It is the term used to indicate the period of the history of the humanity located between prehistory and the history.

The protohistory relates to old civilizations which one is unaware of any written tradition, although they are contemporary people knowing the writing, and corresponds to the whole of the ages of metals: the age of copper or chalcolithic; the Bronze Age; the age of the iron, divided by the periods of Hallstatt and Tène.

It begins to the IV ^E thousand-year-old in the Middle East, with I ^er thousand-year-old front J. - C. approximately in southernmost Europe, in the neighborhoods of the beginning of our era in Western Europe and at the end of I ^er thousand-year-old apr. J. - C. in Northern Europe.

Of relatively recent introduction, the protohistory term caused many discussions, the appropriateness even this sequence of the evolution of humanity having sometimes been disputed. It is important in this field to pose the distinction between time delimited by more or less precise dates and stage of civilization which can be located between variable dates according to the people and the places. Concept of writing between essential way in the definition of the protohistory, this one answering at the state of people not having produced any text itself, but to which the writers of Antiquity could refer.

Thus, the Gallic ones represent a protohistoric civilization: Greeks and Romans wrote on their subject whereas themselves so to speak did not leave texts.