Three-age system: Encyclopedia II - Three-age system - Origin

Three-age system - Origin

Its formal introduction is attributed to the Dane Christian Jürgensen Thomsen in the 1820s in order to classify artefacts in the collection which later became the National Museum of Denmark. Thomsen was not the first to use tool-making materials as a basis for classifying prehistoric societies; the Frenchman Nicholas Mahudel had proposed a similar system in the early eighteenth century and the idea gathered supporters in the intervening hundred years.

Thomsen and his predecessors argued that nobody would have used stone tools if bronze ones had been available and that similarly, no one would have wanted to use bronze tools if there had been iron ones around instead. Reasoning that the advances must therefore have come in chronological sequence, he suggested this as a workable basis for dating artefacts and sites. Such a system was revolutionary and a vast improvement on the disorganised nature of previous prehistoric archaeology.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Origin", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki