, the Swedish archaeologist, Knut Sterjna, addressed another problem of the Three-Age System: although a culture was predominantly classified as one period, it might contain material that was the same as or like that of another. His example was the Gallery grave

Gallery grave

A Gallery grave is a form of Megalithic tomb where there is no size difference between the burial chamber itself and the entrance passage. Two parallel walls of stone slabs were erected to form a corridor and covered with a line of capstones. The rectangular tomb was covered with a barrow or a cairn...

Period of Scandinavia. It was not uniformly Neolithic, but contained some objects of bronze and more importantly to him three different subcultures.

One of these "civilisations" (sub-cultures) located in the north and east of Scandinavia was rather different, featuring but few gallery graves, using instead stone-lined pit graves containing implements of bone, such as harpoon and javelin heads. He observed that they "persisted during the recent Paleolithic period and also during the Protoneolithic." Here he had used a new term, "Protoneolithic", which was according to him to be applied to the Danish kitchen-middens

Ertebølle culture

The Ertebølle culture is the name of a hunter-gatherer and fisher, pottery-making culture dating to the end of the Mesolithic period. The culture was concentrated in Southern Scandinavia, but genetically linked to strongly related cultures in Northern Germany and the Northern Netherlands...

.

Sterjna also said that the eastern culture "is attached to the Paleolithic civilization (se trouve rattachée à la civilisation paléolithique)." However, it was not intermediary and of its intermediates he said "we cannot discusss them here (nous ne pouvons pas examiner ici)." This "attached" and non-transitional culture he chose to call the Epipaleolithic, defining it as follows:

"With Epipaleolithic I mean the period during the early days that followed the age of the reindeer, the one that retained Paleolithic customs. This period has two stages in Scandinavia, that of Maglemose and that of Kunda. (Par époque épipaléolithique j'entends la période qui, pendant les premiers temps qui ont suivi l'âge du Renne, conserve les coutumes paléolithiques. Cette période présente deux étapes en Scandinavie, celle de Maglemose et de Kunda.)"

There is no mention of any Mesolithic, but the material he described had been previously connected with the Mesolithic. Whether or not Sterjna intended his Protoneolithic and Epipaleolithic as a replacement for the Mesolithic is not clear, but Hugo Obermaier

Hugo Obermaier

Hugo Obermaier was a distinguished prehistorian and anthropologist who taught at various European centres of learning...

, a German archaeologist who taught and worked for many years in Spain, to whom the concepts are often erroneously attributed, used them to mount an attack on the entire concept of Mesolithic. He presented his views in El Hombre fósil, 1916, which was translated into English in 1924. Viewing the Epipaleolithic and the Protoneolithic as a "transition" and an "interim" he affirmed that they were not any sort of "transformation:"

"But in my opinion this term is not justified, as it would be if these phases presented a natural evolutionary development – a progressive transformation from Paleolithic to Neolithic. In reality, the final phase of the Capsian, the Tardenoisian
Tardenoisian
The Tardenoisian is an archaeological culture of the Epipaleolithic period from north-western France and Belgium. Similar cultures are known further east in central Europe and west across Spain....

, the Azilian
Azilian
The Azilian is a name given by archaeologists to an industry of the Epipaleolithic in northern Spain and southern France.It probably dates to the period of the Allerød Oscillation around 10,000 years ago and followed the Magdalenian culture...

and the northern Maglemose industries are the posthumous descendants of the Palaeolithic ..."

The ideas of Sterjna and Obermaier introduced a certain ambiguity into the terminology, which subsequent archaeologists found and find confusing. Epipaleolithic and Protoneolithic cover the same cultures, more or less, as does the Mesolithic. Publications on the Stone Age after 1916 include some sort of explanation of this ambiguity, leaving room for different views. Strictly speaking the Epipaleolithic is the earlier part of the Mesolithic. Some identify it with the Mesolithic. To others it is an Upper Paleolithic transition to the Mesolithic. The exact use in any context depends on the archaeological tradition or the judgement of individual archaeologists. The issue continues.

Lower, middle and upper from Haeckel to Sollas

The post-Darwinian

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

approach to the naming of periods in earth history focused at first on the lapse of time: early (Palaeo-), middle (Meso-) and late (Ceno-). This conceptualization automatically imposes a three-age subdivision to any period, which is predominant in modern archaeology: Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age; Early, Middle and Late Minoan, etc. The criterion is whether the objects in question look simple or are elaborative. If a horizon contains objects that are post-late and simpler-than-late they are sub-, as in Submycenaean.

Haeckel's

Ernst Haeckel

presentations are from a different point of view. His History of Creation of 1870 presents the ages as "Strata of the Earth's Crust," in which he prefers "upper", "mid-" and "lower" based on the order in which one encounters the layers. His analysis features an Upper and Lower Pliocene as well as an Upper and Lower Diluvial (his term for the Pleistocene). Haeckel, however, was relying heavily on Lyell

Charles Lyell

Sir Charles Lyell, 1st Baronet, Kt FRS was a British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularised James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism – the idea that the earth was shaped by slow-moving forces still in operation...

. In the 1833 edition of Principles of Geology (the first) Lyell devised the terms Eocene

Eocene

The Eocene Epoch, lasting from about 56 to 34 million years ago , is a major division of the geologic timescale and the second epoch of the Paleogene Period in the Cenozoic Era. The Eocene spans the time from the end of the Palaeocene Epoch to the beginning of the Oligocene Epoch. The start of the...

, Miocene

Miocene

The Miocene is a geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about . The Miocene was named by Sir Charles Lyell. Its name comes from the Greek words and and means "less recent" because it has 18% fewer modern sea invertebrates than the Pliocene. The Miocene follows the Oligocene...

and Pliocene

Pliocene

The Pliocene Epoch is the period in the geologic timescale that extends from 5.332 million to 2.588 million years before present. It is the second and youngest epoch of the Neogene Period in the Cenozoic Era. The Pliocene follows the Miocene Epoch and is followed by the Pleistocene Epoch...

to mean periods of which the "strata" contained some (Eo-, "early"), more (Mio-) and greater (Plio-) numbers of "living Mollusca

Mollusca

The Mollusca , common name molluscs or mollusksSpelled mollusks in the USA, see reasons given in Rosenberg's ; for the spelling mollusc see the reasons given by , is a large phylum of invertebrate animals. There are around 85,000 recognized extant species of molluscs. Mollusca is the largest...

represented among fossil assemblages of western Europe." The Eocene was given Lower, Middle, Upper; the Miocene a Lower and Upper; and the Pliocene an Older and Newer, which scheme would indicate an equivalence between Lower and Older, and Upper and Newer.

