Iron Age Subdivisions
The advent of the Iron Age is marked by the initial use of iron in any region, whether brought in from elsewhere, or by evolution of the smelting process in that region. As the ancient writers considered that they were in the Iron Age, they did not define an end to it. This convention prevailed in modern archaeology as well. Iron is still the major hard material in use in modern civilization. Steel is a vital and indispensable modern industry. Many other suggestions have been made: industrial, machine, plastic, information, etc., but none have been seriously incorporated into the three-age system. Scholarship leaves the question open. Generally in history the Iron Age refers to mainly the 1st millennium BC, no later than the 1st millennium AD. In some cases, however, modern civilization is the Iron Age, as when the African archaeologists hypothesized that Europeans and Middle Easterners brought it to Central and South Africa.
Read more about this topic: Three-age System
Famous quotes containing the words iron and/or age:
“We are told that every American boy has the chance of being president. I tell you that these little boys in the iron cages would sell their chance any day for good square meals and a chance to play.”
—Mother Jones (1830–1930)
“An age is the reversal of an age:
When strangers murdered Emmet, Fitzgerald, Tone,
We lived like men that watch a painted stage.
What matter for the scene, the scene once gone:
It had not touched our lives.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)