European scientific archaeology, including classification, had its beginnings in Scandinavia, a region that had lain outside the realm both of classical antiquity and of the prehistoric megalith-builders. Scandinavians at the outset of the nineteenth century were gripped by
The same spirit of nationalism that affected nearly all European peoples, and like many others they had begun to regard prehistory as an essential part of their national heritage. Without major architectural monuments or conspicuous objets dart, however, they had a much more difficult job to recover that heritage than had their neighbors in more southerly countries. It was in that context that scientific archaeology had its beginnings.
As far back as 1776, Scandinavian scholars had recognized that in their countries there were some archaeological sites which yielded only stone cutting tools, others having both stone and copper, and still others with stone, copper, and iron. In the early nineteenth century, Vedel Simonsen wrote specifically of a Stone Age, a Copper Age, and an Iron Age as stages in the prehistory of Scandinavia. It was however Christian Thomsen who first gave wide publicity to what has come to be called the three-age system, when in 1819 he arranged all of the prehistoric collections in the newly opened Danish National Museum into separate Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age assemblages. The three-age system was from the beginning both a culture classification and a kind of artifact classification.
By the 1850s, discoveries in England, Ireland, and Switzerland had convinced at least some scholars that the scheme had continent-wide validity (see Historic Roots of Archaeology). A little later it was found to accord perfectly with the worldwide schemata of cultural evolution proposed by Herbert Spencer, John Lubbock, Lewis Henry Morgan, and other pioneer evolutionists, and its acceptance became universal. Indeed, it remains at the foundation of nearly all cultural classification systems in Europe and the Near East, down to the present day.
French prehistorians, working in the middle of the nineteenth century, made an important addition to the three-age system when they recognized the existence of two stone ages: an earlier period characterized by the exclusive use of chipped stone tools, and a later period having also ground and polished tools. In his Pre-Historic Times, first published in 1865, the English prehistorian John Lubbock gave to these phases the formal names by which they are still known: the Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age and the Neolithic or New Stone Age.
It was also the French prehistorians of the later nineteenth century who first revealed the great variety of stone age cultures, and the very long time span that they had occupied.
The de Mortillet system, originally proposed in 1869, recognized four stages - Mousterian, Solutrean, Aurignacian, and Magdalenian - each named after a ‘type-site’ in central France where the remains had first been identified. The de Mortillet scheme underwent continual modification, as new cultural assemblages were identified, and a few old ones dropped. Nevertheless, the system became an accepted canon of prehistory for decades, and in many respects it remains so today.
Part of its appeal lay in the fact that the entire system was strictly chronological and unilineal, each stage succeeding the preceding, with no allowance for concurrent, spatial variation in culture in different parts of Europe. As such, it was wholly consistent with the unilinear theories of social evolution that gained general acceptance in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In the broadest sense it may be said that evolutionism, biological and social, provided the ideological framework within which archaeological classification developed for more than half a century.
It was recognized from the beginning that the European Neolithic had been a stage of far shorter duration than the Palaeolithic, enduring perhaps not more than a few thousand years. Yet European scholars at the end of the nineteenth century were so wedded to a unilinear vision of cultural evolution that they at first tried to fit all of the known varieties of Neolithic culture into a single developmental succession, as they had done in the case of the Palaeolithic. However, the Neolithic archaeological record was far richer and more diverse one than was that of the Palaeolithic, encompassing not only tool types but also pottery, houses, and burials. As the full diversity of these remains came to be recognized, the effort to fit them all into a strictly evolutionary and unilinear sequence became insupportable. As a result, the classification of Neolithic cultures in Europe and the Near East came to be based as much on the recognition of spatial as on temporal differences.
The great systematizer for the European Neolithic, as well as for the Bronze and Iron Ages, was yet another Scandinavian, Oscar Montelius. Through the detailed study of artifact collections from all over Europe he worked out a series of regional chronologies, and then went on to suggest an overall periodization into which they could all be fitted. It encompassed four stages, designated as I-IV, for the Neolithic, and five stages (I-V) for the Bronze Age. Other scholars, working at about the same time, subdivided the prehistoric Iron Age into two phases. The new schemes substituted diagnostic assemblages for individual diagnostic tool types as the basis for definition of cultures and culture periods. This approach to culture classification was called by Montelius the ‘typological method'.
The Montelius chronology of roman-numbered Neolithic and Bronze Age stages is still occasionally employed by European prehistorians, insofar as it provides a handy set of typological-chronological pigeonholes into which particular cultures can be placed. However, modified versions of the scheme have a much more basic role in the classification of Aegean and Near East cultures, where scholars still routinely assign sites and cultures to the Early, Middle, or Late Bronze Age, and to numbered subdivisions thereof.
A new and highly formal methodology for the development of culture classifications was proposed in 1968 by David Clarke. In the broadest sense it represented a refinement of the typological method, in which artifacts were to be clustered into types, types into assemblages, and assemblages into cultures, using highly rigorous criteria of inclusion at each level. However, this discussion was purely programmatic; the author did not go on to propose an actual classification based on his system, nor did the Soviet prehistorians who discussed and debated the methods of culture classification in rather similar terms during the same period. The time/space grid of European prehistory that remains in actual, everyday use among prehistorians is still very largely an extension of the ones created initially by Thomsen, de Mortillet, and Montelius, and is based on their typological methodology.
World History