In a French version, Nouveaux Éléments de Géologie, in 1839 Lyell called the Older Pliocene the Pliocene and the Newer Pliocene the Pleistocene (Pleist-, "most"). Then in Antiquity of Man in 1863 he reverted to his previous scheme, adding "Post-Tertiary" and "Post-Pliocene." In 1873 the Fourth Edition of Antiquity of Man restores Pleistocene and identifies it with Post-Pliocene. As this work was posthumous, no more was heard from Lyell. Living or deceased, his work was immensely popular among scientists and laymen alike. "Pleistocene" caught on immediately; it is entirely possible that he restored it by popular demand. In 1880 Dawkins

William Boyd Dawkins

Professor Sir William Boyd Dawkins, FRS, KBE was a British geologist and archaeologist. He was a member of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, Curator of the Manchester Museum and Professor of Geology at Owens College, Manchester. He is noted for his research on fossils and the antiquity of man...

published The Three Pleistocene Strata containing a new manifesto for British archaeology:

"The continuity between geology, prehistoric archaeology and history is so direct that it is impossible to picture early man in this country without using the results of all these three sciences."

He intends to use archaeology and geology to "draw aside the veil" covering the situations of the peoples mentioned in proto-historic documents, such as Caesar

Julius Caesar

Gaius Julius Caesar was a Roman general and statesman and a distinguished writer of Latin prose. He played a critical role in the gradual transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire....

's Commentaries and the Agricola of Tacitus

Tacitus

Publius Cornelius Tacitus was a senator and a historian of the Roman Empire. The surviving portions of his two major works—the Annals and the Histories—examine the reigns of the Roman Emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero and those who reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors...

. Adopting Lyell's scheme of the Tertiary, he divides Pleistocene into Early, Mid- and Late. Only the Palaeolithic falls into the Pleistocene; the Neolithic is in the "Prehistoric Period" subsequent. Dawkins defines what was to become the Upper, Middle and Lower Paleolithic, except that he calls them the "Upper Cave-Earth and Breccia," the "Middle Cave-Earth," and the "Lower Red Sand," with reference to the names of the layers. The next year, 1881, Geikie

James Geikie

James Geikie was a Scottish geologist.He was born in Edinburgh, the son of James Stuart Geikie and younger brother of Sir Archibald Geikie...

solidified the terminology into Upper and Lower Palaeolithic:

"In Kent's Cave the implements obtained from the lower stages were of a much ruder description than the various objects detected in the upper cave-earth ... And a very long time must have elapsed between the formation of the lower and upper Palaeolithic beds in that cave."

The Middle Paleolithic in the modern sense made its appearance in 1911 in the 1st edition of William Johnson Sollas

William Johnson Sollas

William Johnson Sollas FRS was a British geologist and anthropologist. After studying at the City of London School, the Royal College of Chemistry and the Royal School of Mines he matriculated to St. John's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded First Class Honours in geology...

' Ancient Hunters. It had been used in varying senses before then. Sollas associates the period with the Mousterian

Mousterian

Mousterian is a name given by archaeologists to a style of predominantly flint tools associated primarily with Homo neanderthalensis and dating to the Middle Paleolithic, the middle part of the Old Stone Age.-Naming:...

technology and the relevant modern people with the Tasmanians. In the 2nd edition of 1915 he has changed his mind for reasons that are not clear. The Mousterian has been moved to the Lower Paleolithic and the people changed to the Australian aborigines

Australian Aborigines

Australian Aborigines , also called Aboriginal Australians, from the latin ab originem , are people who are indigenous to most of the Australian continentthat is, to mainland Australia and the island of Tasmania...

; furthermore, the association has been made with Neanderthals and the Levalloisian added. Sollas says wistfully that they are in "the very middle of the Palaeolithic epoch." Whatever his reasons, the public would have none of it. From 1911 on, Mousterian was Middle Paleolithic, except for holdouts. Alfred L. Kroeber

Alfred L. Kroeber

Alfred Louis Kroeber was an American anthropologist. He was the first professor appointed to the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and played an integral role in the early days of its Museum of Anthropology, where he served as director from 1909 through...

in 1920, Three essays on the antiquity and races of man, reverting to Lower Paleolithic, explains that he is following Louis Laurent Gabriel de Mortillet

Louis Laurent Gabriel de Mortillet

. The English-speaking public remained with Middle Paleolithic.

Early and late from Worsaae through the three-stage African system

Thomsen had formalized the Three-age System by the time of its publication in 1836. The next step forward was the formalization of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic by Sir John Lubbock in 1865. Between these two times Denmark held the lead in archaeology, especially because of the work of Thomsen's at first junior associate and then successor, Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae

Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae

, rising in the last year of his life to Kultus Minister of Denmark

Kultus Minister of Denmark

The Kultus Minister of Denmark was a Danish minister office. The responsibilities of the minister was the church, culture and education. The word kultus is Latin for adoration, from which the words culture and cult are derived....

. Lubbock offers full tribute and credit to him in Prehistoric Times.

Worsaae in 1862 in Om Tvedelingen af Steenalderen, previewed in English even before its publication by The Gentleman's Magazine, concerned about changes in typology during each period, proposed a bipartite division of each age:

"Both for Bronze and Stone it was now evident that a few hundred years would not suffice. In fact, good grounds existed for dividing each of these periods into two, if not more."

He called them earlier or later. The three ages became six periods. The British seized on the concept immediately. Worsaae's earlier and later became Lubbock's palaeo- and neo- in 1865, but alternatively English speakers used Earlier and Later Stone Age, as did Lyell's 1883 edition of Principles of Geology, with older and younger as synonyms. As there is no room for a middle between the comparative adjectives, they were later modified to early and late. The scheme created a problem for further bipartite subdivisions, which would have resulted in such terms as early early stone age, but that terminology was avoided by adoption of Geikie's upper and lower Paleolithic.

Amongst African archaeologists, the terms Old Stone Age, Middle Stone Age

Middle Stone Age

The Middle Stone Age was a period of African Prehistory between Early Stone Age and Late Stone Age. It is generally considered to have begun around 280,000 years ago and ended around 50-25,000 years ago. The beginnings of particular MSA stone tools have their origins as far back as 550-500,000...

and Late Stone Age

Late Stone Age

The Later Stone Age refers to a period in African prehistory. Its beginnings are roughly contemporaneous with the European Upper Paleolithic...

are preferred.

