Gordon Childe after thirty years

Abstract

Gordon Childe after thirty years

Professor Vere Gordon Childe (1892-1957) was the most distinguished European prehistorian of his time. Australian by birth, a graduate of Sydney and Oxford Universities, he came to prehistory from comparative philology. Between 1915 and his death he wrote many books and articles; if one includes revised editions, translations and reviews, his bibliography exceeds 600 items. His particular interests were the Neolithic and Bronze Ages of Europe, but to these he added the influences on their development of the ancient Near East. He also wrote on the contribution of archaeology to the study of social evolution and had a deep interest in contemporary society's perception of itself.

Childe possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of the data, which he brought to chronological and cultural order with a thoroughness previously unknown in the English­speaking archaeological world. These data he controlled by his alertness to the significance of new evidence, the results of which he incorporated in the revisions of his major books.

Generally regarded as primarily a brilliant synthesist, he saw his contribution to archaeology very differently, as offering »interpretative concepts and methods of explanation« (Childe 1958a:69). Behind this remark was his conviction that the subject required above all clear methods of research, and that what endures in interpretations are the concepts that inform them. In his hands archaeology also became a subject with implications wider than its concern with material evidence. It could illuminate such matters as the development of society, past, present and future. To understand Childe's archaeological career, some attention must be paid to its background. In 1917, having completed his Oxford studies, Childe returned to Australia, where he was unable to obtain an academic post because of his political activities. Eventually he became private secretary to John Storey, the leader of the New South Wales' Labour Party, who became Prime Minister when the Party came to power in April 1920. During this period Childe collected the material for his first book, How Labour Governs: a Study of Workers' Representation in Australia, published in 1923. In late 1921 he was transferred to his government's office in London, but this move coincided with a change of government at home and his post was promptly abolished. Although Childe did not immediately give up the prospect of a career in revolutionary politics, he decided to stay in England to pursue archaeological research. He remained on the Left for the rest of his life, and did not shun political action. Much of his archaeological writing should be viewed with this commitment in mind.

In 1925, after some years of travel to museums and sites, especially in central and eastern Europe, he was appointed Librarian of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Two years later his fortune changed dramatically with his appointment as the first Professor of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. Thus he was aged 35 before he obtained his first academic post.

The years 1925 to 1930 were immensely productive. Childe published a related sequence of books demonstrating how his interests had matured. The Dawn of European Civilization (1925) was to become his most influential (and most revised) work, in the preface to which he defined its scope in these often quoted words: »My theme is the foundation of European Civilization as a peculiar and individual manifestation of the human spirit« (Childe 1925:xiii). This was to be his preoccupying concern, other elements of which were explored in The Aryans (1926), The Most Ancient East (1928), The Danube in Prehistory (1929) and The Bronze Age (1930). Some commentators regard these books as his major achievement, but to others his writings on method and theory remain equally significant.

Childe spent 19 years in Scotland where he undertook, and promptly published, excavations at a variety of sites, including megaliths, settlements and hill forts, the most well-known being the neolithic village of Skara Brae, Orkney, on which a book appeared in 1931. His teaching duties were limited (though it should be noted that until 1939 he was the only lecturer), and he produced other works of synthesis, notably The Prehistory of Scotland (1935) and Prehistoric Communities of the British Isles (1940). Between 1936 and 1944 he also published several non-specialist books which were very successful (see below).

In 1946 Childe became Professor of Prehistoric European Archaeology and Director of the Institute of Archaeology at London University, from where he retired in 1956. The stream of books and articles continued steadily during this decade, including further revisions of some of his major works. New departures included History (1947), Social Evolution (1951), Piecing together the Past (1956), Society and Knowledge (1956), A Short Introduction to Archaeology (1956) and The Prehistory of European Society (1958). The last was a postumous work; on retirement Childe returned to Australia, where, convinced that he had nothing further to contribute to either his subject or society, he committed suicide.

Childe flourished during a very dynamic period of European prehistoric studies, when discoveries and fresh interpretations shed new light on the definitions and interrelationships of cultures. Only towards the end of his life were C14 dates becoming available in any quantity, while the drastic chronological revisions these dates entailed were still to come. According to Glyn Daniel, »Childe once said that there were no certain dates in European prehistory before 1400 B. C.« (Daniel 1967:282). Many of Childe's interpretations were always provisional, as he recognized. Once the independence of C14 dates was confirmed, many of Childe's arguments were negated. As Sherratt has observed, »radio-carbon dating seemed to confirm Europe's cultural autonomy in prehistoric times, and it did not take long for Childe's shaky chronological and intellectual framework to be overturned« (Sherratt 1989: 183). It was no longer possible to regard Europe as the evolutionary infant of the Orient, though, ironically, its »peculiar and individual manifestation of the human spirit« that Childe had sought from 1925 had been demonstrated.

Much of Childe's heritage remains significant. For example in 1929 he stressed the subjective nature of interpretation:

The pattern of our canvas is not, however, Logically imposed by the facts themselves. On the contrary it is a subjective construction, only obtained by the adoption of a certain assumption. We have assumed the priority of the south-east [of Europe], and interpreted our data accordingly as long as it was possible to do so withoug doing obvious violence to the facts (Childe 1929:417).

In 1950 he had this to say (as reported by Fortes) about the limitations of archaeologically defined cultures:

Artefacts are the fossilized remains of cultures such as can still be observed by anthropologists, and symbolize patterns of behaviour Learnt within social groups just as Language and custom is learnt. Though much is missing, an attempt can be made to reconstruct these behaviour patterns. But we have still to face the full difficulties of the concept. Culture conditions values and categories. The good, the true and the beautiful are relative categories given by society. We are bound to the frame of reference derived from our own culture and we are unable to gel outside of it (Fortes 1950:713).

