Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nasrudith | Hacker News Reader

While textiles are a twice neglected area due to decay and some cultural biases the flax age wouldn't be remotely the right naming convention. The invention age naming convention would imply when they /first used it widespread/. So a few meteoric iron artifacts in the Bronze Age wouldn't make it Iron Age but iron becoming commonplace in tools and weapons would. Similarly if we kept up metalic conventions medieval aluminium wouldn't count but 19th century when they started enmasse refining could be an "Aluminium Age" if not for the fact we know enough from records that it would be redundant.

Calling it the Flax Age would be like calling Prebellum Southern US "the cotton age" - it was used already for thousand of years in several prior ages!

We probably can't trace it that precisely from lack of evidence but a Flax Age would probably be among the Neolithic ages and certainly not the Iron Age.

View on HN

The ages are named for the technology that made the most significant difference in history. Not because the archeologists are male, but because you can do things with iron that you cannot do with stone or wood or bone.

I will grant that textiles are probably not given enough attention, but an army covered in flax clothes with wooden spears stands no chance against an army equipped with iron equipment.

But why is the leading military technology the only thing we care about when defining an age?

Because Bronze Age cultures wiped out Stone Age cultures, and Iron Age cultures wiped out Bronze Age cultures.

These transition periods are marked by civilization collapse and literally centuries of warfare, with a radically different society at the end (different beliefs, different agricultural, different ruling structure). Naming the period after the military technology development that directly instigated such crisis and reform seems relevant.

But that's not correct, though, and is exactly the kinds of misunderstandings you might expect people to have if they interpret the ages in simplistic, metallurgic = weapons way.

Bronze age cultures did not "wipe out" stone age cultures with their new, fancy bronze weapons. First of all, bronze weapons weren't even a defining feature of the early bronze age, swords not appearing for a good 1500 years, and spear tips being a fairly minor part of what was being developed in bronze. Second, the description seems to imply a period of stone-age cultures sitting around with bad weapons, getting attacked by other cultures who had invented bronze. Rather, those same "stone age" cultures were gradually incorporating bronze-making into their culture.

The bronze age ended with more of a "collapse," but that was due to a huge number of factors, not simply some new culture having invented iron and jumping out from behind some unexplored region of the map, Age of Empires-style.

Can you provide some references to that effect published in the last decade? I specify the time period because historical genetics has shown that the cultural diffusion pots not people model promulgated after WWII is less accurate than the early twentieth century war and population replacement one.

I’m by no means an expert on the transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age but revolutions in military technology like the chariot or iron weapons did lead to rapid expansion of the culture/ethnos that had them first. The pre-Celtic Irish population left a comparatively minor genetic impact on the current Irish for example.

It depends on where you are talking about. But in Europe, particularly western Europe and especially the British isles, whose prehistory I know better, what I described was accurate.

The Neolithic culture that had lived for thousands of years was displaced by the Bronze Age "Beaker" culture that were an invading culture from mainland Europe. Recent genetic studies show that there wasn't many connecting lineages between Neolithic and Bronze age cultures--the genetic contribution of previous occupants was less than 10% compared to the invading population.

For the Iron Age transition, we have more variety of evidence since it happened thousands of years closer to the present. There was a period of 200 years of conflict known as the "Bronze crisis" after the introduction of iron working. This is due, in part, to the devastating economic effect of moving off of bronze axes as a currency, and the destabilizing effect iron weapons have due to their durability and ease of maintenance--it makes long-distance raiding a realistic proposition. This is an era that people retreated from open communities into hill forts, populations declined, harvests failed, and we have evidence of so many settlements burned to the ground. The people were not wholesale displaced as happened in end of the Bronze age, but there was a total breakdown of society and reformation into a very, very different culture.

I am not a historian, only a reader, so my knowledge has plenty of inaccuracies. However, I believe what you are saying for the Neolithic -> Bronze Age transition makes sense in the British Isles and Western Europe, as these are the last remnants of Neolithic society in Europe.

The Bronze Age doesn't begin in Britain until about 2500-2000 BCE. Thats a full thousand years after the Bronze Age had already begun in the Near East and Egypt. So this displacement from more modern (and militarily advanced) cultures makes sense.

The gradual adaptation of bronze that I was referring to was referring to the origins of the Bronze Age in the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and Greece.

Well... it's not just about military technology. The ages are named for advancements in tools in general. But a good bit of human history is dictated by natural resources and a societies ability to exploit them. Military technology enables me to take over your natural resources and instates my culture as the predominant one in our geography. See the fall of rome, qin dynasty, the conquest of mecca, or the american revolution.

Actually, linen armor was hugely influential [1] [2].

The focus on battles and war in history instead of how civilizations change seems short-sighted, especially as it limits the amount of time a history class can help students understand other cultures. Which, given globalization and the internet, might be a better use of time.

[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/34810209/ns/technology_and_science...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Reconstructing-Ancient-Linen-Body-Arm...

It is not "the most significant difference", it is simply a questions of which materials have been preserved for archeologists to study.

I'm sure that agriculture was a much more significant change than the introduction of bronze.

> Calling it the Flax Age would be like calling Prebellum Southern US "the cotton age"

Antebellum

Prewar. Since everybody knows what that means instead of these weird Latin words. It's even worse because the choice of language contains information about which war it refers to! Latin for the American civil war and English for WWII. Let the context determine which war you're talking about, not some arbitrary choice of language.

How about pre-Civil War and pre-WWII?

In the US “antebellum” refers to the Civil War and “prewar” to World War II.

But, your using the Latin word bellum for war.

“Prebellum” and “antebellum” are both ways of saying “before the war” in Latin. There is nothing wrong with the former term, other than its relative rarity. If you search you can find “prebellum” being used (in the same sense as “antebellum”, e.g. with reference to the US South before the 1860s) in various academic papers, newspaper articles, etc.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22prebellum%22&tbm=bks

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=prebellum

Reply on news.ycombinator.com