Photo: Swan Watson, Andrew.
Professor V. Gordon Childe (1892-1957) was one the most influential archaeologists of the 20th century. His expertise ranged geographically from Skara Brae on the Scottish Isle of Orkney to Northern India, and temporally from the earliest prehistory to late antiquity.[1] He is perhaps best known now for coining two important terms still used in archaeology classrooms today, “the Urban Revolution” and the “Neolithic Revolution”. These labels emerged from his 1936 comparison of early settlements at Erech and Ur to the Industrial Revolution.[2] Despite his devotion to archaeology, Childe did not live with his head in the past; his works and theories were shaped by political conviction and observations of the modern world.
Born in New South Wales in 1892, Childe was the son of an Anglican rector. The High Church atmosphere of his youth instilled in him a taste for books and a distaste for established religion. He graduated in 1914 from the University of Sydney, where he excelled in ancient Greek and Philosophy, before taking up a graduate scholarship in Classics at Oxford, UK.[3] He wrote a B.Litt thesis on Indo-European influences on Greek prehistory, earned a first in “Greats”, and became ever more active in an increasingly radical socialist politics.[4] At Oxford shared rooms with fellow classicist Rajani Palme Dutt (1896-1974), who would soon be a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and one of its chief intellectuals.[5]
On returning to Australia after graduation in 1917, Childe struggled to find work as an academic due to his anti-war convictions and leftist political views.[6] In 1921 he returned to London,[7] where he wrote his first book How Labour Governs: A Study of Workers’ Representation in Australia (1923). In 1925 he was hired as the librarian to the Royal Anthropological Institute and published his first academic monograph The Dawn of European Civilisation (1925) which was shortly followed by The Aryans: A Study of Indo-European Origins (1926). In no small part due to the success of these books Childe was appointed in 1927 to the Abercromby Chair of Archaeology in the University of Edinburgh, which granted him the financial security to pursue his research and travel to the Near East, North America and the Soviet Union.[8]
Eventually he moved back to London after being offered the job of Director of the newly founded Archaeological Institute of the University of London in 1946 where he continued to revise his book The Dawn of Civilisation whilst also writing new ones, e.g. History (1947) for the Cobbett Press (a publishing firm close to the CPGB) and Society and Knowledge on epistemology.[9] He retired a year early from this job, donated much of his library, and made plans to return to Australia. While he continued to give lectures in Australia, visit old friends and receive an honorary degree, he appears to have felt that his life’s work was complete. He wrote in a memoir:
“Now I have seen the Australian Spring; I have smelt the boronia, watched snakes and lizards, listened to the ‘locusts’. There is nothing more I want to do here . . . Life ends best when one is happy and strong.”[10]
Childe fell to his death in the Blue Mountains.
The contribution he made to his discipline was immense. During his lifetime he published over twenty books, two hundred and eighty-one articles or chapters and two hundred and thirty-six book reviews. Additionally, Childe wrote several popular histories, e.g. Man Makes Himself (1936) and What Happened in History (1942). The aim of these publications was to engage more people in intellectual debates, rejecting the idea that one had to be educated to access knowledge about the past.[11] What followed Childe was a new era in the field known as Processual Archaeology, in which the invention of technologies such as radiocarbon dating exposed several issues with his theories (and of course those of many others). In a desire to emancipate the field from the old methods of archaeological research, Childe’s contributions were frequently criticised. While his archaeological methods became outmoded and much of the chronology he established has required serious revision, Childe always asked the important questions, and many of them he asked for the first time. He had an extraordinary gift for big-picture synthesis and generalism. He created coherent histories of Europe and the Near East that were accessible to all, and as such were inspirational to scholars, students and the reading public alike.[12] In many, if not all these respects, he was driven by an unwavering radical socialism and guided by theories associated with historical materialism.
This profile was written by Eligh Barnett (2025).
[1] Sherratt, A. (1989). ‘V. Gordon Childe: Archaeology and Intellectual History’. Past and Present, 125(1),151.
[2] Allen, J. (1967). ‘Aspects of V. Gordon Childe’. Labour History, (12), 55.
[3] Sherratt, 1989, 154.
[4] Irving, Terry (2020) The Fatal Lure of Politics: The Life and Thought of Vere Gordon Childe (Monash University Publishing), 50-62.
[5] Sherratt, 1989, 155, Irving 2020, 49-50.
[6] Irving 2020, 83-97.
[7] Sherratt, 1989, 156.
[8] Sherratt, 1989, 156.
[9] Sherratt, 1989, 157.
[10] Quoted in Sherratt, 1989, 159.
[11] Sherratt, 1989, 152.
[12] Sherratt, 1989, 151.
N.b. To dig deeper we recommend: Irving, Terry (2020) The Fatal Lure of Politics: The Life and Thought of Vere Gordon Childe (Monash University Publishing). Also, Brami, M. N. (2019) ‘The Invention of Prehistory and the Rediscovery of Europe: Exploring the Intellectual Roots of Gordon Childe’s “Neolithic Revolution” (1936),’ Journal of World Prehistory, 32(4), 311–351.; Trigger, B. G. (1980) Gordon Childe: Revolutions in Archaeology (London); Gathercole, P. (1971) ‘”Patterns in Prehistory”: An Examination of the Later Thinking of V. Gordon Childe,’ World Archaeology, 3(2), 225–232; Tringham, Ruth (1983). ‘V. Gordon Childe 25 Years after: His Relevance for the Archaeology of the Eighties,’ Journal of Field Archaeology, 10 (1), 85–100; Jastrzębowska, E. (2009) ‘Late Antiquity By Gordon Childe: Sources and Inspirations’. European Journal of Archaeology, 12(1-3), 157-165.
