Great archaeologists

Vere Gordon Childe

Vere Gordon Childe (14 April 1892 – 19 October 1957) was an Australian philologist by training who later specialised in archaeology. Usually known as just Gordon Childe, he was perhaps best known for his excavation of the unique Neolithic site of Skara Brae in Orkney and for his Marxist views which influenced his thinking about prehistory. He is also credited with coining the terms "Neolithic Revolution" and "Urban Revolution" and combined with his innovative theories, he is recognized as a major contributor to the field of sociocultural evolution.

In 1914 Childe went to Britain to attend the Queen's College at the University of Oxford and was awarded a B.A. in 1917. He returned to Australia, and in 1917 was appointed Senior Tutor at St Andrew's College, Sydney University. After addressing a pacifist meeting in 1918 he was asked by the College Principal to resign his position and was then refused an appointment as Ancient History Tutor by the University of Sydney. He was multi-talented, being an accomplished linguist, and by 1927 had been appointed Professor of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, a post which he held until 1946.

Marxism greatly influenced Childe's philosophy on archaeological thinking. His views at times were unclear, but a strong motivation from socialism and left politics influenced his ideas on his materialistic approach to the grand theories of prehistory.

Childe's aim was to form a truly international approach to prehistoric studies in order to understand how civilizations arose. His method was based on an integrative principle. He related the known events of history to the data of natural history so as to form a total picture of how human civilization had developed. He studied the legal, political, economic, religious, and sociological structures of primitive and developing societies and linked the relevant studies with anthropology, geology, biology, zoology, and paleontology.

His book, The Dawn of European Civilisation (1925) won him immediate recognition, and he followed it up with other books on archaeological theory. In that first book he laid out his ideas on the relation between European and Near Eastern development. He also explored the relation of archaeology and Indo-European languages, which he further developed in The Aryans: A Study of Indo-European Origins, (1926). He posited a modified diffusionist theory of the spread of civilization, identifying south Russia as the homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans and studied this theory in the context of the archaeological record. His basic ideas contributed to the Kurgan invasion theory.

Childe's book Social Evolution makes the conclusion that archaeology does not correlate social institutions with stages of development. Childe refutes several different institutions that have been used as proof of parallelism in development: food gathering activities, tools and weapons, trade, type of government, war, and the role of women.

Social Evolution also asserts that it is essential to have the view that "culture represents the means by which societies adapt themselves to their environments so as to survive and multiply, taking the place of the bodily modifications and instincts that serve animals to the same end." Hence, archaeology is important because it "can prove interaction between two societies, that is, how culture is transmitted from one society to the next". Also, it is important to realize that while "ideas never fossilize, they may be realized in actions that leave durable impressions on the archeological record."

Childe's Place In Society. Childe was the first to explore developments he called the "Neolithic Revolution" and "Urban Revolution" in the archaeological record, and they are still vital concepts in prehistoric studies. Further developments in civilization could be explained with reference to the changes in technology that occurred, which were accessible from the archaeological record. To do this, Childe started to use terms like Bronze Age or Iron Age as a way of exploring shifts from one level of material development to another, rather than just for dating.

Childe was unusual in emphasizing the Hellenistic period as the apex of Graeco-Roman civilisation, rather than the world of Athens in the 5th century BC, or that of the Roman Empire. He discovered that many of the aspects of culture which were attributed to Greece, actually had basis in southwest Asia and northeast Africa. In the Hellenized eastern Mediterranean, and particularly at Alexandria, he saw the culmination of classical culture. This emphasis was unique because Childe was admitting that aspects of African and Asian culture played a major part in development, a view that was in direct opposition to general scientific opinion.

Childe placed considerable importance on human culture as a social construct rather than a product of environmental or technological contexts. In Childe's theory, societies had separate cultures and developed separately until contact occurred which resulted in similar adaptations to similar problems.

Childe was also an accomplished populariser: his two most widely read books, What Happened in History (1942) and Man Makes Himself (1951), were readable accounts that brought archaeology to a wider audience and helped make him well known.

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