or Bronze Age); in English, "the stone-to-bronze period". Shortly after, "Eneolithic" or "Aeneolithic" began turning up in scholarly English as a synonym for "Copper Age". Sir John's own son, Arthur Evans, beginning to come into his own as an archaeologist and already studying Cretan civilization, refers in 1895 to some clay figures of "aeneolithic date" (quotes his). End of the Iron Age The three-age system is a way of dividing prehistory, and the Iron Age is therefore considered to end in a particular culture with either the start of its protohistory, when it begins to be written about by outsiders, or when its own historiography begins. Although iron is still the major hard material in use in modern civilization, and steel is a vital and indispensable modern industry, as far as archaeologists are concerned the Iron Age has therefore now ended for all cultures in the world. The date when it is taken to end varies greatly between cultures, and in many parts of the world there was no Iron Age at all, for example in Pre-Columbian America and the prehistory of Australia. For these and other regions the three-age system is little used. By a convention among archaeologists, in the Ancient Near East the Iron Age is taken to end with the start of the Achaemenid Empire in the 6th century BC, as the history of that is told by the Greek historian Herodotus. This remains the case despite a good deal of earlier local written material having become known since the convention was established. In Western Europe, the Iron Age is ended by the Roman conquest. In South Asia the start of the Maurya Empire about 320 BC is usually taken as the endpoint; although we have a considerable quantity of earlier written texts from India, they give us relatively little in the way of a conventional record of political history. For Egypt, China and Greece "Iron Age" is not a very useful concept, and relatively little used as a period term. In the first two prehistory has ended, and periodization by historical ruling dynasties has already begun, in the Bronze Age, which these cultures do have. In Greece, the Iron Age begins during the Greek Dark Ages, and coincides with the cessation of a historical record for some centuries. For Scandinavia and other parts of northern Europe that the Romans did not reach, the Iron Age continues