Ages & Periods - Encyclopedia of World History and Prehistory
One hundred fifty years of archaeology have contributed to the development of a world history; in some cases, archaeology is the only way we know anything about the history of the ancient world.
Important Neolithic chamber tomb in the Orkney Islands; webpage from OrkneyJar.
The Oldowan Tradition is the name given to a pattern of stone-tool making by our hominid ancestors, from 2.5-1.5 million years ago.
The Stone Age (known to scholars as the Paleolithic era) in human prehistory is the name given to the period roughly between about 1.5 million and 20,000 years ago.
The Neolithic period designation is a prime example of how science doesn't come as clean as you can think it, at least in archaeology.
The Chalcolithic is the name given to the period in the Near East and Europe after the Neolithic and before the Bronze Age, between about 4500 and 3500 BC.
The Bronze Age is a fairly arbitrary technological stage invented as part of a three-part system (Stone, Bronze, and Iron)
The Pleistocene epoch is that little snippet of geological history between 1.8 million years to 11,000 years ago.
The so-called Three Age System was developed by the Danish curator of the National Museum of Denmark C.J. Thomsen, at the instigation of his predecessor Rasmus Nyerup, and to resolve display issues.
