The Stainless Steel Age

Posted on 23rd January, 2026 in News

The three age system has been the backbone of archaeology ever since 1831 when the Danish antiquarian Christian Thomsen realised that he could date sites by the presence of three materials: stone, bronze and iron. Thomsen’s system was developed and popularised by the British baron John Lubbock in his book Prehistoric Times, and the three ages of man – the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age – quickly became embedded in the public consciousness. Two centuries of research has refined Christensen’s idea. Archaeologists have split the ages further based on more subtle aspects of the design of the objects they have found and they have reconstructed out how people actually made and used their tools. The early Old Stone Age or Lower Palaeolithic, for instance began some 3.5 million years ago with simple Lamokwian and Oldowan tools. It was followed 2 million years ago by Acheulian technology, characterised by finely knapped hand axes, and five hundred thousand years ago by the Lavallois technology of the Middle Palaeolithic which produced multiple sharp flakes from single core, and finally by the finer blades of the Upper Palaeolithic. The Mesolithic was dominated by the production of tiny flaked microliths, and the Neolithic by ground stone axes. Archaeologists succeeded in painting a detailed picture of man’s relationship with stone tools.

There is just one problem. Early people certainly made and use stone tools but they also must have used tools made from other materials. Stone has dominated our imaginations purely because it is the only material that could have survived for tens of thousands of years. Our picture of prehistory therefore leaves out all the tools, artefacts and structures made from less resilient materials that our ancestors must have made and used. Materials such as wood, plant fibres, bone, shell, hair, sinew and skin would long since have rotted away or broken down. Therefore stone tools have become regarded not only as the most important tools at our ancestors’ disposal but their only tools. This has led archaeologists to exalt the human line above all other animals; since only humans make stone tools we have imagined that we are the only ones that made any sort of tool, and we exult in the uniqueness of “man the toolmaker”. Another result is that archaeologists have investigated just a small aspect of our material culture and this has led us to underestimate their intelligence and the sophistication of Stone Age humans. After all, Oldowan choppers and flakes are hardly precision tools, being barely modified pebbles, and even later stone can readily be mistaken for random bits of flint. It is hard to be impressed by them, and we find it all-too easy to regard early hominins as stupid brutes.

To understand just how much the effect of differential survival have had on our perceptions of human history, imagine what an archaeologist living a hundred thousand years in the future might think of us if they used the same logic. Most of the materials we employ to build our industrial world – plastic and mild steel, for example – and long since have broken down and disappeared from the fossil record. Of the metals only stainless steel, protected by its chromium oxide coating would remain. What would the archaeologists think? They might marvel at the sudden flowering of a kitchen culture – impressed by the craftsmanship that must have gone into producing sets of knives forks and spoons, and by the design of the kitchen sinks. And they would be astonished at the exuberance of the imagination that could produce surgical instruments such as scalpels, scissors and probes. They might even find a cache of beer barrels or stumble across huge lengths of piping from car exhausts, chemical –pressed to reconstruct our society works or gas pipelines. Because they considered stainless steel objects in isolation they would fail understand their true role in our lives and  be hard-pressed to reconstruct our society. They might even conclude that some of the artefacts – particularly obscure items of cutlery or specialised surgical tools – might have had a ritual role, or be used in some form of primitive human sacrifice. They would be all too likely to build a wholly erroneous idea of “The Stainless Steel Age”.

To avoid the same mistake, the archaeologists of today really need to move on from its blinkered view of the world. Stone, bronze and iron artefacts must all be interpreted on their merits and in the context of their use alongside all the other materials that our ancestors must have used. The absence of evidence about these other materials does not imply evidence that they were absent! Early hominins must have made and used wooden tools long before they began to make ones out of stone. We already know, for instance, that our closest ancestors, the great apes, all use tree branches  to build their sleeping nests, and that many also use wooden sticks as tools to break into bees’ nests, dig into the soil for bulbs, and as spears to probe hollow tree trunks for small mammals. They also use other parts of plants; they probe into termite nests using slender grass stems; and they use mosses and leaves to scoop up drinking water. Some primates even use lumps of stone to break open the shells of nuts and bivalve molluscs. Our hominin ancestors would surely have been no less adept at using a wide range of biological materials to make tools.

Of course that is not to downplay the importance of stone. It would have played a large role in the lives of many, if not all, hominins because of its material properties. Stone is stiff, hard, and heavy so it is ideally suited to be used as a hammer. And because it is brittle it is easily broken and so can be knapped with a second hammer stone to produce fragments with sharp edges that make razor sharp knives. These can be used to can slice through flesh, skin and sinew and to chop vegetables. Archaeologists have already demonstrated the pathways by which humans perfected these operations. But there are biological materials that can also be used to carry out these actions and which can replace stone. In Asia, the stems of bamboos are reinforced by razor-sharp silica crystals, so they can be readily cut formed into knives. The giant seashells of the South Pacific can also be turned into even better cutting implements, since the calcium carbonate crystals of which they are composed are interspersed with thin layers of collagen that deflect cracks and make them far tougher than stone. Consequently, shell can withstand large tensile forces and so shells can be carved into knives and axes with far narrower blades. This enabled Polynesian to build large canoes for maritime exploration even without metal woodworking tools. Even the long bones of large ungulates and the teeth of beavers can be converted into chisels that outperform ones made of stone.

There are also a myriad of other purposes for which stone would be totally useless. Because it is so brittle it could never be used as a lever, as a spear, as a rope or to construct the roof of a house. It would fail in tension immediately it was put to the test. And even for the purposes where its properties proved useful, stone could not be used to its full potential until people found ways to combine it with other materials. People could not cut down large trees until they had learnt how to attach stone axe heads to strong, flexible handles, using plant fibres and glues to haft them onto carved lengths of wood or antler. The same story can also be told about those new wonder materials, bronze and iron that later replaced stone. They certainly have vastly superior mechanical properties, being not only hard and stiff, but also extremely tough. Consequently metals can be used for most tasks, but their usefulness is limited by two drawbacks: their high density; and high cost of manufacture. This is why so many metal tools are mounted on light wooden handles.

The first take home message from our thought experiment about stainless steel is that if anthropologists and archaeologists want to understand the material culture of hominins and early humans they really need to think about how they would have used not just stone but also other biological materials. At last this is starting to happen. In my book The Wood Age/The Age of Wood I examined the dominant role that this single material must have played in our history. In The Botanic Age Dean Falk has done much the same for a wider range of plant materials that hominins must have used during the period before the discovery of stone tools. And Linda Hurcombe in her book Perishable Material Culture in Prehistory has considered the range of organic cultures during the later ages of humanity. And anthropologists such as Veerle Rots are investigating how people actually made and use their tools and weapons.

The second take-home message is that to understand material culture better, archaeologists need to know more about the culture of materials – their mechanical properties and the logistics involved in their manufacture and use. After all, humans have always lived in a material world, not just a social one.  Hopefully then the archaeologists of the distant future would realise that in the Stainless Steel Age of today our lives are not dominated by our cutlery medical instruments or beer barrels.