Sven Nilsson och treperiodsystemet

The common held view among historians of archaeology is that the professor of Natural History, Sven Nilsson (1797–1883), of Lund University, had nothing to do with the Archaeological Three Age System, crucial to scientific archaeology. The system gave antiquity a chronology and a direction with its well-known, Stone-, Bronze- and Iron Ages. The system also assumes that antiquity is very old and prehistoric. The creator is Nilsson’s contemporary, the Dane Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1788–1865). The origin of the system is however very problematic. Despite extensive research no one has been able to establish how and when Thomsen constructed it. Source research has been replaced by guess-work and myth-making on Thomsen’s extraordinary qualities as scientist and curator. It was actually Nilsson who showed Thomsen how things really are during three meetings in 1835 and 1836. Nilsson was the only antiquarian who recognized the Stone Age as a distinct period. He called his archaeological research comparative ethnology, a method that makes it possible to study prehistory, a time without written records. It was of course Thomsen who published the Three Age system. Without Nilsson’s he would not have been able to formulate it.