While textiles are a twice neglected area due to decay and some cultural biases the flax age wouldn't be remotely the right naming convention. The invention age naming convention would imply when they /first used it widespread/. So a few meteoric iron artifacts in the Bronze Age wouldn't make it Iron Age but iron becoming commonplace in tools and weapons would. Similarly if we kept up metalic conventions medieval aluminium wouldn't count but 19th century when they started enmasse refining could be an "Aluminium Age" if not for the fact we know enough from records that it would be redundant.
Calling it the Flax Age would be like calling Prebellum Southern US "the cotton age" - it was used already for thousand of years in several prior ages!
We probably can't trace it that precisely from lack of evidence but a Flax Age would probably be among the Neolithic ages and certainly not the Iron Age.
The ages are named for the technology that made the most significant difference in history. Not because the archeologists are male, but because you can do things with iron that you cannot do with stone or wood or bone.
I will grant that textiles are probably not given enough attention, but an army covered in flax clothes with wooden spears stands no chance against an army equipped with iron equipment.
Actually, linen armor was hugely influential [1] [2].
The focus on battles and war in history instead of how civilizations change seems short-sighted, especially as it limits the amount of time a history class can help students understand other cultures. Which, given globalization and the internet, might be a better use of time.
Because Bronze Age cultures wiped out Stone Age cultures, and Iron Age cultures wiped out Bronze Age cultures.
These transition periods are marked by civilization collapse and literally centuries of warfare, with a radically different society at the end (different beliefs, different agricultural, different ruling structure). Naming the period after the military technology development that directly instigated such crisis and reform seems relevant.
But that's not correct, though, and is exactly the kinds of misunderstandings you might expect people to have if they interpret the ages in simplistic, metallurgic = weapons way.
Bronze age cultures did not "wipe out" stone age cultures with their new, fancy bronze weapons. First of all, bronze weapons weren't even a defining feature of the early bronze age, swords not appearing for a good 1500 years, and spear tips being a fairly minor part of what was being developed in bronze. Second, the description seems to imply a period of stone-age cultures sitting around with bad weapons, getting attacked by other cultures who had invented bronze. Rather, those same "stone age" cultures were gradually incorporating bronze-making into their culture.
The bronze age ended with more of a "collapse," but that was due to a huge number of factors, not simply some new culture having invented iron and jumping out from behind some unexplored region of the map, Age of Empires-style.
It depends on where you are talking about. But in Europe, particularly western Europe and especially the British isles, whose prehistory I know better, what I described was accurate.
The Neolithic culture that had lived for thousands of years was displaced by the Bronze Age "Beaker" culture that were an invading culture from mainland Europe. Recent genetic studies show that there wasn't many connecting lineages between Neolithic and Bronze age cultures--the genetic contribution of previous occupants was less than 10% compared to the invading population.
For the Iron Age transition, we have more variety of evidence since it happened thousands of years closer to the present. There was a period of 200 years of conflict known as the "Bronze crisis" after the introduction of iron working. This is due, in part, to the devastating economic effect of moving off of bronze axes as a currency, and the destabilizing effect iron weapons have due to their durability and ease of maintenance--it makes long-distance raiding a realistic proposition. This is an era that people retreated from open communities into hill forts, populations declined, harvests failed, and we have evidence of so many settlements burned to the ground. The people were not wholesale displaced as happened in end of the Bronze age, but there was a total breakdown of society and reformation into a very, very different culture.
I am not a historian, only a reader, so my knowledge has plenty of inaccuracies. However, I believe what you are saying for the Neolithic -> Bronze Age transition makes sense in the British Isles and Western Europe, as these are the last remnants of Neolithic society in Europe.
The Bronze Age doesn't begin in Britain until about 2500-2000 BCE. Thats a full thousand years after the Bronze Age had already begun in the Near East and Egypt. So this displacement from more modern (and militarily advanced) cultures makes sense.
The gradual adaptation of bronze that I was referring to was referring to the origins of the Bronze Age in the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and Greece.
Can you provide some references to that effect published in the last decade? I specify the time period because historical genetics has shown that the cultural diffusion pots not people model promulgated after WWII is less accurate than the early twentieth century war and population replacement one.
I’m by no means an expert on the transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age but revolutions in military technology like the chariot or iron weapons did lead to rapid expansion of the culture/ethnos that had them first. The pre-Celtic Irish population left a comparatively minor genetic impact on the current Irish for example.
