ABOUT STAGES AND ERAS
Now come some definitions, so I may describe my material more easily. Archeologists have always loved to make divisions and subdivisions within the long range of materials which they have found. They often disagree violently about which particular assemblage of material goes into which subdivision, about what the subdivisions should be named, about what the subdivisions really mean culturally. Some archeologists, probably through habit, favor an old scheme of Grecized names for the subdivisions: paleolithic, mesolithic, neolithic. I refuse to use these words myself. They have meant too many different things to too many different people and have tended to hide some pretty fuzzy thinking. Probably you haven’t even noticed my own scheme of subdivision up to now, but I’d better tell you in general what it is.
I think of the earliest great group of archeological materials, from which we can deduce only a food-gathering way of culture, as the food-gathering stage. I say “stage” rather than “age,” because it is not quite over yet; there are still a few primitive people in out-of-the-way parts of the world who remain in the food-gathering stage. In fact, Professor Julian Steward would probably prefer to call it a food-gathering level of existence, rather than a stage. This would be perfectly acceptable to me. I also tend to find myself using collecting, rather than gathering, for the more recent aspects or era of the stage, as the word “collecting” appears to have more sense of purposefulness and specialization than does “gathering” (see [p. 91]).
Now, while I think we could make several possible subdivisions of the food-gathering stage—I call my subdivisions of stages eras[5]—I believe the only one which means much to us here is the last or terminal sub-era of food-collecting of the whole food-gathering stage. The microliths seem to mark its approach in the northwestern part of the Old World. It is really shown best in the Old World by the materials of the “Forest folk,” the cultural adaptation to the post-glacial environment in northwestern Europe. We talked about the “Forest folk” at the beginning of this chapter, and I used the Maglemosian assemblage of Denmark as an example.
[5] It is difficult to find words which have a sequence or gradation of meaning with respect to both development and a range of time in the past, or with a range of time from somewhere in the past which is perhaps not yet ended. One standard Webster definition of stage is: “One of the steps into which the material development of man ... is divided.” I cannot find any dictionary definition that suggests which of the words, stage or era, has the meaning of a longer span of time. Therefore, I have chosen to let my eras be shorter, and to subdivide my stages into eras. Webster gives era as: “A signal stage of history, an epoch.” When I want to subdivide my eras, I find myself using sub-eras. Thus I speak of the eras within a stage and of the sub-eras within an era; that is, I do so when I feel that I really have to, and when the evidence is clear enough to allow it.
The food-producing revolution ushers in the food-producing stage. This stage began to be replaced by the industrial stage only about two hundred years ago. Now notice that my stage divisions are in terms of technology and economics. We must think sharply to be sure that the subdivisions of the stages, the eras, are in the same terms. This does not mean that I think technology and economics are the only important realms of culture. It is rather that for most of prehistoric time the materials left to the archeologists tend to limit our deductions to technology and economics.
I’m so soon out of my competence, as conventional ancient history begins, that I shall only suggest the earlier eras of the food-producing stage to you. This book is about prehistory, and I’m not a universal historian.