The everlasting Botanic Age

The Stone Age. The Bronze Age. The Iron Age. Life back then was hard, literally. We think of these time periods in relation to the hard, resilient materials that tools and weapons were made out of. We're obsessed with tools, in archaeology and in the way we assess the intelligence of other species. We've created a narrative about how we progressed from primordial swamp to megacities and it involves some key periods where we made rapid progress because we started picking things up and using them. And our obsession with tools has nothing on our obsession with weapons.

There are various sociological, cultural explanations that might explain why we're so focused on tools and weapons. For instance, a focus on weapons fits well with the patriarchal narrative that men drove our progress: we associate weapons (and, to a large extent, tools) with men (even though research has shown that women also hunted), and in archaeology (history, science, and most other topics) we tend to focus research on men. This narrative, “Man the Hunter, Woman the Gatherer,” has led to research on hunting and the tools and weapons used to do so dominating the literature. There's little evidence to support this notion of a prehistoric sexual division of labour, and many argue it's an obvious example of modern beliefs and gender roles being projected onto the past.

Regardless of what you think about the sociological reasons for our focus on stone, bronze, and iron tools and weapons, there's a practical reason, too: those materials last. Anything that biodegrades, like naturals fibres, doesn't stick around anywhere near as long as stone and metal. It's a bit like survivorship bias. If you talk to lots of people who recovered from a risky operation, you'll get the impression that the operation is usually a success; after all, everyone you've spoken to said they're doing well. But the people who died aren't around for you to ask. In archaeology, we've only been talking to the surviving tools. We look at what remains thousands of years later and see stone, bronze, and iron. We conclude that humans at that time relied predominantly on these materials because that's what we see. We even name the time periods after the materials, so sure are we that they dominated their time period.

Of course, archaeology is an enormous field and there are researchers working on all sorts of topic. There's a lot of nuance in archaeological discourse within the discipline. But if you look at what is taught in schools, or what's in introductory and accessible books about prehistory, or if you ask a random person on the street what the most important or most widely used material of the stone, bronze, or iron ages was, you'll almost certainly leave with the impression that the most widely used material was stone, bronze, or iron (as applicable). It's this contribution - the influence on public perception of general ideas about prehistory - that in my view is the strongest public output of archaeology. This matters, because stories we tell ourselves about our origins have enormous effects on how we think about things today, not only things like gender roles, but also our relationship with the natural world.

Use of stone, bronze, and iron is extractive. Stone is often quarried from the earth. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin; copper, tin, and iron are all mined. The manufacturing process is hard; it usually requires high levels of force or high temperatures.