During the worldwide exploration of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, contact was made with hunter-gatherer societies and descriptions of them and collections of their stone tools were brought back to Europe. This engendered the possibility of a parallel between these ‘modern’ primitive peoples and prehistoric Europeans.
Georgius Agricola (1490-1555) and Conrad Gessner (1516-1565) suggested that flint tools were traces left by thunderbolts. Michele Mercati (1541-93) tried to prove that the objects popularly interpreted as thunderbolts were weapons or implements of early races of men. Sir William Dugdale (1605-86) in his Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656) attributed such tools to the ancient Britons who lacked the use of metals.
The growing realisation that antiquities could be a source of information about the past was frustrated by the lack of a chronological framework. The argument therefore remained that iron working and the lack of such knowledge could have had a parallel existence throughout human history.
In 1807 Christian Jurgensen Thomsen (1788-1865), curator of the Danish National Museum (est.1807), grouped tools according to the material from which they were made: stone, bronze, iron. He then made the crucial additional step of grouping the rest of the artefacts according to the context in which they were found, i.e. with stone, bronze or iron tools.
Thomsen’s assistant and eventual successor Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae (1821-85) helped to show the validity of the three-age system. He recognised also a fundamental principle of stratigraphic succession – that the top layer is the most recent and the succeeding layers progressively older.
Francois Vatar de Jouannet (1765-1845) tried to reconstruct the way flaked and polished stone axes were made. He concluded that there had been two Stone Ages; and Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913), Lord Avebury, in his Prehistoric Times (1865), coined the names Palaeolithic for the earlier or Old Stone Age, and Neolithic for the later or New Stone Age.
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