define the artifact types that were diagnostic attributes of each particular culture. There was a special interest in those types that could be recognized as “index markers” for particular cultural periods, akin to the “index fossils” of the geologist and the paleontologist. This instrumentalist function remains an important consideration in artifact classification to the present day, particularly in the Old World.

The Development of Culture Classification in the Old World

As far back as 1776, Scandinavian scholars had recognized that in their countries there were some archaeological sites that yielded only stone-cutting tools, others had both stone and copper, and still others had stone, copper, and iron (Daniel 1967, 90). 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 (Simonsen 1816–1819). It was christian thomsen, however, who first gave wide publicity to what has come to be called the three-age system when he arranged all of the prehistoric collections in the newly opened Danish National Museum into separate Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age assemblages in 1819. In order to achieve this comprehensive separation, he studied not only the cutting tools but also all of the different prehistoric remains at his disposal, including such things as pottery and ornaments, classifying them as Stone, Bronze, or Iron Age according to the contexts in which they occurred. The three-age system was thus from the beginning both a culture classification and a kind of artifact classification.

Thomsen’s contribution to the three-age system was basically museum oriented, and it was left to several colleagues, most notably jens jacob worsaae, to give it wider recognition through published works (especially Worsaae 1843). For some time, however, there was resistance to the scheme in other countries, where scholars tended to regard it as a strictly Scandinavian phenomenon. In the competitive nationalist spirit of the times, they were perhaps hoping to discover uniquely different cultural sequences for their own countries. Still, by the 1850s, discoveries in England, Ireland, and Switzerland had convinced at least some scholars that the scheme had a wider validity. A little later it was found to accord perfectly with the worldwide schemata of cultural evolution proposed by sociologist Herbert Spencer (1855), ethnologist John Lubbock (lord avebury)(1865), anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan (1877), and other pioneer evolutionists, and its acceptance became universal. Indeed, it has remained at the foundation of nearly all cultural classification systems in Europe and the Near East to the present day.

The three-age system could be regarded as a mere periodization, exemplifying a procedure that had long been common among historians. However, it was also the first archaeological culture classification insofar as it created a set of mutually exclusive categories to which both sites and artifacts were to be assigned.

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 Pre-historic Times, first published in 1865, the English prehistorian John Lubbock gave these phases the formal names by which they are still known: Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, and 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. édouard lartet, excavator of many Paleolithic sites in the Dordogne and Vezere regions of France, offered a four-stage periodization based on the kinds of mammal bones that were found in the sites: first aurochs and bison, then reindeer, then mammoth and woolly rhinoceros, and finally, cave bear. However, this periodization was soon superseded by the more comprehensive Stone Age classification of gabriel de mortillet, which, like the earlier classificatory systems of Thomsen and Lubbock, was based on the internal evidence of distinctive artifact types rather than on the external evidence of paleontology.