Well... it's not just about military technology. The ages are named for advancements in tools in general. But a good bit of human history is dictated by natural resources and a societies ability to exploit them. Military technology enables me to take over your natural resources and instates my culture as the predominant one in our geography. See the fall of rome, qin dynasty, the conquest of mecca, or the american revolution.
“Prebellum” and “antebellum” are both ways of saying “before the war” in Latin. There is nothing wrong with the former term, other than its relative rarity. If you search you can find “prebellum” being used (in the same sense as “antebellum”, e.g. with reference to the US South before the 1860s) in various academic papers, newspaper articles, etc.
Prewar. Since everybody knows what that means instead of these weird Latin words. It's even worse because the choice of language contains information about which war it refers to! Latin for the American civil war and English for WWII. Let the context determine which war you're talking about, not some arbitrary choice of language.
On a site called Literary Hub, they should recognize that the best reason for a "Flax Age" is the production of linen paper beginning about 1350 CE.
Previously, parchment made expensively and laboriously from animal hides was the medium for the written word in Europe. However, a cheaper medium was needed for less important documents, and "rag paper" made from old linen clothes began to be produced in greater volumes in the mid-14th Century. As volumes increased it became much cheaper than parchment. As a result, Gutenberg's invention of movable type was economically advantageous and the literary explosion in Europe resulted. Had parchment still been the only medium available, the cost of books would have been very expensive, whether produced by scribe or printing press.
The paper isn't the point, the press is. As is evidenced by your dates, linen paper in and of itself does not move the needle much. Asia Minor and China never produced a press. The idea of cheap, disposable paper that leads someone to think up a mass production scheme moves the needle a lot.
The argument put forth in "Paper: Paging Through History" is actually the opposite. Europe was exposed to cheap, disposable paper through trade for centuries but scorned it until they had a need for it.
(While "Paper" is partially a history book, it also has as a thesis that societal change leads to technological change, rather than the opposite, and attempts to demonstrate it through the history of paper.)
I'm interested in reading this. I think I disagree with the main thesis though.
The most important forces in history are geography, demographics, and information flow, probably in that order.
I would propose that the history of the west largely hinges on the printing press. Gutenberg doesn't invent the press, Luther never gets the word out about Reformation, Enlightenment never occurs, John Smith never writes Wealth of Nations, America never splits from Britain, etc.
Note that after the continuous decline in price from 1350 to 1650, the price of paper stabilized due to the demand from printers. The availability of linen rags was another limiting factor until the development of wood pulp paper.
On page 9 -"Vellum and parchment were not viable for mass production. A well-known example is the Gutenberg Bible, of which 30 copies were printed on parchment. Each parchment copy required the skins of more than 300 sheep."
So if you're saying hand-carved woodblock printing should be considered a "press", sure the Chinese had a "press." If you're going to tell me that the printing press could not have been the important factor because a hand-carved woodblock typeset is just as economical as an actual press with metal movable type, I'm willing to debate you on that.
They had mechanical printing presses used for wood-blick illustrations. They also had movable type printing presses for long text. For some reason they didn’t combine the two until much later. Probably market forces though—Europe was rather unique in having demand for everyone to own a Bible during the reformation. Without needing thousands of copies, hand presses were easier.
> This implies that metal objects were the principal features of these times, when they are simply often the most visible and long-lasting remnants.
I'm not an archeologist so I probably lack a lot of context, but I assume metal requires more advanced technology to acquire. It seems kind of logical to me to name a period after its most advanced technology.
How do you define "advanced"? It's not always clear.
For example, bronze metallurgy is easier to achieve (it requires lower temperatures) than iron metallurgy. But bronze is, for many use cases, a superior technology to iron. So is iron or bronze "more advanced technology"?
It's also easy to underestimate the difficulty in mundane technologies. Take bread for instance; this is how you make bread: Grow a grass (cereal crop). Separate the seeds, dry them, and then shell them to get your grains. Now grind it into flour, and then mix it with water, fat, and salt. Let it sit out to grow a yeast infection. Stick it in a fire, and then you get bread.
Compare this to typical metalworking: Find the appropriate ore. Stick it in a fire. Depending on the metal, let it melt completely and pour it into a sand cast, or get it red-hot and then bang on it with a hammer.
The popular conception of technology often hews towards a Civilization-style technology tree model, but the consensus of historians and anthropologists in modern times is that this model is quite far from the truth, and that trying to impose that model on what we know of history unnecessarily limits our understanding.
