Three-age system
The three-age system divides prehistory into the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age according to the materials widely used to make tools and weapons.
Christian Jürgensen Thomsen: A Danish antiquarian who organized the National Museum of Denmark and formalized the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Age sequence. His museum cataloguing made the three-part sequence a practical archaeological method.
Prehistory: The span of human past before written records provide direct historical evidence. The system is a broad framework for dividing this period.
Stone Age: The prehistoric period when stone was a major material for tools, before widespread metalworking. It is the earliest and longest division in the system.
Cultural-historical archaeology: An archaeological approach that classifies past societies through material culture, cultural groups, and historical sequences. It offers a framework for organizing archaeological change beyond a universal material sequence.
National Museum of Denmark: A Copenhagen museum whose early collections were organized using chronological divisions that included the three-age system. Thomsen tested his chronology by arranging its archaeological collections.
Archaeological typology: The classification of artifacts by shared forms, materials, or manufacturing techniques. Thomsen used recurring artifact types to distinguish successive periods.
Bronze Age: A period characterized by widespread use of bronze, an alloy of copper and usually tin, for tools and weapons. It marks the system's middle division, associated with bronze metallurgy.
Historical archaeology: The study of societies using both archaeological evidence and written records. Written evidence can make a simple prehistory-to-metal-ages sequence less useful.
Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae: A Danish archaeologist who used excavation and stratigraphic evidence to support the chronology of the three ages. His fieldwork helped establish that the sequence reflected archaeological layers, not just artifact groupings.
Stratigraphy (archaeology): The study of archaeological layers and their sequence, used to establish the relative age of deposits and finds. Stratified finds provided evidence that artifact groups belonged to different times.