Nicolas Mahudel (21 November 1673 – 7 March 1747) was a French antiquary interested in prehistoric research.
[1][2] With his work Three Successive Ages of Stone, Bronze, and Iron (1734), he influenced fellow antiquaries, notably William Borlase who further developed this idea.
Mahudel, member of the Académie des Inscriptions, presented several of those stones and showed that they have evidently been cut by the hand of man.
"An examination of them," he said, "affords a proof of the efforts of our earliest ancestors to provide for their wants, and to obtain the necessaries of life."
He noticed that graves with decayed urns largely featured bronze items, whereas iron was found in more recent ones.