page_title: Three-age system
section_title: Piette finds the Mesolithic
hierarchical_section_title: Three-age system / Stone Age subdivisions / Piette finds the Mesolithic
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Mas-d'Azil, entrée de la grotte
context_page_description: The three-age system is the periodization of history into three time periods;
  for example: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age; although it also refers to other tripartite divisions of historic time periods. In history, archaeology and physical anthropology, the three-age system is a methodological concept adopted during the 19th century by which artifacts and events of late prehistory and early history could be ordered into a recognizable chronology. It was initially developed by C. J. Thomsen, director of the Royal Museum of Nordic Antiquities, Copenhagen, as a means to classify the museum's collections according to whether the artifacts were made of stone, bronze, or iron.
  The system first appealed to British researchers working in the science of ethnology who adopted it to establish race sequences for Britain's past based on cranial types.
context_section_description: In that same year, 1872, Sir John Evans produced a massive work, The Ancient Stone Implements, in which he in effect repudiated the Mesolithic, making a point to ignore it, denying it by name in later editions. He wrote:
  Sir John Lubbock has proposed to call them the Archaeolithic, or Palaeolithic, and the Neolithic Periods respectively, terms which have met with almost general acceptance, and of which I shall avail myself in the course of this work.
  Evans did not, however, follow Lubbock's general trend, which was typological classification. He chose instead to use type of find site as the main criterion, following Lubbock's descriptive terms, such as tools of the drift. Lubbock had identified drift sites as containing Palaeolithic material. Evans added to them the cave sites. Opposed to drift and cave were the surface sites, where chipped and ground tools often occurred in unlayered contexts. Evans decided he had no choice but to assign them all to the most recent. He therefore consigned them to the Neolithic and used the term "Surface Period" for it.
  Having read Westropp, Sir John knew perfectly well that all the former's Mesolithic implements were surface finds. He used his prestige to quell the concept of Mesolithic as best he could, but the public could see that his methods were not typological. The less prestigious scientists publishing in the smaller journals continued to look for a Mesolithic. For example, Isaac Taylor in The Origin of the Aryans, 1889, mentions the Mesolithic but briefly, asserting, however, that it formed "a transition between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic Periods." Nevertheless, Sir John fought on, opposing the Mesolithic by name as late as the 1897 edition of his work.
  Meanwhile, Haeckel had totally abandoned the geologic uses of the -lithic terms. The concepts of Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic had originated in the early 19th century and were gradually becoming coin of the geologic realm. Realizing he was out of step, Haeckel started to transition to the -zoic system as early as 1876 in The History of Creation, placing the -zoic form in parentheses next to the -lithic form.
  The gauntlet was officially thrown down before Sir John by J. Allen Brown, speaking for the opposition before the Anthropological Institute on 8 March 1892. In the journal he opens the attack by striking at a "hiatus" in the record:
  It has been generally assumed that a break occurred between the period during which ... the continent of Europe was inhabited by Palaeolithic Man and his Neolithic successor ... No physical cause, no adequate reasons have ever been assigned for such a hiatus in human existence ...
  The main hiatus at that time was between British and French archaeology, as the latter had already discovered the gap 20 years earlier and had already considered three answers and arrived at one solution, the modern. Whether Brown did not know or was pretending not to know is unclear. In 1872, the very year of Evans' publication, Mortillet had presented the gap to the Congrès international d'Anthropologie at Brussels:
  Between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic, there is a wide and deep gap, a large hiatus.
  Apparently prehistoric man was hunting big game with stone tools one year and farming with domestic animals and ground stone tools the next. Mortillet postulated a "time then unknown (époque alors inconnue)" to fill the gap. The hunt for the "unknown" was on. On 16 April 1874, Mortillet retracted. "That hiatus is not real (Cet hiatus n'est pas réel)," he said before the Société d'Anthropologie, asserting that it was an informational gap only. The other theory had been a gap in nature, that, because of the ice age, man had retreated from Europe. The information must now be found. In 1895 Édouard Piette stated that he had heard Édouard Lartet speak of "the remains from the intermediate period (les vestiges de l'époque intermédiaire)", which were yet to be discovered, but Lartet had not published this view. The gap had become a transition. However, asserted Piette:
  I was fortunate to discover the remains of that unkn
caption: Mas-d'Azil Grotto
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