section_path: History of the concept
section_name: History of the concept
paragraph_text: History of the concept
  
  The three-age method of Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages was first used for the archaeology of Europe during the first half of the 19th century, and by the latter half of the 19th century, it had been extended to the archaeology of the Ancient Near East. Its name harks back to the mythological " Ages of Man " of Hesiod. As an archaeological era, it was first introduced to Scandinavia by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen during the 1830s. By the 1860s, it was embraced as a useful division of the "earliest history of mankind" in general and began to be applied in Assyriology. The development of the now-conventional periodization in the archaeology of the Ancient Near East was developed during the 1920s and 1930s.