Iron. Advancement doesn't mean "overall quality," it means difficulty and sophistication, including the sophistication and difficulty of the necessary supply chain. A computer is a more advanced technology than a shovel, even though if you need to dig a hole the computer would be useless. That's the definition of advanced.
Bronze is not easy to make, but iron is more difficult, requiring better furnaces. Given access to the right raw materials, any civilization that can make iron can make bronze but not the other way around.
>Find the appropriate ore. Stick it in a fire.
Open fires aren't hot enough to melt any but the softest metals, like tin. Building fires required to reach metallurgical temperatures is a very difficult task whose know-how evolved slowly over millennia.
> Given access to the right raw materials, any civilization that can make iron can make bronze but not the other way around.
However, in a sense the spread of bronzemaking required a more advanced society and intercultural trade because rich deposits of copper and tin ore can be located thousands of kilometers from each other. Most of the tin used by the Mediterraneans was imported from Britain.
> Open fires aren't hot enough to melt any but the softest metals, like tin.
Extracting metal from an ore (smelting) does not in general involve melting temperatures, and neither does working the metal into tools.
I was about to say this. Iron smelting was a later invention, but once it was discovered, it's actually significantly easier to smelt iron than bronze, even if you start from zero (i.e. knowledge only, no tools), due to the geographical scarcity of tin. For instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyGLE0usN_I
So you can easily say bronze requires a more advanced civilization than does iron, given the more complicated trade routes required. In that sense, developing Bronze before smelted iron is partially a historical/geological artifact (although one replicated in the Americas). the southern half of Africa was cut off from European and Asian sources of tin but geographical barriers (and there are no tin sources in Africa itself), so they skipped Bronze and went straight to Iron smelting.
>Most of the tin used by the Mediterraneans was imported from Britain.
This is an interesting one because it touches on the evolution of bronze. Early bronze was made from nearby co-occurring deposits, including arsenic bronze which was made from the arsenic that is often found along with copper. However because tin was much rarer than copper, and because there was a lot of it in Britain, the long-term evolved solution was to transport the tin across great distances. I'm not completely sure but I believe that the tin trade route post-dates the invention of bronze.
>Extracting metal from an ore (smelting) does not in general involve melting temperatures, and neither does working the metal into tools.
That's a good catch, but it's also worth pointing out that campfires still can't smelt copper, and also that early iron furnaces, incapable of melting iron as they were, still had to be enclosed and fed with forced air.
Getting access to tin is hard. And making wrought iron isn't really harder to do than making cast bronze. The issue is that if you don't know how to turn it into steel (which isn't hard, just requires discovery), wrought iron is highly inferior to bronze.
India actually basically skipped a bronze age, going largely from unalloyed copper straight to steel rather early, without any intervening period where bronze was widespread. So the bronze first then iron developmental pattern is not universal.
The earliest refining of iron also produced a little steel as a byproduct. There is reason to believe that iron refining is as old as, or even older than bronze, and steel would have been made with that iron. However bronze was easier to work with (I think this refers to readily available ore though I haven't looked into this and could be wrong as to reasons). In general a craftsman would use bronze where possible, iron where bronze didn't work (which wasn't often, bronze is better than most people think), and steel only where required. For files and other metal working tools not much steel is required and the advantages would be worth it (though these might be case hardened iron - we suspect they knew how to do this long ago but there is no historic record to be sure)
The are plenty of stories passed down about magic swords that could cut others in half. If someone collected enough steel from the little that would made it would be magic compared to other swords, but the effort to collect that much steel would be enough that few such swords would be made.
Wrought iron is immensely more useful than bronze in many applications demanding strength (per weight or per volume, take your pick) and/or toughness.
There's a reason things like metal bridges, railways, etc. all became common only after wrought iron became readily available.
Likewise for cast iron, other than malleability it is mechanically superior to bronze.
There's a reason the only time you see bronze these days is bushing material and applications demanding corrosion resistance for which aluminum/zinc alloys would be unsuitable.
To clarify, I meant superior for contemporary needs. People weren’t building large scale structures out of metal, but they were crafting tools, weaponry, and armor, for which wrought iron’s softness is a dealbreaker.
Dwarf Fortress taught me to always import bismuthinite and cassiterite stones on embark, along with willow logs.
