The de Mortillet system as originally proposed (Mortillet 1869) comprised four stages, Mousterian, Solutrean, Aurignacian, and Magdalenian, each named after a “type site” in central France where the remains had first been identified. In a modification three years later, the author temporarily dropped the Solutrean but added a Chellean at the beginning. An important distinction was now also made between the first three stages, which were called Lower Paleolithic, and the last stage, called Upper Paleolithic. The latter was distinguished from its three predecessors by the use of bone and horn as well as stone tools. In a further modification in 1883, the author restored the Solutrean, as an Upper Paleolithic stage, and also added a Thenaisian period at the beginning of the sequence and a Robenhausian at the end (Mortillet 1883). The former was an eolithic period, represented by crudely chipped stones that had not yet attained any standardized forms, and the Robenhausian was actually a Neolithic period based on recent finds in Switzerland.

The de Mortillet scheme continued to undergo modifications, first at the hands of its original author and then by a host of successors. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Aurignacian had been restored to its original position in the Upper Paleolithic and an additional very important stage, the Acheulian, had been added to the Lower Paleolithic. The Thenaisian and Robenhausian were never generally accepted as part of the Paleolithic chronology, although de Mortillet himself always believed in them.

As glyn daniel (1950, 106) observed, the de Mortillet system “became an accepted canon of prehistory,” 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. The most imaginative prehistorians, like Lubbock, attempted to combine the artifactual evidence of prehistory with the ethnographic evidence on which social evolutionists chiefly relied to produce comprehensive cultural descriptions of prehistoric life at its various stages of development. It was thus the prehistorian and the ethnographer together who provided the nineteenth century with its particular progressivist vision of prehistory.

Modified innumerable times, the de Mortillet system, with its basic division into Lower and Upper Paleolithic, still remains at the core of Old World Paleolithic classifications. There is now some allowance for concurrent spatial variations within the system, particularly in the Upper Paleolithic where phases like Tardenoisian and Tayacian are considered to be localized adaptations to particular circumstances. The scheme nevertheless remains at heart a chronological one.

It was recognized from the beginning that the European Neolithic stage had been far shorter in duration than the Paleolithic, 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 Paleolithic. However, the Neolithic archaeological record was far richer and more diverse than that of the Paleolithic, 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 differences as it was 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 detailed study of artifact collections from all over Europe he worked out a series of regional chronologies and then went on