ABSTRACT
When, in the first of seven editions of his book Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages (1865), Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913) introduced the distinction between Old and New Stone Ages, that is between Palaeolithic and Neolithic, the English-speaking world had already accepted the new way of thinking about antiquity using the ‘Ages System’. However, this was not the position in the German-speaking world, where, as late as the 1880s, scholars were unwilling to accept the idea of distinct Bronze and Iron Ages (Graslund 1981:49), despite Thomsen’s Ledetraad having been translated into German only a year after its publication in Danish. Indeed for nationalistic reasons ‘the Germans maintained their opposition to the system more or less to the end of the century, although the number and importance of the antagonists decreased’ (Sklenar 1983:88-9). This while the great Swedish archaeologist Oscar Montelius (1843-1921), in the 1880s and 1890s was subdividing Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages into periods by the seriation of closed finds, and thus forming clusters of association that in turn enabled him to establish regional and pan-European chronologies (Trigger 1989:157).
