CHRONOLOGY OF ANCIENT EUROPE, 2000 B.C.–A.D. 1000

Archaeologists need to make sense of how the archaeological record fits together in time and space. A simple tool for organizing this information is a chronological chart, which can be thought of as a timeline running vertically, with the oldest developments at the bottom and the most recent at the top. The vertical lines indicate the duration of cultures and peo ple, whose date of first appearance is indicated by the label at the bottom of the line. The horizontal lines indicate cultures and events that spanned more than one geographic region. Historical events or milestones appear in boldface type.

During the last two millennia B.C. and the first millennium A.D., the archaeological record in Europe gets progressively more detailed. The broad developments of the earlier period dis cussed in volume I now take on greater specificity in time and space. For that reason, the following chronological chart is organized somewhat differently from the one in volume I: in stead of large regions, it is now necessary to view the past in terms of particular countries or smaller regions and in 500-year increments. The chronological chart should be used in conjunction with the individual articles on these topics to give the reader a sense of the larger picture across Europe and through time.