Periodisation and orientation

In earlier posts, I talked about the overall history of the human race, from its beginnings forty or fifty thousand years ago to its culmination a million or so years from now. I did this so as to dispel the chronocentrism or distortion that comes from viewing history from our particular vantage point.

Since we represent the greatest level of advancement humanity has yet achieved, we tend to have a conceited view of ourselves and of our importance in history. It is common to talk of things happening in our day as 'unprecedented'. Of course, they are unprecedented, but this is an inevitable consequence of the fact that we live in the present and at the forward edge of time, as every generation has done and must do.

The people who lived two thousand years ago did not think of themselves as the ancient Romans, living in the past. They thought of themselves as the most sophisticated, technologically advanced civilisation that the world had ever seen, and that is what they were. Only now do we see them as part of history.

What we must not forget is that we, and our time, are also part of history, which started a long time ago and will continue a long time after we are gone. Once we were the future; today, for a brief moment, we are the present, where everything seems to be happening; and for the remainder of eternity we will be the past, getting deader and more ancient as time goes on.

History is a continuously unfolding saga, and we are just at the latest point of it.

Now that that point has, I hope, been made, I want to concentrate on the history that has actually happened.

We can begin by thinking in terms of the three ages--stone, bronze and iron--that were defined by the Danish archaeologist, Christian Jürgen Thomsen (1788-1865) and his Swedish pupil J J A Worsaae (1821-85). This scheme is a convenient simplification. There was no sharp transition between the various ages, and they occurred at different times in different parts of the world. People continued using stone tools during the bronze age, and they were already experimenting with iron long before the bronze age was over.

The human species emerged in the middle of an ice age, the Würm glaciation, which had then been going on for 60,000 or 70,000 years. (This was just the latest cold snap within the ice age proper, which started 40 million years ago and became more intense 3 million years ago, with repeated cycles of cooling and warming.)

The emergence of humans marks the beginning of the Upper paleolithic (paleolithic = 'old stone' [age]) . Stone tools were being made before this by sub-human hominids, but hundreds of thousands of years could go by with little change in their sophistication. The Upper paleolithic was characterised by more advanced stone-working, a shorter duration, and a process of continual improvement.

With the end of the ice age, it is conventional to recognise the beginning of a new period, the Mesolithic (middle stone age), some 30,000 years after humans emerged. This was characterised by finer stone blades, or microliths, which included arrowheads. It is mainly relevant to Europe, since Africa and the Middle East were already steaming into the Neolithic. This shows the relative arbitrariness of the division into distinct periods; we could as easily consider it a sub-stage within the paleolithic.

The Neolithic (new stone age), from 8000 BC, corresponds to the introduction of agriculture (until now, people had largely hunted and lived off the land). Cities arose in the Middle East, and, though this was still the 'stone age', copper and gold began to be worked (archaeologists sometimes speak of a separate 'Copper Age' or Chalcolithic).

The Bronze age came in from around 3500 BC, when people began mixing copper with tin or arsenic to produce bronze, this being harder and more useful than pure copper.

Finally, the Iron age came in some time after 1000 BC. In so far as hammers and cutting edges continue to be made of steel (an iron alloy known virtually from the beginning of the iron age), we can regard ourselves as in the iron age to this day.

I return to the point that this periodisation is a matter of convenience, to give us some signposts. We should not imagine that a gong rang and suddenly the stone age turned into the bronze age etc. Rather one thing led to another, and everything grew out of what had gone before. Nor should we imagine that the raw materials--stone, bronze, iron--were the be-all and end-all. It is just that these survive best in the soil and are most noticeable to archaeologists. There was also continuous development in other technologies and in the more intangible social, economic and political institutions.