Wallace's grand revolution recycled

When Sir John Lubbock was doing the preliminary work for his 1865 magnum opus
Magnum opus
Magnum opus , from the Latin meaning "great work", refers to the largest, and perhaps the best, greatest, most popular, or most renowned achievement of a writer, artist, or composer.-Related terms:Sometimes the term magnum opus is used to refer to simply "a great work" rather than "the...

, Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

and Alfred Russel Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace, OM, FRS was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist...

were jointly publishing their first papers On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection. Darwins's On the Origin of Species came out in 1859, but he did not elucidate the theory of evolution as it applies to man until the Descent of Man in 1871. Meanwhile Wallace read a paper in 1864 to the Anthropological Society of London

Anthropological Society of London

that was a major influence on Sir John, publishing in the very next year. He quoted Wallace:

From the moment when the first skin was used as a covering, when the first rude spear was formed to assist in the chase, the first seed sown or shoot planted, a grand revolution was effected in nature, a revolution which in all the previous ages of the world's history had had no parallel, for a being had arisen who was no longer necessarily subject to change with the changing universe,—a being who was in some degree superior to nature, inasmuch as he knew how to control and regulate her action, and could keep himself in harmony with her, not by a change in body, but by an advance in mind.

Wallace distinguishing between mind and body was asserting that natural selection

Natural selection

Natural selection is the nonrandom process by which biologic traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution....

shaped the form of man only until the appearance of mind; after then, it played no part. Mind formed modern man, meaning that result of mind, culture. Its appearance overthrew the laws of nature. Wallace used the term "grand revolution." Although Lubbock believed that Wallace had gone too far in that direction he did adopt a theory of evolution combined with the revolution of culture. Neither Wallace not Lubbock offered any explanation of how the revolution came about, or felt that they had to offer one. Revolution is an acceptance that in the continuous evolution of objects and events sharp and inexplicable disconformities do occur, as in geology. And so it is not surprising that in the 1874 Stockholm

Stockholm

Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...

meeting of the International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology

International Union for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences

The International Union for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences is a learned society, linked through the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies to UNESCO, and concerned with the study of prehistory and protohistory...

, in response to Ernst Hamy's denial of any "break" between Paleolithic and Neolithic based on material from dolmen

Dolmen

A dolmen—also known as a portal tomb, portal grave, dolmain , cromlech , anta , Hünengrab/Hünenbett , Adamra , Ispun , Hunebed , dös , goindol or quoit—is a type of single-chamber megalithic tomb, usually consisting of...

s near Paris "showing a continuity between the paleolithic and neolithic folks," Edouard Desor, geologist and archaeologist, replied: "that the introduction of domesticated animals was a complete revolution and enables us to separate the two epochs completely."

A revolution as defined by Wallace and adopted by Lubbock is a change of regime, or rules. If man was the new rule-setter through culture then the initiation of each of Lubbock's four periods might be regarded as a change of rules and therefore as a distinct revolution, and so Chambers's Journal, a reference work, in 1879 portrayed each of them as:

"...an advance in knowledge and civilization which amounted to a revolution in the then existing manners and customs of the world."

Because of the controversy over Westropp's Mesolithic and Mortillet's Gap beginning in 1872 archaeological attention focused mainly on the revolution at the Palaeolithic—Neolithic boundary as an explanation of the gap. For a few decades the Neolithic Period, as it was called, was described as a kind of revolution. In the 1890s, a standard term, the Neolithic Revolution, began to appear in encyclopedias such as Pears. In 1925 the Cambridge Ancient History

Cambridge Ancient History

The Cambridge Ancient History is a comprehensive ancient history in fourteen volumes, spanning Prehistory to Late Antiquity, published by Cambridge University Press. The first series, of twelve volumes, was planned by J. B. Bury and published between 1924 and 1939. A second series, revising and...

reported:

"There are quite a large number of archaeologists who justifiably consider the period of the Late Stone Age to be a neolithic revolution and an economic revolution at the same time. For that is the period when primitive agriculture developed and cattle breeding began."

Vere Gordon Childe's revolution for the masses

In 1936 a champion came forward who would advance the Neolithic Revolution into the mainstream view: Vere Gordon Childe

Vere Gordon Childe

Vere Gordon Childe , better known as V. Gordon Childe, was an Australian archaeologist and philologist who specialised in the study of European prehistory. A vocal socialist, Childe accepted the socio-economic theory of Marxism and was an early proponent of Marxist archaeology...

. After giving the Neolithic Revolution scant mention in his first notable work, the 1928 edition of New Light on the Most Ancient East, Childe made a major presentation in the first edition of Man Makes Himself in 1936 developing Wallace's and Lubbock's theme of the human revolution against the supremacy of nature and supplying detail on two revolutions, the Paleolithic—Neolithic and the Neolithic-Bronze Age, which he called the Second or Urban revolution.

Lubbock had been as much of an ethnologist as an archaeologist. The founders of cultural anthropology

Cultural anthropology

, such as Tylor

Edward Burnett Tylor

Sir Edward Burnett Tylor , was an English anthropologist.Tylor is representative of cultural evolutionism. In his works Primitive Culture and Anthropology, he defined the context of the scientific study of anthropology, based on the evolutionary theories of Charles Lyell...

and Morgan, were to follow his lead on that. Lubbock created such concepts as savages and barbarians based on the customs of then modern tribesmen and made the presumption that the terms can be applied without serious inaccuracy to the men of the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. Childe broke with this view:

"The assumption that any savage tribe today is primitive, in the sense that its culture faithfully reflects that of much more ancient men is gratuitous."

Childe concentrated on the inferences to be made from the artifacts:

"But when the tools ... are considered ... in their totality, they may reveal much more. They disclose not only the level of technical skill ... but also their economy .... The archaeologists's ages correspond roughly to economic stages. Each new "age" is ushered in by an economic revolution ...."

The archaeological periods were indications of economic ones:

"Archaeologists can define a period when it was apparently the sole economy, the sole organization of production ruling anywhere on the earth's surface."

These periods could be used to supplement historical ones where history was not available. He reaffirmed Lubbock's view that the Paleolithic was an age of food gathering and the Neolithic an age of food production. He took a stand on the question of the Mesolithic identifying it with the Epipaleolithic. The Mesolithic was to him "a mere continuance of the Old Stone Age mode of life" between the end of the Pleistocene

Pleistocene

The Pleistocene is the epoch from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years BP that spans the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. The name pleistocene is derived from the Greek and ....

and the start of the Neolithic. Lubbock's terms "savagery" and "barbarism" do not much appear in Man Makes Himself but the sequel, What Happened in History (1942), reuses them (attributing them to Morgan, who got them from Lubbock) with an economic significance: savagery for food-gathering and barbarism for Neolithic food production. Civilization begins with the urban revolution of the Bronze Age.

