Mortillet rejected the fauna-based cultural subdivisions of the Pleistocene (cave bear, mammoth, reindeer) that had been introduced by Edouard Lartet in favor of a system based on tools and artifacts (“données industrielles”). During the 1860s Mortillet “extended the geological system of period and epochs into the recent past, characterizing each by a series of archaeological ‘type-fossils’ and naming them after a ‘type-site.’ . . . By 1869 his scheme for European prehistory was fairly well elaborated and included: the Thenasian (for the now obsolete Eolithic), Chellean, Mousterian, Solutrean, Aurignacian, Magdalenian, and Robenhausian. Many of these remain in use as cultural-historical labels for bodies of material, but whereas de Mortillet saw each as a block of time they are now seen as geographically as well as chronologically defined entities” (Darvill, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology [2003], 271).

This atlas of 100 plates containing roughly 800 individual images, with accompanying text, was both a comprehensive atlas of then-known prehistoric artifact types and an attempt at their classification. Until 1902 the scientific establishment rejected the authenticity of prehistoric cave paintings. In the 1903 second edition, the work was revised and expanded to 105 plates by Adrien de Mortillet to include recent discoveries on cave paintings, the legitimacy of which had been accepted in 1902 by Emil Cartailhac and other authorities.

Digital facsimile of the 1881 edition from the Internet Archive at this link; facsimile of the 1903 edition from Google Books at this link.