Editing Iron Age (section)

==History of the concept==
[[File:Eastern and Central Europe around 750 BC.png|thumb|alt=Map showing the extent of the Chernoles culture in Eastern Europe during the late Bronze Age.]]
The [[three-age system]] of Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages was first used for the archaeology of Europe during the first half of the 19th century; by the latter half of the 19th century, it had been extended to the archaeology of the ancient Near East. Its name harks back to the mythological "[[Ages of Man]]" of [[Hesiod]]. As an archaeological era, it was first introduced to Scandinavia by [[Christian Jürgensen Thomsen]] during the 1830s. By the 1860s, it was embraced as a useful division of the "earliest history of mankind" in general<ref>{{cite book | last1=von Rotteck | first1=K. | last2=Welcker | first2=K. T. | title=Das Staats-Lexikon: Bd. | publisher=F. A. Brockhaus | series=Das Staats-Lexikon: Enzyklopädie der sämmtlichen Staatswissenschaften für alle Stände : in Verbindung mit vielen der angesehensten Publicisten Deutschlands | year=1864 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=kgL__ooMXj0C&pg=PA774 | language=de | access-date=2024-07-19 | page=774}}</ref> and began to be applied in [[Assyriology]]. The development of the now-conventional [[periodization]] in the archaeology of the ancient Near East was developed during the 1920s and 1930s.<ref>''Oriental Institute Communications'', Issues 13–19, Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1922, p. 55.</ref>