Dear All,
With reference to Ed Lee's last message, I would make the following suggestions:
1) Terms for periods of 1000's of years: Use the informal SI units of Ka, Ma, and Ga, for kilo annum, mega annum, and giga annum. These units are defined as years before present with present fixed at 1950 as with radiocarbon dates. So Ed's examples would be: Holocene - 10 Ka to present, Devensian - 120 Ka to 10 Ka, Age of the Dinosaurs - 320 Ma to 65 Ma, etc, etc.
2) Early Modern Period: Wallerstein's Modern World-System actually has the modern period starting about 1460 in Europe, but the dissolution of the monasteries is a significant turning point in England, with the removal of monastic monopolies and a rapid expansion of private industry/business in market towns thereafter. The start of the industrial revolution ends this early modern period, and I have chosen a date of ca 1690 for this.
3) Historic Process terms such as Migration period, Contact period, Protohistoric period: Terms perhaps more for Europe or N America, but also useful for settled peoples in Britain in contact with expanding systems such as the Romans or Germanic speaking peoples. Where a site has a largely native artefact assemblage but some components from the expanding system (traded or exotic ?) and where there is no record of the native people or site in the expanding system's material or written culture, then the site could be called Protohistoric. Where the artefactual component is largely that of the expanding system or perhaps hybridised, it could be called Colonial. Mixed bags of artefacts with elements from a variety of cultures would definitely be Migrational !
Cheers, Neil
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