Three-age system, Three-age system - Dating, Three-age system - Difficulties, Three-age system - Divisions, Three-age system - Origin, list of archaeological periods
Later, the Stone Age was divided into the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic and further subdivisions were introduced to divide all the ages into early, mid or late (or lower, middle and upper in the case of the Palaeolithic) sections. There are also the Mesolithic and Epipaleolithic periods between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic.
In some cultures, archaeological evidence has made it necessary to add a Copper Age period between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. The term Megalithic does not refer to a period of time and merely describes the use of la ...
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 s ...
The three age system has been difficult to apply fully outside Europe. Some societies skipped some of the stages or never developed them when their societies didn't need them. Amazonian tribes in South America remain in the Neolithic for example, while there was no Bronze Age south of the Sahara; techonological innovation progressed from stone to iron working.
It also soon became apparent that the switches from one age to another did not happen quickly or decisively. Flint tools remained in use in a limited fashion into the Iron Age in Europe and early metal items often ap ...
Advances made in the fields of seriation, typology, stratification and the associative dating of artefacts and features permitted even greater refinement of the system. However, because no precise numerical date could be given to finds using the three age system, they could only be placed in a relative sequence. Elaborate efforts were often made to align European and Near Eastern sequences with the datable chronology of Ancient Egypt; but more direct and convincing scientific dating methods such as carbon dating were not invented unt ...