The Pre-pottery Neolithic of Garstang and Kenyon at Jericho

Even as Childe was developing this revolution theme the ground was sinking under him. Lubbock did not find any pottery associated with the Paleolithic, asserting of its to him last period, the Reindeer, "no fragments of metal or pottery have yet been found." He did not generalize but others did not hesitate to do so. The next year, 1866, Dawkins

William Boyd Dawkins

proclaimed of Neolithic people that "these invented the use of pottery...." From then until the 1930s pottery was considered a sine qua non

Sine qua non

Sine qua non or condicio sine qua non refers to an indispensable and essential action, condition, or ingredient...

of the Neolithic. The term Pre-Pottery Age came into use in the late 19th century but it meant Paleolithic.

Meanwhile the Palestine Exploration Fund

Palestine Exploration Fund

The Palestine Exploration Fund is a British society often simply known as the PEF. It was founded in 1865 and is still functioning today. Its initial object was to carry out surveys of the topography and ethnography of Ottoman Palestine with a remit that fell somewhere between an expeditionary...

founded in 1865 completing its survey of excavatable sites in Palestine in 1880 began excavating in 1890 at the site of ancient Lachish

Lachish

Lachish was an ancient Near East town located at the site of modern Tell ed-Duweir in the Shephelah, a region between Mount Hebron and the maritime plain of Philistia . The town was first mentioned in the Amarna letters as Lakisha-Lakiša...

near Jerusalem, the first of a series planned under the licensing system of the Ottoman Empire

Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...

. Under their auspices in 1908 Ernst Sellin

Ernst Sellin

Ernst Sellin was a German theologian.Sellin studied theology and oriental languages...

and Carl Watzinger

Carl Watzinger

Carl Watzinger was a German-born archaeologist that was part of a team that worked on uncovering the site of the ancient city of Jericho from 1907 to 1908. His partner was the German theologian Ernst Sellin....

began excavation at Jericho

Jericho

Jericho ; is a city located near the Jordan River in the West Bank of the Palestinian territories. It is the capital of the Jericho Governorate and has a population of more than 20,000. Situated well below sea level on an east-west route north of the Dead Sea, Jericho is the lowest permanently...

previously excavated for the first time by Sir Charles Warren

Charles Warren

General Sir Charles Warren, GCMG, KCB, FRS was an officer in the British Royal Engineers. He was one of the earliest European archaeologists of Biblical Holy Land, and particularly of Temple Mount...

in 1868. They discovered a Neolithic and Bronze Age city there. Subsequent excavations in the region by them and others turned up other walled cities that appear to have preceded the Bronze Age urbanization.

All excavation ceased for World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

. When it was over the Ottoman Empire was no longer a factor there. In 1919 the new British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem

Council for British Research in the Levant

The Council for British Research in the Levant was formed in 1998 with the amalgamation of the British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History and the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem...

assumed archaeological operations in Palestine. John Garstang

John Garstang

John Garstang was a British archaeologist of the ancient Near East, especially Anatolia and the southern Levant....

finally resumed excavation at Jericho 1930-1936. The renewed dig uncovered another 3000 years of prehistory that was in the Neolithic but did not make use of pottery. He called it the Pre-pottery Neolithic

Pre-Pottery Neolithic

The Pre-Pottery Neolithic represents the early Neolithic in the Levantine and upper Mesopotamian region of the Fertile Crescent. It succeeds the Natufian culture of the Epipaleolithic as the domestication of plants and animals was in its beginnings and triggered by the Younger Dryas...

, as opposed to the Pottery Neolithic, subsequently often called the Aceramic or Pre-ceramic and Ceramic Neolithic.

Kathleen Kenyon

Kathleen Kenyon

Dame Kathleen Mary Kenyon , was a leading archaeologist of Neolithic culture in the Fertile Crescent. She is best known for her excavations in Jericho in 1952-1958.-Early life:...

was a young photographer then with a natural talent for archaeology. Solving a number of dating problems she soon advanced to the forefront of British archaeology through skill and judgement. In World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

she served as a commander in the Red Cross. In 1952-1958 she took over operations at Jericho as the Director of the British School, verifying and expanding Garstang's work and conclusions. There were two Pre-pottery Neolithic periods, she concluded, A and B. Moreover the PPN had been discovered at most of the major Neolithic sites in the near East and Greece. By this time her personal stature in archaeology was at least equal to that of V. Gordon Childe. While the three-age system was being attributed to Childe in popular fame, Kenyon became gratuitously the discoverer of the PPN. More significantly the question of revolution or evolution of the Neolithic was increasingly being brought before the professional archaeologists.

Bronze age subdivisions

Danish archaeology took the lead in defining the Bronze Age, with little of the controversy surrounding the Stone Age. British archaeologists patterned their own excavations after those of the Danish, which they followed avidly in the media. References to the Bronze Age in British excavation reports began in the 1820s contemporaneously with the new system being promulgated by C.J. Thomsen. Mention of the Early and Late Bronze Age began in the 1860s following the bipartite definitions of Worsaae.

The tripartite system of Sir John Evans

In 1874 at the Stockholm

Stockholm

meeting of the International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology

International Union for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences

, a suggestion was made by A. Bertrand that no distinct age of bronze had existed, that the bronze artifacts discovered were really part of the Iron Age. Hans Hildebrand

Hans Hildebrand

Hans Olof Hildebrand Hildebrand was a Swedish archeologist. Born in Stockholm, he was the son of Bror Emil Hildebrand and Anna Mathilda Ekecrantz...

in refutation pointed to two Bronze Ages and a transitional period in Scandinavia. John Evans

John Evans (archaeologist)

denied any defect of continuity between the two and asserted there were three Bronze Ages, "the early, middle and late bronze age."

His view for the Stone Age, following Lubbock, was quite different, denying, in the The Ancient Stone Implements, any concept of a Middle Stone Age. In his 1881 parallel work, The Ancient Bronze Implements, he affirmed and further defined the three periods, strangely enough recusing himself from his previous terminology, Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age (the current forms) in favor of "an earlier and later stage" and "middle". He uses Bronze Age, Bronze Period, Bronze-using Period and Bronze Civilization interchangeably. Apparently Evans was sensitive of what had gone before, retaining the terminology of the bipartite system while proposing a tripartite one. After stating a catalogue of types of bronze implements he defines his system:

"The Bronze Age of Britain may, therefore, be regarded as an aggregate of three stages: the first, that characterized by the flat or slightly flanged celts, and the knife-daggers ... the second, that characterized by the more heavy dagger-blades and the flanged celts and tanged spear-heads or daggers, ... and the third, by palstaves and socketed celts
and the many forms of tools and weapons, ... It is in this third stage that the bronze sword and the true
socketed spear-head first make their advent."

