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Protohistory is the period between prehistory and written history, during which a culture or civilization has not yet developed writing, but other cultures that have developed writing have noted the existence of those pre-literate groups in their own writings.
Protohistoric may also refer to the transition period between the advent of literacy in a society and the writings of the first historians. The preservation of oral traditions may complicate matters, as they can provide a secondary historical source for even earlier events. Colonial sites involving a literate group and a nonliterate group are also studied as protohistoric situations.
The term can also refer to a period in which fragmentary or external historical documents, not necessarily including a developed writing system, have been found. For instance, the Proto–Three Kingdoms of Korea, the Yayoi, [1] recorded by the Chinese, and the Mississippian groups, recorded by early European explorers, are protohistoric.
In The Oxford Illustrated History of Prehistoric Europe, [2] an article [3] by Timothy Taylor stated:
Because of the existence in some but not all societies of historical writing during the first millennium BC, the period has often been termed 'protohistoric' instead of prehistoric. Of course, the understanding of the past gained through archaeology is broadly different in nature to understanding derived from historical texts. Having both sorts of evidence is a boon and a challenge.
— Timothy Taylor, The Oxford Illustrated Prehistory of Europe
In the abstract of a later paper on "slavery in the first millennium Aegean, Carpatho-Balkan and Pontic regions", [4] Taylor, primarily an archaeologist, stated,
I have taken the rather unusual step of trusting what the classical authors tell us they knew.
— Timothy Taylor, The Archaeology of Slavery
For other examples, see also the writings of Brian M. Fagan on the protohistory of North America [5] and the work of Muhammed Abdul Nayeem on that of the Arabian Peninsula [6]
As with prehistory, determining when a culture may be considered prehistoric or protohistoric is sometimes difficult for anthropologists. Data varies considerably from culture to culture, region to region, and even from one system of reckoning dates to another.
In its simplest form, protohistory follows the same chronology as prehistory and is based on the technological advancement of a particular people with regard to metallurgy:
The best-known protohistoric civilizations and ethnic groups are those for whom the term was originally coined: the barbarian tribes mentioned by European and Asian writers. Many protohistoric peoples also feature in prehistory and in history:
The Dacians were the ancient Indo-European inhabitants of the cultural region of Dacia, located in the area near the Carpathian Mountains and west of the Black Sea. They are often considered a subgroup of the Thracians. This area includes mainly the present-day countries of Romania and Moldova, as well as parts of Ukraine, Eastern Serbia, Northern Bulgaria, Slovakia, Hungary and Southern Poland. The Dacians and the related Getae spoke the Dacian language, which has a debated relationship with the neighbouring Thracian language and may be a subgroup of it. Dacians were somewhat culturally influenced by the neighbouring Scythians and by the Celtic invaders of the 4th century BC.
The Thracians were an Indo-European speaking people who inhabited large parts of Southeast Europe in ancient history. Thracians resided mainly in Southeast Europe in modern-day Bulgaria, Romania, and northern Greece, but also in north-western Anatolia in Turkey.
The Agathyrsi were an ancient people belonging to the Scythian cultures who lived in the Transylvanian Plateau, in the region that later became Dacia. The Agathyrsi are largely known from Herodotus of Halicarnassus's description of them in the 5th century BC.
The Wessex culture is the predominant prehistoric culture of central and southern Britain during the early Bronze Age, originally defined by the British archaeologist Stuart Piggott in 1938.
The International Union for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences (IUPPS) is a learned society, linked through the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies to UNESCO, and concerned with the study of prehistory and protohistory. In the words of its constitution:
The history of Hungarybefore the Hungarian conquest spans the time period before the Hungarian conquest in the 9th century of the territories that would become the Principality of Hungary and the Kingdom of Hungary.
The Getae or Getai were a large nation who inhabited the regions to either side of the Lower Danube in what is today northern Bulgaria and southern Romania, throughout much of Classical Antiquity. Our main source of information about the Getae are Greek and Roman writers, at least some of whom believed that the Getae were closely related to the neighbouring Thracians to the south, and Dacians to the north. Modern scholars continue to debate the details of these relationships, including the question of whether these three peoples spoke the same language.
