Doing some research to find interesting time periods in which to base some fiction. Of course, the first place I turned to was Wikipedia.
The first age I looked up was the Bronze Age then went to the Iron Age, since it came next. There I found a link for the Three-Age System, which includes Stone Age. By the way, these ages are named for the predominate material used in tools and weapons. It was on that page that I hit the mother lode: a link to the List of Archaeological Periods.
Basically, the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages are considered ‘pre-historic‘ which means, roughly, before written language existed, although most archeologists and others refer to it as being archeological cultures rather than named nations or peoples.
Geological time-scale is used more often than the Three Ages System. Geological is more global whereas the Three Ages are based on the peoples who inhabited what is now Europe. Peoples of the Americas, Africa and Asia developed at different rates. For example, some of the African cultures skipped the Bronze Age and Ancient China has been given a ‘Jade Age’ section due to the prominence of the use of Jade for tools and weapons prior to the Broze Age. For these reasons, it is often referred to as “Old World” Three Age System, with the Archeology of the Americas being ‘New World’.
So now I have more directions I can go with this. There are the archeological cultures, the geological time-scale (geological occurences play an important role in Wayback) and then all of the sub-cultures that fall into the ‘historical periods’ starting with the Babylonian and Persian periods.
The Middle Ages, the time most consider to be the medieval period, kinda sorta started during the 5th century after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Since the Christian Church was almost literally the only organization to survive the fall, religion plays a very important role in the Middle Ages which ends with the Protestant Reformation at about 1517. The Middle Ages take up a good chunk of history, roughly a thousand years. So it is easy to see why it is easy for a writer to use that time period. The Crusads and their sword-swing heroes make for a good background.
The Eastern Roman Empire (Greek speaking Romans) made up the Byzantine Empire that follows roughly the same time period as the Middle Ages.
The Industrial Revolution does not occur until the 18th century in Europe.
The Mayan culture prevailed from 500-1200s known as the Classic Stage.
The Incan and Mississipian cultures prevailed from 1200s to present in the Post-Classic Stage.
The Anasazi/Hisatsinom are thought to have emerged at around 1200BC. The Pecos Classification page is interesting reading.
Another cool thing with Wikipedia is that you can look up an individual year, a decade, a millennia and etc. For example, I looked up 1850BC. On that page, I can find the events from that year as well as births and deaths. I can also find links to years around it, the 1850s decade, 1850 art, architecture, and other important topics (the architecture timeline page is a great resource too).
Okay, well, I’m going back in. Wonder where the ‘net will take me next???