From Evans' gratuitous Copper Age to the mythical chalcolithic

In chapter 1 of his work, Evans proposes for the first time a transitional Copper Age

Copper Age

The Chalcolithic |stone]]") period or Copper Age, also known as the Eneolithic/Æneolithic , is a phase of the Bronze Age in which the addition of tin to copper to form bronze during smelting remained yet unknown by the metallurgists of the times...

between the Neolithic

Neolithic

and the Bronze Age

Bronze Age

The Bronze Age is a period characterized by the use of copper and its alloy bronze as the chief hard materials in the manufacture of some implements and weapons. Chronologically, it stands between the Stone Age and Iron Age...

. He adduces evidence from far-flung places such as China and the Americas to show that the smelting of copper universally preceded alloying with tin

Tin

Tin is a chemical element with the symbol Sn and atomic number 50. It is a main group metal in group 14 of the periodic table. Tin shows chemical similarity to both neighboring group 14 elements, germanium and lead and has two possible oxidation states, +2 and the slightly more stable +4...

to make bronze. He does not know how to classify this fourth age. On the one hand he distinguishes it from the Bronze Age. On the other hand he includes it:

"In thus speaking of a bronze-using period I by no means wish to exclude the possible use of copper unalloyed with tin."

Evans goes into considerable detail tracing references to the metals in classical literature: Latin aer, aeris and Greek chalkós first for "copper" and then for "bronze." He does not mention the adjective of aes, which is aēneus, nor is he interested in formulating New Latin words for the Copper Age, which is good enough for him and many English authors from then on. He offers literary proof that bronze had been in use before iron and copper before bronze.

In 1884 the center of archaeological interest shifted to Italy with the excavation of Remedello and the discovery of the Remedello culture

Remedello culture

The Remedello culture developed during the Copper Age in Northern Italy, particularly in the area of the Po valley...

by Gaetano Chierici. According to his 1886 biographers, Luigi Pigorini

Luigi Pigorini

Luigi Pigorini was an Italian palaeoethnologist, archaeologist and ethnographer.-Biography:Pigorini was born at Fontanellato, near Parma....

and Pellegrino Strobel, Chierici devised the term Età Eneo-litica to describe the archaeological context of his findings, which he believed were the remains of Pelasgians

Pelasgians

The name Pelasgians was used by some ancient Greek writers to refer to populations that were either the ancestors of the Greeks or who preceded the Greeks in Greece, "a hold-all term for any ancient, primitive and presumably indigenous people in the Greek world." In general, "Pelasgian" has come...

, or people that preceded Greek and Latin speakers in the Mediterranean. The age (Età) was:

"A period of transition from the age of stone to that of bronze (periodo di transizione dall'età della pietra a quella del bronzo)"

Whether intentional or not, the definition was the same as Evans', except that Chierici was adding a term to New Latin. He describes the transition by stating the beginning (litica, or stone age) and the ending (eneo-, or Bronze Age); in English, "the stone-to-bronze period." Shortly after, "Eneolithic" or "Aeneolithic" began turning up in scholarly English as a synonym for "Copper Age." Sir John's own son, Arthur Evans

Arthur Evans

Sir Arthur John Evans FRS was a British archaeologist most famous for unearthing the palace of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete and for developing the concept of Minoan civilization from the structures and artifacts found there and elsewhere throughout eastern Mediterranean...

, beginning to come into his own as an archaeologist and already studying Cretan civilization, refers in 1895 to some clay figures of "aeneolithic date" (quotes his).

Iron age subdivisions

The advent of the Iron Age is marked by the initial use of iron in any region, whether brought in from elsewhere, or by evolution of the smelting process in that region. As the ancient writers considered that they were in the Iron Age, they did not define an end to it. This convention prevailed in modern archaeology as well. Iron is still the major hard material in use in modern civilization. Steel is a vital and indispensable modern industry. Many other suggestions have been made: industrial, machine, plastic, information, etc., but none have been seriously incorporated into the three-age system. Scholarship leaves the question open. Generally in history the Iron Age refers to mainly the 1st millennium BC, no later than the 1st millennium AD. In some cases, however, modern civilization is the Iron Age, as when the African archaeologists hypothesized that Europeans and Middle Easterners brought it to Central and South Africa.

Dating

The question of the dates of the objects and events discovered through archaeology is certainly the prime concern of any system of thought that seeks to summarize history through the formulation of ages or epochs

Epoch (reference date)

In the fields of chronology and periodization, an epoch is an instance in time chosen as the origin of a particular era. The "epoch" then serves as a reference point from which time is measured...

. An age is defined through comparison of contemporaneous events. If the events selected are not contemporaneous then any grouping of them does not enable synthesis of history but rather contributes to the formulation of another myth. The myths of archaeologists have long been a subject of ridicule.

Even this ridicule fuels an expanding and ever more determined industry by the scientific community to discover accurate chronological relationships between events based on their material evidence long after the fact. Epochalization is in fact the creation of history. Increasingly the terminology of archaeology is parallel to that of historical method. An event is "undocumented" until it turns up in the archaeological record. Fossils and artifacts are "documents" of the epochs hypothesized. The correction of dating errors is therefore a major concern.

In the case where parallel epochs defined in history were available, elaborate efforts were made to align European and Near East

Near East

The Near East is a geographical term that covers different countries for geographers, archeologists, and historians, on the one hand, and for political scientists, economists, and journalists, on the other...

ern sequences with the datable chronology of Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...

and other known civilizations. The resulting grand sequence was also spot checked by evidence of calculateable solar or other astronomical events. These methods are only available for the relatively short term of recorded history. Most prehistory does not fall into that category.

Physical science provides at least two general groups of dating methods, stated below. Data collected by these methods is intended to provide an absolute chronology to the framework of periods defined by relative chronology. Although it can be used to correct the relative chronologies, it can never by definition be used to replace those chronologies.

Grand systems of layering

The initial comparisons of artifacts defined periods that were local to a site, group of sites or region.
Advances made in the fields of seriation

Seriation (archaeology)

In archaeology, seriation is a relative dating method in which assemblages or artifacts from numerous sites, in the same culture, are placed in chronological order. Where absolute dating methods, such as carbon dating, cannot be applied, archaeologists have to use relative dating methods to date...