Real history shows that tin mines were a major strategic asset for pre-steel civilization, and Devon and Cornwall on Britain had the oldest and deepest mines in the world, and continued working after other European sources were exhausted.
Even if you know how to make steel, making types suitable for non-specialty work in significant quantities was difficult until smelting technology upgraded to the Bessemer process, and the types of available steels meant that a lot of cannons were still cast bronze. On a historical scale, it is only very recently that newer steel alloys and mass-produced aluminum has obsoleted bronze for just about everything but cymbals, certain corrosion-resistant fittings, and yellowish coinage cladding.
I thought it was mostly a reference to what was used in the weapons of the era. Bronze has several advantages over iron for a variety of uses, but a bronze sword or bronze tipped spear is at a severe disadvantage against an iron equipped foe.
> It's also easy to underestimate the difficulty in mundane technologies. Take bread for instance; this is how you make bread: Grow a grass (cereal crop). Separate the seeds, dry them, and then shell them to get your grains. Now grind it into flour, and then mix it with water, fat, and salt. Let it sit out to grow a yeast infection. Stick it in a fire, and then you get bread. Compare this to typical metalworking: Find the appropriate ore. Stick it in a fire. Depending on the metal, let it melt completely and pour it into a sand cast, or get it red-hot and then bang on it with a hammer.
Your example doesn't support your point. You're simply going into more detail on the baking process than the smithing process. In particular, none of these things are trivial:
* finding the right ore (generally depends on trade and specialization)
* making a fire hot enough to melt metal
* making a sand cast
* alloying the metal
* rooting out impurities such that the finished artifact is useful
"Compare this to typical metalworking: Find the appropriate ore. Stick it in a fire. Depending on the metal, let it melt completely and pour it into a sand cast, or get it red-hot and then bang on it with a hammer."
This reminds me of something I read about the "Great Leap Forward" in China, where my impression is authorities thought something like, yeah, metalworking is simple, let's get everyone making steel, and then the results were not good for much.
So, sure, bread is something that doubtless took thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of years to develop, but that's no reason to take metalworking for granted.
No, deriving metal from ore is not as easy as you make it out to be. Even the construction of a simple bloom furnace requires a fair amount of knowledge of the properties of fire.
You can make a bloom furnace with your hands out of mud, so if it was trivial to make metal objects, why was the stone hand ax the predominant tool on record for most of human history?
The periods are named after the characteristic material of the finds. It is not really about "most advanced", it is about what have been preserved. Lots of iron tools/weapons are preserved from the iron age, lots of bronze tools/weapons have been preserved from the bronze age.
The division is from the 1820's and based on the finds available at the time. Of course today we have much better tools (like carbon dating) but the basic division is still valid.
There is no "pottery age" because pottery is known through the ages, but specific characteristics of pottery is indeed used to subdivide the periods and cultures - Funnelbeaker culture, Linear Pottery culture etc. To suggest that pottery have been ignored by archeologists is absurdly ignorant.
I don't think metals technology was significantly more advanced than textiles technology. Turning plants into good quality fabrics is a complicated process with non-obvious steps. E.g. retting (controlled partial rotting of plants to aid removal of the bast fibers) is IMO something non-intuitive, just like smelting of metals.
But textiles technology gave only small incremental improvements with each step. Plant-based fabrics were more convenient than animal skins, but they weren't something fundamentally new. Metals however could be used to make things completely impossible with older technologies, so they're a better candidate for naming time periods.
I don't think so. Retting isn't obvious, but it isn't hard to imagine that someone encountered some material that wasn't preserved and it rotted in the right way. This could be accidentally finding it, or storing some for latter processing and then dieing - only latter was the cache discovered and used.
> but I assume metal requires more advanced technology to acquir
Anyone can make a crude knife. Try making a cotton scarf.
We are taking textiles for granted (as in t-shirts and fast fashion) but until XIX century for hundreds of years nothing could match Indian cotton fabrics which were used as mean of exchange in all over Asia.
As someone who is writing a tool that procedurally generates random textile and clothing styles for fantasy cultures, this article is extremely useful to me.
Metals are far more important because metals provide better tools and weapons.
Better fibers give more comfort, better resistance to the elements. But, in itself, is not as much transformative as better tools and weapons.
If you went back to the distant past with modern clothes, you'd have some marginal survival advantages, but not enough for your tribe if you needed to fight for scarce resources like food.
