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A scheme for the cultural history of the British Iron Age first proposed Christopher Hawkes, Charles Francis Christopher in 1931, but expanded and elaborated in the late 1950s as the opening paper at a conference on the Southern British Iron Age organized by the CBA and held in London in December 1958, subsequently published in Antiquity (1959, 170–82). The ABC refers to cultures, each of which appears in each of three periods that are designated 1, 2, and 3. Period 1 broadly equates to the late Hallstatt on the continent, period 2 to La Tène I, and period 3 to La Tène II and III. Hawkes's scheme is often recalled but rarely used.