, typology

Typology (archaeology)

, stratification

Stratification (archeology)

Stratification is a paramount and base concept in archaeology, especially in the course of excavation. It is largely based on the Law of Superposition...

and the associative dating of artifacts

Artifact (archaeology)

An artifact or artefact is "something made or given shape by man, such as a tool or a work of art, esp an object of archaeological interest"...

and features permitted even greater refinement of the system. The ultimate development is the reconstruction of a global catalogue of layers (or as close to it as possible) with different sections attested in different regions. Ideally once the layer of the artifact or event is known a quick lookup of the layer in the grand system will provide a ready date. This is considered the most reliable method. It is used for calibration of the less reliable chemical methods.

Measurement of chemical change

Any material sample contains elements and compounds that are subject to decay into other elements and compounds. In cases where the rate of decay is predictable and the proportions of initial and end products can be known exactly, consistent dates of the artifact can be calculated. Due to the problem of sample contamination and variability of the natural proportions of the materials in the media, sample analysis in the case where verification can be checked by grand layering systems has often been found to be widely inaccurate. Chemical dates therefore are only considered reliable used in conjunction with other methods. They are collected in groups of data points that form a pattern when graphed. Isolated dates are not considered reliable.

Other -liths and -lithics

The term Megalithic does not refer to a period of time, but merely describes the use of large stones by ancient peoples from any period. An eolith

Eolith

An eolith is a chipped flint nodule. Eoliths were once thought to have been artifacts, the earliest stone tools, but are now believed to be naturally produced by geological processes such as glaciation....

is a stone that might have been formed by natural process but occurs in contexts that suggest modification by early humans or other primates for percussion.