Charles Francis Christopher Hawkes, FBA, FSA was an English archaeologist specialising in European prehistory. He was Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford from 1946 to 1972.
The Decebalus treasure is an account detailed by Cassius Dio about events said to have happened in the Roman world during the 2nd century AD.
The prehistory of Southeast Europe, defined roughly as the territory of the wider Southeast Europe covers the period from the Upper Paleolithic, beginning with the presence of Homo sapiens in the area some 44,000 years ago, until the appearance of the first written records in Classical Antiquity, in Greece. First Greek language is Linear A and follows Linear B, which is a syllabic script that was used for writing in Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested form of the Greek language. The script predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries. The oldest Mycenaean writing dates to about 1400 BC. It is descended from the older Linear A, an undeciphered earlier script used for writing the Minoan language, as is the later Cypriot syllabary, which also recorded Greek. Linear B, found mainly in the palace archives at Knossos, Kydonia, Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae, but disappeared with the fall of the Mycenean civilisation during the Late Bronze Age collapse.
Midianite pottery, also known as Qurayya ware is a ware type found in the Hejaz, southern and central Jordan, southern Canaan and the Sinai, generally dated to the 13th-12th centuries BCE, although later dates are also possible.
Prehistory, also called pre-literary history, is the period of human history between the first known use of stone tools by hominins c. 3.3 million years ago and the beginning of recorded history with the invention of writing systems. The use of symbols, marks, and images appears very early among humans, but the earliest known writing systems appeared c. 5,200 years ago. It took thousands of years for writing systems to be widely adopted, with writing having spread to almost all cultures by the 19th century. The end of prehistory therefore came at different times in different places, and the term is less often used in discussing societies where prehistory ended relatively recently.
The appearance of Celts in Transylvania can be traced to the later La Tène period . Excavation of the great La Tène necropolis at Apahida, Cluj County, by S. Kovacs at the turn of the 20th century revealed the first evidence of Celtic culture in Romania. The 3rd–2nd century BC site is remarkable for its cremation burials and chiefly wheel-made funeral vessels.
The Golden Helmet of Coțofenești is a Geto-Dacian helmet dating from the second half of the 5th century BCE.
The Helmet of Iron Gates is a Geto-Dacian silver helmet dating from the 4th century BC, housed in the Detroit Institute of Arts, United States.
Dacian art is the art associated with the peoples known as Dacians or North Thracians; The Dacians created an art style in which the influences of Scythians and the Greeks can be seen. They were highly skilled in gold and silver working and in pottery making. Pottery was white with red decorations in floral, geometric, and stylized animal motifs. Similar decorations were worked in metal, especially the figure of a horse, which was common on Dacian coins.
The Antiquity in Romania spans the period between the foundation of Greek colonies in present-day Dobruja and the withdrawal of the Romans from "Dacia Trajana" province. The earliest records of the history of the regions which now form Romania were made after the establishment of three Greek towns—Histria, Tomis, and Callatis—on the Black Sea coast in the 7th and 6th centuries BC. They developed into important centers of commerce and had a close relationship with the natives. The latter were first described by Herodotus, who made mention of the Getae of the Lower Danube region, the Agathyrsi of Transylvania and the Sygannae of Crişana.
Paul Grimm was a German prehistorian and also a pioneer of Medieval archaeology, especially of the excavation of abandoned villages and castles. Grimm worked on various periods, but mainly in central Germany – the names of two important Neolithic archaeological cultures in the area, the Baalberge group and the Salzmünde group derive from him. His comprehensive excavations at Hohenrode and Tilleda were important milestones in the history of German archaeology.
Prehistoric religion is the religious practice of prehistoric cultures. Prehistory, the period before written records, makes up the bulk of human experience; over 99% of human experience occurred during the Paleolithic period alone. Prehistoric cultures spanned the globe and existed for over two and a half million years; their religious practices were many and varied, and the study of them is difficult due to the lack of written records describing the details of their faiths.