Diverses périodes de l'age de la pierre.

Mortillet rejected the fauna-based cultural subdivisions of the Pleistocene (cave bear, mammoth, reindeer) that had been introduced by Edouard Lartet in favor of a system based on tools and artifacts (“données industrielles”). During the 1860s Mortillet “extended the geological system of period and epochs into the recent past, characterizing each by a series of archaeological ‘type-fossils’ and naming them after a ‘type-site.’ . . . By 1869 his scheme for European prehistory was fairly well elaborated and included: the Thenasian (for the now obsolete Eolithic), Chellean, Mousterian, Solutrean, Aurignacian, Magdalenian, and Robenhausian. Many of these remain in use as cultural-historical labels for bodies of material, but whereas de Mortillet saw each as a block of time they are now seen as geographically as well as chronologically defined entities” (Darvill, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology [2003], 271).