Three-age system resumptive table

Age	Period	Tools	Economy	Dwelling sites	Society	Religion
Stone age Stone Age The Stone Age is a broad prehistoric period, lasting about 2.5 million years , during which humans and their predecessor species in the genus Homo, as well as the earlier partly contemporary genera Australopithecus and Paranthropus, widely used exclusively stone as their hard material in the...	Palaeolithic	Handmade tools and objects found in nature – cudgel, club Club (weapon) A club is among the simplest of all weapons. A club is essentially a short staff, or stick, usually made of wood, and wielded as a weapon since prehistoric times.... , sharpened stone, chopper Chopper (archaeology) Archaeologists define a chopper as a pebble tool with an irregular cutting edge formed through the removal of flakes from one side of a stone.... , handaxe, scraper Scraper (archaeology) In archaeology, scrapers are unifacial tools that were used either for hideworking or woodworking purposes. Whereas this term is often used for any unifacially flaked stone tool that defies classification, most lithic analysts maintain that the only true scrapers are defined on the base of... , spear Spear A spear is a pole weapon consisting of a shaft, usually of wood, with a pointed head.The head may be simply the sharpened end of the shaft itself, as is the case with bamboo spears, or it may be made of a more durable material fastened to the shaft, such as flint, obsidian, iron, steel or... , harpoon Harpoon A harpoon is a long spear-like instrument used in fishing to catch fish or large marine mammals such as whales. It accomplishes this task by impaling the target animal, allowing the fishermen to use a rope or chain attached to the butt of the projectile to catch the animal... , needle Sewing needle A sewing needle is a long slender tool with a pointed tip. The first needles were made of bone or wood; modern ones are manufactured from high carbon steel wire, nickel- or 18K gold plated for corrosion resistance. The highest quality embroidery needles are plated with two-thirds platinum and... , scratch awl Scratch awl A scratch awl is a woodworking layout and point-making tool. It is used to scribe a line to be followed by a hand saw or chisel when making woodworking joints and other operations.... . In general stone tool Stone tool A stone tool is, in the most general sense, any tool made either partially or entirely out of stone. Although stone tool-dependent societies and cultures still exist today, most stone tools are associated with prehistoric, particularly Stone Age cultures that have become extinct... s of Modes I—IV.	Hunting and gathering Hunter-gatherer A hunter-gatherer or forage society is one in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to agricultural societies which rely mainly on domesticated species. Hunting and gathering was the ancestral subsistence mode of Homo, and all modern humans were...	Mobile lifestyle – cave Cave A cave or cavern is a natural underground space large enough for a human to enter. The term applies to natural cavities some part of which is in total darkness. The word cave also includes smaller spaces like rock shelters, sea caves, and grottos.Speleology is the science of exploration and study... s, hut Hut (dwelling) A hut is a small and crude shelter, usually used for dwelling. Its design favors local techniques and materials to allow for swift and inexpensive construction.-Modern use:... s, tooth or skin hovel Hovel Hovel can mean:A small poor-quality house: see wikt:hovelHövels is a municipality in the district of Altenkirchen, in Rhineland-Palatinate, in western Germany.... s, mostly by river River A river is a natural watercourse, usually freshwater, flowing towards an ocean, a lake, a sea, or another river. In a few cases, a river simply flows into the ground or dries up completely before reaching another body of water. Small rivers may also be called by several other names, including... s and lake Lake A lake is a body of relatively still fresh or salt water of considerable size, localized in a basin, that is surrounded by land. Lakes are inland and not part of the ocean and therefore are distinct from lagoons, and are larger and deeper than ponds. Lakes can be contrasted with rivers or streams,... s	A band Band society A band society is the simplest form of human society. A band generally consists of a small kin group, no larger than an extended family or clan; it has been defined as consisting of no more than 30 to 50 individuals.Bands have a loose organization... of edible-plant gatherers and hunters (25–100 people)	Evidence for belief in the afterlife first appears in the Upper Palaeolithic, marked by the appearance of burial Burial Burial is the act of placing a person or object into the ground. This is accomplished by excavating a pit or trench, placing an object in it, and covering it over.-History:... rituals and ancestor worship. Priest Priest A priest is a person authorized to perform the sacred rites of a religion, especially as a mediatory agent between humans and deities. They also have the authority or power to administer religious rites; in particular, rites of sacrifice to, and propitiation of, a deity or deities... s and sanctuary Sanctuary A sanctuary is any place of safety. They may be categorized into human and non-human .- Religious sanctuary :A religious sanctuary can be a sacred place , or a consecrated area of a church or temple around its tabernacle or altar.- Sanctuary as a sacred place :#Sanctuary as a sacred place:#:In... servants appear in the prehistory Prehistory Prehistory is the span of time before recorded history. Prehistory can refer to the period of human existence before the availability of those written records with which recorded history begins. More broadly, it refers to all the time preceding human existence and the invention of writing... .
	Mesolithic Mesolithic The Mesolithic is an archaeological concept used to refer to certain groups of archaeological cultures defined as falling between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic.... (other name epipalaeolithic)	Mode V tools employed in composite devices – harpoon Harpoon A harpoon is a long spear-like instrument used in fishing to catch fish or large marine mammals such as whales. It accomplishes this task by impaling the target animal, allowing the fishermen to use a rope or chain attached to the butt of the projectile to catch the animal... , bow Bow (weapon) The bow and arrow is a projectile weapon system that predates recorded history and is common to most cultures.-Description:A bow is a flexible arc that shoots aerodynamic projectiles by means of elastic energy. Essentially, the bow is a form of spring powered by a string or cord... and arrow Arrow An arrow is a shafted projectile that is shot with a bow. It predates recorded history and is common to most cultures.An arrow usually consists of a shaft with an arrowhead attached to the front end, with fletchings and a nock at the other.- History:... . Other devices such as fish – basket Fishing basket A fishing basket is a basket used for fishing. The manufacture of fishing baskets can provide income for tribal peoples.-History:The ancient Egyptians used weir baskets made from willow branches to fish the Nile river.... , boat Boat A boat is a watercraft of any size designed to float or plane, to provide passage across water. Usually this water will be inland or in protected coastal areas. However, boats such as the whaleboat were designed to be operated from a ship in an offshore environment. In naval terms, a boat is a... s	Intensive hunting and gathering, porting of wild animals and seeds of wild plants for domestic use and planting	Temporary villages at opportune locations for economic activities	Tribe Tribe A tribe, viewed historically or developmentally, consists of a social group existing before the development of, or outside of, states.Many anthropologists use the term tribal society to refer to societies organized largely on the basis of kinship, especially corporate descent groups .Some theorists... s and bands
	Neolithic Neolithic The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BC in some parts of the Middle East, and later in other parts of the world. It is traditionally considered as the last part of the Stone Age...	Polished stone tools, devices useful in subsistence farming and defense – chisel Chisel A chisel is a tool with a characteristically shaped cutting edge of blade on its end, for carving or cutting a hard material such as wood, stone, or metal. The handle and blade of some types of chisel are made of metal or wood with a sharp edge in it.In use, the chisel is forced into the material... , hoe Hoe (tool) A hoe is an ancient and versatile agricultural tool used to move small amounts of soil. Common goals include weed control by agitating the surface of the soil around plants, piling soil around the base of plants , creating narrow furrows and shallow trenches for planting seeds and bulbs, to chop... , plough Plough The plough or plow is a tool used in farming for initial cultivation of soil in preparation for sowing seed or planting. It has been a basic instrument for most of recorded history, and represents one of the major advances in agriculture... , yoke Yoke A yoke is a wooden beam, normally used between a pair of oxen or other animals to enable them to pull together on a load when working in pairs, as oxen usually do; some yokes are fitted to individual animals. There are several types of yoke, used in different cultures, and for different types of oxen... , reaping-hook, grain pourer, loom Loom A loom is a device used to weave cloth. The basic purpose of any loom is to hold the warp threads under tension to facilitate the interweaving of the weft threads... , earthenware Earthenware Earthenware is a common ceramic material, which is used extensively for pottery tableware and decorative objects.-Types of earthenware:Although body formulations vary between countries and even between individual makers, a generic composition is 25% ball clay, 28% kaolin, 32% quartz, and 15%... (pottery Pottery Pottery is the material from which the potteryware is made, of which major types include earthenware, stoneware and porcelain. The place where such wares are made is also called a pottery . Pottery also refers to the art or craft of the potter or the manufacture of pottery... ) and weapon Weapon A weapon, arm, or armament is a tool or instrument used with the aim of causing damage or harm to living beings or artificial structures or systems... s	Neolithic Revolution Neolithic Revolution The Neolithic Revolution was the first agricultural revolution. It was the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and settlement. Archaeological data indicates that various forms of plants and animal domestication evolved independently in 6 separate locations worldwide circa... - domestication Domestication Domestication or taming is the process whereby a population of animals or plants, through a process of selection, becomes accustomed to human provision and control. In the Convention on Biological Diversity a domesticated species is defined as a 'species in which the evolutionary process has been... of plants and animals used in agriculture Agriculture Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the... and herding, supplementary gathering, hunting Hunting Hunting is the practice of pursuing any living thing, usually wildlife, for food, recreation, or trade. In present-day use, the term refers to lawful hunting, as distinguished from poaching, which is the killing, trapping or capture of the hunted species contrary to applicable law... , and fishing Fishing Fishing is the activity of trying to catch wild fish. Fish are normally caught in the wild. Techniques for catching fish include hand gathering, spearing, netting, angling and trapping.... . Warfare.	Permanent settlements varying in size from villages to walled cities, public works.	Tribes and formation of chiefdoms in some Neolithic societies the end of the period	Polytheism Polytheism Polytheism is the belief of multiple deities also usually assembled into a pantheon of gods and goddesses, along with their own mythologies and rituals.... presided over by the mother goddess Mother goddess Mother goddess is a term used to refer to a goddess who represents motherhood, fertility, creation or embodies the bounty of the Earth. When equated with the Earth or the natural world such goddesses are sometimes referred to as Mother Earth or as the Earth Mother.Many different goddesses have...
Bronze Age Bronze Age The Bronze Age is a period characterized by the use of copper and its alloy bronze as the chief hard materials in the manufacture of some implements and weapons. Chronologically, it stands between the Stone Age and Iron Age...	Copper Age Copper Age The Chalcolithic \|stone]]") period or Copper Age, also known as the Eneolithic/Æneolithic , is a phase of the Bronze Age in which the addition of tin to copper to form bronze during smelting remained yet unknown by the metallurgists of the times...	Copper Copper Copper is a chemical element with the symbol Cu and atomic number 29. It is a ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. Pure copper is soft and malleable; an exposed surface has a reddish-orange tarnish... tools, potter's wheel Potter's wheel In pottery, a potter's wheel is a machine used in asma of round ceramic ware. The wheel may also be used during process of trimming the excess body from dried ware and for applying incised decoration or rings of color...	Civilization, including craft Craft A craft is a branch of a profession that requires some particular kind of skilled work. In historical sense, particularly as pertinent to the Medieval history and earlier, the term is usually applied towards people occupied in small-scale production of goods.-Development from the past until... , trade Trade Trade is the transfer of ownership of goods and services from one person or entity to another. Trade is sometimes loosely called commerce or financial transaction or barter. A network that allows trade is called a market. The original form of trade was barter, the direct exchange of goods and...	Urban centers surrounded by politically attached communities	City-states State (polity) A state is an organized political community, living under a government. States may be sovereign and may enjoy a monopoly on the legal initiation of force and are not dependent on, or subject to any other power or state. Many states are federated states which participate in a federal union... *	Ethnic gods, state religion
	Bronze Age Bronze Age The Bronze Age is a period characterized by the use of copper and its alloy bronze as the chief hard materials in the manufacture of some implements and weapons. Chronologically, it stands between the Stone Age and Iron Age...	Bronze Bronze Bronze is a metal alloy consisting primarily of copper, usually with tin as the main additive. It is hard and brittle, and it was particularly significant in antiquity, so much so that the Bronze Age was named after the metal... tools				Ethnic gods, state religion
Iron Age Iron Age The Iron Age is the archaeological period generally occurring after the Bronze Age, marked by the prevalent use of iron. The early period of the age is characterized by the widespread use of iron or steel. The adoption of such material coincided with other changes in society, including differing...		Iron tools	National economy presided over by the government	cities City A city is a relatively large and permanent settlement. Although there is no agreement on how a city is distinguished from a town within general English language meanings, many cities have a particular administrative, legal, or historical status based on local law.For example, in the U.S... connected by roads, capital city	Countries, empires	One or more religions sanctioned by the state

