2500-2100, Neolithic, with copper, and 2100-1900, with occasional bronze, have already been mentioned.
1900-1600 B.C. Burial in stone cysts. Little decoration of bronze, and that only in straight lines. Flat ax heads or celts. Triangular daggers. Daggers mounted on staves like ax heads.
1600-1400 B.C. Occasional cremation of corpses, the ashes put into very small cysts. Decoration of bronze in engraved spirals. Flanged and stop-ridged axes. Swords. Straight fibulas.
1400-1050 B.C. Cremation general. Axes of socketed type. Bowed fibulas. Bronze vessels with lids.
1050-850 B.C. Spiral ornament decaying. Fibulas with two large bosses. Ship-shaped razors.
850-650 B.C. Ornamentation plastic, rather than engraved, often produced in the casting. Rows of concentric circles and other patterns replace spirals. Fibulas with two large disks. Knives with voluted antennæ-like handles. Sporadic occurrence of iron.
650-500 B.C. Iron increasing in use; decorative bronze deteriorating.
236. Problems of Chronology
The dating of events in the Neolithic and Metal Ages is of much more importance than in the Palæolithic. Whether an invention was made in Babylonia in 5000 or in 3000 B.C. means the difference between its occurring in the hazy past of a formative culture or in a well advanced and directly documented phase of that culture. If the dolmens and other megalithic monuments of northern Europe were erected about 3000 B.C., they are older than the pyramids of Egypt and contemporaneous with the first slight unfoldings of civilization in Crete and Troy. But if their date is 1000 B.C., they were set up when pure alphabetic writing and iron and horses were in use in western Asia, when Egypt was already senile, and the Cretan and Trojan cultures half forgotten. In the one case, the megaliths represent a local achievement, perhaps independent of the stone architecture of Egypt; in the other event, they are likely to be a belated and crudely barbarian imitation of this architecture.
But in the Palæolithic, year dates scarcely matter. Whether the Mousterian phase culminated 25,000 or 75,000 years ago is irrelevant: it was far before the beginning of historic time in either case. If one sets the earlier date, the Chellean and Magdalenian are also stretched farther off; if the later, it is because one shrinks his estimate of the whole Palæolithic, the sequence of whose periods remains fixed. It is really only the relative chronology that counts within the Old Stone Age. The durations are so great, and so wholly prehistoric, that the only value of figures is the vividness of their concrete impression on the mind, and the emphasis that they place on the length of human antiquity as compared with the brevity of recorded history. Palæolithic datings might almost be said to be useful in proportion as they are not taken seriously.