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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hriston" data-source="post: 9423957" data-attributes="member: 6787503">You're quibbling with me about the meaning of the word neolithic. That's semantics. You are, of course, correct, and I considered not (mis)using it in my OP (which was copy/pasted from the other thread which used the term) and in my thread title but had difficulty finding another convenient label for the range of real-world dates I wanted to discuss. Prehistoric seemed too vague, covering all of Time up until the beginning of Ancient history around 3,000 BC (in Mesopotamia and Egypt) and conjuring images of cavemen and dinosaurs. It’s also subject to the same kind of objection as neolithic due to the existence of writing in the legendarium from its invention by Rúmil.Clearly, it was a mistake to use neolithic because, rather than suggest a specific time-period as I had intended, it seems to imply in the minds of many posters strict conformity to a model used to identify an archaeological period by its package of cultural traits, inviting the reader to become an archaeologist of the Third Age and evaluate its level of cultural development according to the "evidence" found in the LotR. This wasn't my intention at all, and by using the term, I wasn't holding myself up to be such an "archaeologist". I think now, after doing some light research, it would be better to use a term from the geologic timescale because it describes the timing and relationship of (geologic) events and is based on objective relationships between rock layers rather than "measures" of human cultural activity, so I'm editing the OP and thread title to replace Neolithic with Greenlandian which I hope will clarify my intentions with regard to this thread.It wasn't clear to me. The OP of that thread calls the Neolithic a "time period" in its first sentence. I took that literally and responded by talking about fantasy I consider to be set in that time period.Because it's difficult to engage with your points if I don't know on what specific passages of text you're basing your assertions.Because it isn't talked about very much in the books. A lot of what posters have asserted in this thread seems like it's based on their personal mental picture rather than any specific textual reference.Because it is. It's delusional to think modern society has perfect knowledge of what the past was like.I make no claims about what JRR Tolkien imagined other than what's represented in the words he wrote in his fiction and letters. The premise of this thread is he made a statement about the real-world time-period in which he imagined his stories to have taken place and that what is understood about that time-period, both currently and in Tolkien's own time, can inform how we might imagine and how Tolkien himself might have imagined the setting of his stories.I make no claims about the actual level of cultural advancement of societies of the time, and my opinion is that Tolkien wasn't particularly interested in describing culture.</blockquote>

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