Three-age system
Sistema de las tres edades
- Date
- c. 1816-1825 · confidence medium
- Place
- Copenhagen, Denmark
- Credited to
- Christian Jürgensen Thomsen
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What it is
As curator of the Museum of Nordic Antiquities, Thomsen systematically classified objects by the material of their tools -stone, bronze and iron- and showed that this order reflected a real chronological sequence.
What it led to
- The standard relative chronology of European prehistory
- The founding of modern archaeology as a scientific discipline