to suggest an overall periodization into which they would all fit. His periodization encompassed four stages for the Neolithic and five stages for the Bronze Age (Montelius 1903). Other scholars working at about the same time subdivided the prehistoric Iron Age into two phases. The Montelius scheme combined and elaborated upon the features of the Thomsen and de Mortillet classifications in that culture periods were defined both by the materials employed in tool manufacture and by diagnostic characteristics of the tools themselves. In effect, the new method substituted diagnostic assemblages for individual diagnostic tool types as the basis for the definition of cultures and culture periods. This approach, which Montelius called “the typological method,” has since been widely employed by European prehistorians although it has come in for substantial criticism in the recent past.

Although the cultural chronologies of Montelius and his colleagues, like those of Thomsen and de Mortillet, were based on the recognition of supposed continent-wide similarities, those similarities were attributed for the first time to cultural diffusion rather than to evolutionary processes. This new perspective went hand in hand with the general adoption of the concept of culture among both ethnologists and prehistorians at the end of the nineteenth century. Different prehistoric assemblages were now seen as representing the work of ethnically distinct peoples who had continually borrowed ideas from one another. At least in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, widespread cultural similarities were now seen mostly as the result of those borrowings.

The Montelius chronology of roman-numbered Neolithic (I-IV) and Bronze Age (I-V) 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 Eastern cultures, where scholars still routinely assign sites and cultures to the Early, Middle, or Late Bronze Age and to numbered subdivisions of these periods.

Although the general typological method of Montelius has remained in use among European prehistorians to the present day, no one since Montelius himself has proposed an overall, formal schema for the classification or periodization of European and Near Eastern prehistory. The nearest thing to overall synthesis is found in the works of English archeologists gordon childe (1925) and grahame clark (1952), but both of those scholars made use of the culture classifications already in use rather than proposing new ones.

A new and highly formal methodology for the development of culture classifications was proposed in 1968 by david clarke (1968, 187–398). 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. Clarke 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 (Klejn 1982). 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 Christian Thomsen, de Mortillet, and Montelius, and it is based on their typological methodology.

The underlying conceptual model for Old World Paleolithic classification has always been chronological and evolutionary while the underlying model for Neolithic and Bronze Age classification has been mostly geographical and diffusionist. It may be noted that the same is generally true in the classifications of African Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures, which have been undertaken almost entirely by European-trained scholars (Trigger 1989, 135–138).

Culture Classification in the New World

Although the classification of prehistoric cultures in Europe and the Near East was always overshadowed by a concern for chronology and a belief in evolutionary progress, these factors