Re:What if we called it the Flax Age instead of the Iron Age?
by SamBam on Thursday November 21, 2019 @11:19AM
(#21595744)
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.
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.