As Champion has commented, »more than any other writer before or since, [Childe] faced the critical problems of how knowledge of the prehistoric past is possible and what sort of knowledge it is« (Champion 1981). Childe's solution to this subjective/objective debate (itself an aspect of the sociology of knowledge) was to stress the close relationship of theory and practice. He maintained that

in practice the separation of subject from object is transcended. Real thoughts of the past have issued in action. Real thinking has already been objectified. To study a past society there is no need to turn its real thoughts into objects, for that has already been done. The relics and monuments studied by archaeology are patently objects, and need no translation into an alien conceptual framework. Yet they are concrete expressions of thought. But what is true of the durable tools handled by archaeologists, is true, too, of intellectual tools so immaterial as mathematical formulae and logical categories (Childe 1949a:25).

But how, one might ask, does one recognize the archaeological presence of such immaterial tools' The problem is still topical.

Childe's awareness of what Champion (1981) has termed »the contemporary context« of archaeological research had wider implications for his work. Though always the dedicated specialist, he was also conscious of his obligations to the society that gave him the opportunities to practise his subject. He saw the evolution of European society as part of the »main stream« (his words) of social evolution, an attitude eloquently set out in his popular book, What Happened in History (1947), which many commentators today would consider as too Eurocentric a view. Childe was much influenced in this attitude by Hegel and Marx. Many of his characterizations of the attributes of prehistoric Europe in the first edition of The Dawn of European Civilization and in The Aryans are unambiguously Hegelian. His debt to Marxism in archaeological interpretation became explicit after a visit to the U.S.S.R. in 1934, which he acknowledged when reviewing a book by the classical scholar, George Thomson, in 1949:

I believe, as much as the author, that (Marxism] is potentially valuable, and that some of the workers (i.e. academic collagues] may be converted to the sound method of dialectical materialism by a concrete demonstration (I was myself convinced by some Russian articles on prehistoric archaeology) (Childe 1949b:251).

But conviction concerning the correctness of dialectical materialism did not imply an immediate endorsement of Marxism-Leninism. An indication of this can be seen from the reactions of the Russian scholar, S. Lyaskovsky, to Childe's popular expositions of Old World social progress, Man Makes Himself (1936), What Happened in History and Progress and Archaeology (1944):

The author takes an interest in Soviet science and is sympathetic towards it. It is all the more important, then, to show that Childe's conception [of historical development] is confined to economic materialism. On the whole, it is quite far-removed from genuine Marxist ideology. Moreover, on a whole range of important issues in primitive and ancient history, the author unfortunately subscribes to reactionary views (Lyaskovsky 1947: 104; translation by Barbara Laughlin).

Ever since writing The Bronze Age Childe had a particular interest in the social as much as the economic implications of technology -in Marxist terms, the relations of production. More and more he moved from a study of cultures to that of societies. Eventually he saw the uniqueness of Europe to derive from the absence of any central control of technology, and of its socio-economic ramifications:

In temperate Europe by 1500 B. C. had been established a distinctive politico-economic structure such as had existed a thousand years earlier in the Aegean, but nowhere else in the Bronze Age world. An international commercial system linked up a turbulent multitude of tiny political units. All these, whether city-states or tribes, while jealously guarding their autonomy, and at the same time seeking to subjugate one another, had none the less surrendered their economic independence by adopting for essential equipment materials that had to be imported (Childe 1958b: 172).

A further example of Childe's commitment to archaeology's »contemporary context« was his support for trade union education. For nearly 30 years he was a member of the Association of Scientific Workers, and on several occasions was a main speaker at meetings aimed at making results of scientific research more widely known. He also supported the activities of the National Council of Labour Colleges, a socialist organization devoted to working class adult education, and between 1924 and 1941 contributed reviews of books on politics, anthropology and archaeology to The Plebs, the NCLC's monthly journal. These reviews, written in a direct and simple style, brought the writings of such scholars as Elliot Smith, Perry, Frazer, Hocart and Lowie to the attention of a readership which had a traditional interest in social evolution as much as in economics and politics.

For a time Childe supported the political stance of the U.S.S.R., particularly after the German invasion in 1941 and during the early years of the Cold War. A Marxist-Leninist line pervades his books Scotland before the Scots (1946) and History (1947), while after his move to London he became chairman of the History and Archaeology Section of the Society for Cultural Relations with the U .S.S.R. and wrote for its journal. Childe was particularly pleased when The Dawn of European Civilization appeared in a Russian translation in 1952, and he welcomed the »pertinent criticisms« of A. L. Mongait, who wrote its introduction, when preparing the sixth edition of the book in 1956 (Childe 1957:xiii). In these Cold War years, when academic contacts between East and West were minimal, he strove to keep some of the links open.

In 1957, however, he wrote of »the Marrist perversion of Marxism« (Childe 1958a:72), an oblique reference to the controversy that had taken place in 1950 among Soviet intellectuals concerning the theories of the linguist, N. Y. Marr, in which Stalin had intervened. The implication of this usage was that, near the end of his life, Childe regarded as incorrect the Marxism-Leninism that had held sway in the U.S.S.R. before 1950. But he left unclear whether or not he considered the post-1950 »purged« Marxism-Leninism to be within the tradition of the Marxism of Marx.

Childe was, of course, a scholar of his time, but his work and thinking were not bound by it. His concern for the establishment of a socially responsible and responsive archaeology has a contemporary ring. We are indebted to him for his massive influence on the organized comprehension of the data, and for his insistence that archaeology, by being both scientific in its methods and historical in its findings, need not be an esoteric subject. His linking of Marxism with archaeology is regarded by some present-day critics as little more than a characteristic of his time, but its influence on his life and work carries lessons for those who are prepared to examine it seriously.

Peter Gathercole