* Formation of states starts during the Early Bronze Age in Egypt and Mesopotamia and during the Late Bronze Age first empires are founded.

Criticism

Criticisms of the Three-age System have been with it from at least the 19th century. Every phase of its development has been contended. Some of the arguments that have been presented against it follow.

Unsound epochalism

In some cases criticism resulted in other, parallel three-age systems, such as the concepts expressed by Lewis Henry Morgan in Ancient Society
Ancient Society
Ancient Society is a book by the United States ethnologist Lewis H. Morgan and published in 1877. In this book, Morgan develops his theory of the three stages of human progress, i.e., from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization...

, based on ethnology

Ethnology

Ethnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnic, racial, and/or national divisions of humanity.-Scientific discipline:Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct...

. These disagreed with the metallic basis of epochization. The critic generally substituted his own definitions of epochs. Vere Gordon Childe

Vere Gordon Childe

said of the early cultural anthropologists:

"Last century Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era....

, Lewis H. Morgan
Lewis H. Morgan
Lewis Henry Morgan was a pioneering American anthropologist and social theorist, a railroad lawyer and capitalist. He is best known for his work on kinship and social structure, his theories of social evolution, and his ethnography of the Iroquois...

and Tylor propounded divergent schemes ... they arranged these in a logical order .... They assumed that the logical order was a temporal one.... The competing systems of Morgan and Tylor remained equally unverified—and incompatible—theories."

More recently, many archaeologists have questioned the validity of dividing time into epochs at all. For example, one recent critic, Graham Connah, describes the three-age system as "epochalism" and asserts:

"So many archaeological writers have used this model for so long that for many readers it has taken on a reality of its own. In spite of the theoretical agonizing of the last half-century, epochalism is still alive and well ... Even in parts of the world where the model is still in common use, it needs to be accepted that, for example, there never was actually such a thing as 'the Bronze Age.'"

Simplisticism

Some view the three-age system as over-simple; that is, it neglects vital detail and forces complex circumstances into a mold they do not fit. Rowlands argues that the division of human societies into epochs based on the presumption of a single set of related changes is not realistic:

"But as a more rigorous sociological approach has begun to show that changes at the economic, political and ideological levels are not 'all of apiece' we have come to realise that time may be segmented in as many ways as convenient to the researcher concerned."

The three-age system is a relative chronology

Relative dating

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...

. The explosion of archaeological data acquired in the 20th century was intended to elucidate the relative chronology in detail. One consequence was the collection of absolute dates

Absolute dating

Absolute dating is the process of determining an approximate computed age in archaeology and geology. Some scientists prefer the terms chronometric or calendar dating, as use of the word "absolute" implies an unwarranted certainty and precision...

. Connah argues:

"As radiocarbon and other forms of absolute dating contributed more detailed and more reliable chronologies, the epochal model ceased to be necessary."

Peter Bogucki of Princeton University summarizes the perspective taken by many modern archaeologists:

"Although modern archaeologists realize that this tripartite division of prehistoric society is far too simple to reflect the complexity of change and continuity, terms like ‘Bronze Age’ are still used as a very general way of focusing attention on particular times and places and thus facilitating archaeological discussion."

Eurocentrism

Another common criticism attacks the broader application of the Three-age System as a cross-cultural model for social change. The model was originally designed to explain data from Europe and West Asia, but archaeologists have also attempted to use it to explain social and technological developments in other parts of the world such as the Americas, Australasia, and Africa. Many archaeologists working in these regions have criticized this application as eurocentric

Eurocentrism

Eurocentrism is the practice of viewing the world from a European perspective and with an implied belief, either consciously or subconsciously, in the preeminence of European culture...

. Graham Connah writes that:

"... attempts by Eurocentric archaeologists to apply the model to African archaeology have produced little more than confusion, whereas in the Americas or Australasia it has been irrelevant, ..."

Alice B. Kehoe further explains this position as it relates to American archaeology:

"... Professor Wilson's presentation of prehistoric archaeology was a European product carried across the Atlantic to promote an American science compatible with its European model."

She goes on to complain of Wilson that "he accepted and reprised the idea that the European course of development was paradigmatic for humankind." This criticism argues that the different societies of the world underwent social and technological developments in different ways. A sequence of events that describes the developments of one civilization may not necessarily apply to another, in this view. Instead social and technological developments must be described within the context of the society being studied.

Origin

The metallic ages of Hesiod

The progress of Lucretius

Early lithic analysis by Michele Mercati

The usages of Mahudel and de Jussieu

The three-age system of C. J. Thomsen

The savagery and civilization of Sir John Lubbock

The elusive Mesolithic of Hodder Westropp

Piette finds the Mesolithic

The Epipaleolithic and Protoneolithic of Sterjna and Obermaier

Lower, middle and upper from Haeckel to Sollas

Early and late from Worsaae through the three-stage African system

Wallace's grand revolution recycled

Vere Gordon Childe's revolution for the masses

The Pre-pottery Neolithic of Garstang and Kenyon at Jericho

Bronze age subdivisions

The tripartite system of Sir John Evans

From Evans' gratuitous Copper Age to the mythical chalcolithic

Iron age subdivisions

Dating

Grand systems of layering

Measurement of chemical change

Other -liths and -lithics

Three-age system resumptive table

Criticism

Unsound epochalism

Simplisticism

Eurocentrism

See also