Periods in Palestinian Archaeology.
The "Three Age" System

"Three Age System": "The chronological division of Old World prehistory into three successive ages of Stone, Bronze, and Iron. Rooted in classical ideas about the past taken up by such Renaissance scholars as the naturalist Michele Mercati (1541-93), the scheme owes its archaeological exploitation to the Dane, Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1788-1865), who adopted it in 1819 to classify the collections of the new National Museum in Copenhagen. It became widely influential a generation later with the English publication of Thomsen's Ledetraad til Nordisk Oldkyndighed (1836, A Guide to Northern Antiquities), and his pupil Jens Worsaae's Danmarks Oldtid (1843, The Primaeval Antiquities of Denmark). The subdivision of the Stone Age into the Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age), characterized by polished stone tools, and the Neolithic (New Stone Age), characterized by polished stone tools, stems from the English archaeologist Sir John Lubbock's Prehistoric Times (1865). The term Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), covering the five millennia following the end of the last glaciation, was also coined in the 1860s, though Chalcolithic for th Copper or earliest Bronze Age belongs to more recent times," "Three Age System," The Cambridge Encyclopedia (ed. D. Crystal; Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), p. 1206.