Metal Age

The three-age system is the periodization of human pre-history (with some overlap into the historical periods in a few regions) into three time-periods: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age; although the concept may also refer to other tripartite divisions of historic time-periods. In history, archaeology and physical anthropology, the three-age system is a methodological concept adopted during the 19th century according to which artefacts and events of late prehistory and early history could be broadly ordered into a recognizable chronology. C. J. Thomsen initially developed this categorization in the period 1816 to 1825, as a result of classifying the collection of an archaeological exhibition chronologically – there resulted broad sequences with artefacts made successively of stone, bronze, and iron.

The system appealed to British researchers working in the science of ethnology – they adopted it to establish race sequences for Britain's past based on cranial types. Although the craniological ethnology that formed its first scholarly context holds no modern scientific value, the ''relative chronology'' of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age remains in use in a general public context, and the three-ages concept underpins prehistoric chronology for Europe, the Mediterranean world and the Near East.

The structure reflects the cultural and historical background of Mediterranean Europe and the Middle East. It soon underwent further subdivisions, including the 1865 partitioning of the Stone Age into Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic periods by John Lubbock. The schema, however, has little or no utility for establishing chronological frameworks in sub-Saharan Africa, much of Asia, the Americas and some other areas; and has little importance in contemporary archaeological or anthropological discussion for these regions.

Origin

The concept of dividing pre-historical ages into systems based on metals extends far back in European history, probably originated by Lucretius in the first century BC. But the present archaeological system of the three main ages – stone, bronze and iron – originates with the 19th century Danish archaeologist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, 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). 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'', the ancient Greek poet Hesiod possibly between 750 and 650 BC, defined five successive Ages of Man: 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'', 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, 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 and humans, 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 humankind by spontaneous generation. Having been given birth as a species, humans must grow to maturity by analogy with the individual. 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 human 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, 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 of the objects in his collection, which led him to believe that they are artifacts and to suggest that the historical evolution of these artefacts 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 artefacts 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 12 November 1734, Nicholas Mahudel, physician, antiquarian and numismatist, read a paper at a public sitting of the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 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, 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 in the period 1816–1825 when the Danish antiquarian 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 artefacts 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 supported by archaeological evidence. Initially, the three-age system as it was developed by Thomsen and his contemporaries in Scandinavia, such as Sven Nilsson and J.J.A. Worsaae, was grafted onto the traditional biblical chronology. But, during the 1830s they achieved independence from textual chronologies and relied mainly on typology and stratigraphy.

In 1816 Thomsen at age 27 was appointed to succeed the retiring Rasmus Nyerup as Secretary of the ''Kongelige Commission for Oldsagers Opbevaring'' ("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, the Dane Vedel Simonsen, Montfaucon and Mahudel. Sorting the material in the collection chronologically he mapped out which kinds of artefacts 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 Artefacts 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.

Stone Age subdivisions

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

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 correct 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 1867–68 Ernst Haeckel in 20 public lectures in Jena, 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 got these terms from Hodder Westropp, who took Palaeolithic from Lubbock, invented 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 first used Mesolithic and 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 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 tools, 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 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 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 originated 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 on 8 March 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, Gabriel de Mortillet had presented the gap to the Congrès international d'Anthropologie at Brussels:: "Entre le paléolithique et le neolithique, il y a une large et profonde lacune, un grand hiatus; ..."

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 16 April 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 Édouard Piette stated that he had heard Édouard Lartet 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 from that 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 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 tools, or microliths. 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 Stjerna 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 Stjerna, 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 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.

Stjerna 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 discuss 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 Stjerna intended his Protoneolithic and Epipaleolithic as a replacement for the Mesolithic is not clear, but Hugo Obermaier, 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, the Azilian and the northern Maglemose industries are the posthumous descendants of the Palaeolithic ...

The ideas of Stjerna 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 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 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. In the 1833 edition of ''Principles of Geology'' (the first) Lyell devised the terms Eocene, Miocene and Pliocene

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases