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