So yes, Iron is far more relevant than flax. Because Iron gave better tools, and our history is basically the history of our tools (and weapons)
Looking at Primitive Technology, I'd call all of those eras the Clay Age - he uses clay for pretty much everything, including (of course) trying to melt iron from mud.
There is one primitive tech guy who actually got iron smelting working enough to make a useable knife[1]. This naturally took him an enormous amount of work and patience.
> Intriguingly, a 2013 discovery in southeast France has led to tentative suggestions that Homo sapiens may not have been the first species to have made string. A tiny sliver of twisted fibers—just 0.028 inches long—was found in a site occupied by Neanderthals 90,000 years ago, well before sapiens arrived in Europe.
Is "0.028 inches" a typo here? How would anyone find a thread that short, and, if found, how could one tell that the thread was intentionally woven instead of just fibers lying next to each other and getting twisted together by random chance?
The fiber was some remnants found on stone tools, apparently. I don't have the archaeological background to say if the claim it's not possible to twist in nature in plausible or not.
Another activity not given enough attention is fishing. Remnants of fish, as well as fishing tools are perishable, but they played an important role before the neolithic revolution. The name seems to be misleading.
It mentions Dzudzuana three times, but does not explain it. Presumably that is explained elsewhere in the book, but it is used inconsistently, thus confusingly, here.
I'm wondering: did they eat a lot of flaxseed in that period? I'm asking because I like flaxseed, and there seems to be a limit on how much the body (my body) can handle of it.
It's always annoying to see identity politics injected into hard sciences:
> Archaeologists—predominantly male—gave ancient ages names like “Iron” and “Bronze,” rather than “Pottery” or “Flax.”
Entire cultures are named after their pottery. For example, there are the "corded ware culture" and "bell beaker culture." Archaeologists pay very close attention to material culture (including more feminine items like jewelry). Maybe - just maybe - it's harder to know about fabrics than metals because the former degrade more quickly than the latter. Or we could just blame it on men.
The specific information in your comment is good. If you dropped the first sentence, the last sentence, and the snark ("Maybe - just maybe"), your comment would be a much better contribution to HN.
That's not a fair description of the article, but for fun, let's suppose it were. Your argument doesn't wash. If someone vandalizes your house or (let's say) a city park, that doesn't make it ok for someone else to vandalize.
Not sure why you're getting down-voted, because you're totally right. I'd add the fibulae to the list of "female" archaeological artifacts closely studied by, well, archeologists. For example the history of late 6th - early 7th century Slavs in South-Eastern Europe is mostly "deduced" by studying women-worn fibulae like those presented in articles like this [1]
To be fair, studies like history and archaeology are anything but hard sciences. One of the history courses I took during my degree was dedicated entirely to looking at historical texts and trying to see the biases of the historian who wrote them. There's always reason to look for bias in primary sources and secondary sources and then try and learn from them. Re-framing what we know in different lights definitely has value.
All that being said, it does feel like a weird jab to throw in the male bit at the beginning. But that's who was studying this at one time, and realizing that and being open to re-framing doesn't hurt.
I think it's important to acknowledge the biases of the scientists or researchers that study first-hand materials. They absolutely affect the research and conclusions they produce and affect how the broader public understand history and science.
That said, you are absolutely right in the particulars here. Pottery is extremely important to our understanding of human history -- that was an absurd mistake in the article, since it is so important -- and it makes sense that fabrics have been less important simply because there is much less evidence of the particulars of it.
--
On an unrelated note, I love flax and its many uses. I love that when we eat it as seed we call it "flax seed," when we use it as cooking oil we call it "flax oil," when we use it as a protective finish we call it "linseed oil," when we make it into cloth we call it "linen," and when we make it into flooring we call it "linoleum." Let me know if I missed others.
So here's a question about flax, and other things.
It seems like there is a technological progression in clothing from "I take the unprocessed hides from the animals I kill or the leaves and vines around me and just wear them" to "I tan hides to make leather" to "I grow flax or cotton to make fibers and fabric"
Actual question: Do these technologies correspond to lengthy time frames in large areas in such a way that it could be useful to identify a "Leather Age/Culture" or "Plant fiber Age/Culture"?
Sewing is a vital technology, since only with sewn, multi-layer clothing was cold-intolerant Homo sapiens able to colonize the middle and upper latitudes of the Eurasian continent during the last Ice Age. In the referenced article, it mentions needles from about 35,000 years ago. Presumably the earliest garments were furs stitched with sinew threads, but plant fiber thread from 34,000 has been found in Georgia. The archaeological problem is that bone needles and organic fibers do not endure to the present like stone and copper.
