Vere Gordon Childe

(1892-1957), born Sydney, had a brilliant scholastic record at the universities of Sydney and Oxford but his strongly held socialist, pacifist and anti-conscription beliefs prevented his securing an academic appointment in the conservative universities of Australia after his return from England in 1917. In 1918 he taught briefly in Maryborough, Queensland, where P.R. Stephensen was a pupil, and in 1919-21 was private secretary to the NSW Labor politician John Storey; he returned to England as a research officer in the NSW agent-general's office, but was dismissed in 1922 after a change of government. The following year How Labor Governs, a pessimistic view of the difficulties faced by working-class politicians working within a parliamentary system, was published; thereafter Childe's attention was focused on the fields of archaeology, prehistory and anthropology. In a career that saw him librarian of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1925-27) and professor of archaeology at the universities of Edinburgh (1927-46) and London (1946-57), he published about twenty books and many papers; the best known were his much-revised and republished The Dawn of European Civilization (1925) and two works written primarily for the general public, Man Makes Himself (1936) and What Happened in History (1942). Two studies of Childe have been published, Prehistorian, by Sally Green (1981) and Gordon Childe: Revolutions in Archeology by Bruce G. Trigger (1980).

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The Australian prehistorian and archeologist Vere Gordon Childe (1892-1957) pioneered in the systematic study of European prehistory of the 3d and 2d millenniums B.C. and showed how technological advances marked the birth of human civilizations.

On April 14, 1892, V. Gordon Childe was born in Sydney, New South Wales. He studied at Oxford University under Sir Arthur Evans and John Linton Myers. His studies there concerning the relation of archeology and Indo-Aryan languages led to The Dawn of European Civilization (1925; 6th ed. 1957) and The Aryans (1926).

Childe became the first Abercromby professor of prehistoric archeology at the University of Edinburgh in 1927 and taught there until 1946. From 1928 to 1931 he supervised the excavation of the Skara Brae Stone Age village in the Orkney Islands, Scotland. In his evolution as a scholar Childe, like all 19th-and early-20th-century prehistorians, was strongly influenced by Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) and by the positivism of Auguste Comte, Max Weber, and Sir Edward B. Tylor.

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 Man Makes Himself (1936) and Social Evolution (1951) are prime examples of his power of synthesis.

For Childe the invention of writing was a primary index of civilization. He maintained that the invention of writing by ancient peoples always coincided with a critical threshold in their economic and demographic structure. At that moment they had achieved a certain economic surplus, a definite preoccupation with such things as calendrical astronomy, geometry, and arithmetic, and some literary occupations mainly of a religious bent. In addition, their population involved a more complex sociopolitical organization than ever before. Childe used the term "civilization" to refer to this critical turning point rather than to any qualitative character of the civilization in terms of technological, artistic, and leisure indexes.

Childe was director of the Institute of Archaeology at the University of London from 1946 to 1956. He died on Oct. 19, 1957, on Mt. Victoria, New South Wales.

Further Reading

Stuart Piggott gives details of Childe's life in Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 44 (1959). An assessment of his work is in Julian H. Steward, Theory of Culture Change (1955), and in Robert Redfield, The Characterizations of Civilizations (1956).

Additional Sources

Green, Sally, Prehistorian: a biography of V. Gordon Childe, Bradford-on-Avon: Moonraker, 1981.

Trigger, Bruce G., Gordon Childe, revolutions in archaeology, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.

(1892–1957) [Bi]

Celebrated prehistorian who worked widely in Europe and who is particularly associated with the definition and application of the concept of ‘culture’ in archaeological analysis. Born in North Sydney, Australia, he graduated in Latin, Greek, and philosophy from Sydney University in 1913, developing at the same time good linguistic skills. Growing up alongside the rise of the Australian Labour Party he became a militant socialist. Between 1914 and 1916 Childe studied for a B. Litt. at Queen's College, Oxford, becoming a close friend of Rajani Palme Dutt who was later a leading figure in the British Communist Party. In 1916 Childe returned to Australia and became involved in the anti-conscription movement and Labour politics while supporting himself teaching in a Queensland secondary school and for a time at Sydney University.

After briefly working as a publicity officer in London he abandoned political work in 1922 and resumed his interest in European prehistory, although in 1926 he published his only political book How Labour governs (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press). From 1925 he was appointed librarian at the Royal Anthropological Institute, a post which allowed him to continue his researches and especially his travels in eastern Europe. Several books were published in this period including The dawn of European civilization (1925, London: Routledge) and The Ayrians (1926, New York: A. A. Knopf). In 1927 he joined with archaeologists from the Hungarian National Museum and Cambridge University in excavating the Hungarian Bronze Age site of Toszeg. In the same year he was appointed Abercromby Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at Edinburgh University. By the end of the 1920s he had attained the greatest achievement of his early works, the linking of the idea of an archaeological culture as a device for tracing the history of a particular people with the idea of diffusionism as a means for the spread of ideas and people. Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s he applied these ideas locally within the British Isles and to the wider European scene, publishing such key works as The Danube in prehistory (1929, Oxford: Clarendon Press), Prehistory of Scotland (1935, London: Kegan Paul), and Prehistoric communities of the British Isles (1940, London: Chambers). His pursuit of Marxism took him to the Soviet Union for the first time in 1935.

He left Edinburgh in 1946 to became the Director of the Institute of Archaeology at London University, a position he retained until his retirement in 1956. He returned to Australia, seemingly disillusioned in his own ability to devise new ways of carrying forward the Marxist analysis of prehistory. After presenting some lectures and visiting friends, he committed suicide, falling 300m from Govett's Leap in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales on the morning of 19 October 1957.

[Bio.: B. Trigger, 1980, Gordon Childe. London: Thames & Hudson]

Childe, Vere Gordon, 1892-1957, British archaeologist, b. Australia. An Oxford graduate, he taught at the Univ. of Edinburgh (1927-46) and the Univ. of London (1946-56). He gained renown for his monumental synthesis of European prehistory, The Dawn of European Civilization (1925, 6th ed. 1957), and The Prehistory of European Society (1958). His studies in Asian archaeology led him to advance the concepts of the agricultural and urban revolutions in New Light on the Most Ancient East (1929, rev. ed. 1953). His interpretation of human history is put forth in two popular works, Man Makes Himself (1937, rev. ed. 1951) and What Happened in History (1942).