I know a few female archaeologists. They've uniformly experienced sexism, ridicule, scorn, and harassment for being women. The hard sciences are steeped in identity politics, and have been as long as there have been hard sciences. God forbid somebody actually talk about the assumptions and biases that result.
Archaeology is among the hardest of the "soft" sciences. They routinely rely on radioactivity, density of pollen varieties, tree-ring correlation, and genetic analysis to determine ground facts.
Won't debate you on that. I'm a mathematician. IMNSHO, physics is a soft science because they accept 5-sigma experimental results as "proof."
My parent made the claim that "identity politics" are invading archaeology, and my point is that "identity politics" have always been there -- it's no longer acceptable to explicitly forbid women from the sciences, but that doesn't mean that implicit gatekeeping isn't happening.
I do! Mostly. It's a little complicated. Read the Mathematics page on wikipedia, and you'll find I'm in good company.
My strong, loosely held, opinion is that rigorous mathematics is the hardest of sciences. Where mathematicians reject computer proofs over all-human proofs, I balk at their lack of rigor and consider their stance unscientific.
Mathematics is one of the only sciences that finds absolute ground truth: we state axioms, and elaborate proofs based entirely upon those axioms. Axioms are assumptions, and we freely acknowledge that results are only guaranteed to hold if the axioms are satisfied. Logicians are seen as philosophers, but I hold them as equals.
There's a perspective that "science" deals purely with the natural world, and mathematicians aren't bothered by the surreality of their axioms. The way I see it is, these are truths that can extend beyond even our universe, should anything more exist. And occasionally, pure mathematical results come hundreds of years before natural observations require them -- what looks absurdly inapplicable now might not in a few generations.
I agree for the most part, as I'm somewhat of a mathematician myself (theoretical computer science).
However, you state "mathematics is one of the only sciences that finds absolute ground truth", which I would argue sets it apart from being a science: science does not deal with absolute truth. The scientific method and experiments allows you to inductively make more and more accurate predictions about the object of your study (most often the natural world), but it will never give the deductive truth like math.
So rather than classifying almost all sciences as lacking rigor, I myself consider math to simply be not a science, but something else, as implied with my question.
I guess it depends on ones definition of "science". Is any process resulting in knowledge a science, or does it have to involve the scientific method, hypotheses, experiments.
> I agree for the most part, as I'm somewhat of a mathematician myself (theoretical computer science).
Haha, see? You can call yourself a scientist and nobody will bat an eye! Computer Science was once a branch of mathematics; and now it's a full-fledged field. But as you note, the pure-math roots still shine brightly. I'm somewhat of a computer scientist myself; I peddle in algorithms, graph theory, and more generally discrete math. Which brings me to a point I forgot to make: fundamentally, I'm an experimentalist. Not all mathematicians are.
> However, you state "mathematics is one of the only sciences that finds absolute ground truth", which I would argue sets it apart from being a science: science does not deal with absolute truth.
Happy to live with this disagreement, but not all mathematicians find ground truths. For example, there's a significant industry on "conditional proofs" in number theory -- they assume that the Riemann Hypothesis, or even the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis, is true, and discover results based on that. Others work on the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. They collect evidence, and report on it; similar to the 5-sigma proofs I derided earlier -- the distinction is that they only call things proofs when they're actual proofs.
In our shared world, there is the question of P vs NP. We've got a hypothesis (I tend to believe that NP won't be constructively equal to P; but I wouldn't be terribly surprised by a nonconstructive proof). Folks devote their lives to examining this dichotomy: given a problem class, resolve it into P or NP -- I call that an experiment!
I claim that endeavors like the above are actually following the scientific method. Only we use somewhat different language. I've seen snobbery on both sides^ -- scientists and mathematicians are happy to build and maintain a fence. And I find that sad.
Textiles are incredibly important, but the age is defined by conflict.
End of the day, you can make the finest cloth, but if you're armed with bronze weapons, whomever comes in with iron weapons and armor are going to kill you.
Calling it the Flax Age would be like calling Prebellum Southern US "the cotton age" - it was used already for thousand of years in several prior ages!
We probably can't trace it that precisely from lack of evidence but a Flax Age would probably be among the Neolithic ages and certainly not the Iron Age.