Vere Gordon Childe, 1892-1957

Author(s): Robert J. Braidwood

Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Aug., 1958), pp. 733-736
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/665678
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 VERE GORDON CHILDE
1892-1957*
GORDON CHILDE, one of archeology's few very great synthesizers,
V. fell to his death while studying rock formations in the mountains of New
South Wales on October 19, 1957. Childe had retired in advance of his time as
Director of the Institute of Archaeology of the University of London, in order
to simplify the task for his successor, who must move the Instititute to new
quarters. At the time of his death, he was engaged in a sentimental journey to
Australia, where he had been born.
Childe left Australia for Oxford in 1914 with a graduate scholarship in
Classics. He returned with a B. Litt., a first class honors in the "greats" (the
humanities), and a fascination with Hegelian and Marxist philosophy. After
several years as private secretary to the premier of New South Wales, he began
(in 1922) a period of travel and study in Central and Eastern Europe. The
* A bibliographyof Childe'sworks,into 1956,
appearsin Proceedings
of thePrehistoricSociety,
XXI (1955),whichvolumeis givenoverto essaysin his honor.

733
734 American Anthropologist [60, 1958]
first edition of his Dawn of European Civilization appeared in 1925; in 1927 he
became professor of prehistoric archeology at Edinburgh. He held the director-
ship of the London institute from 1946-56.
Even to begin to understand the man, it seems necessary to stress Childe's
early training in the humanities, as well as his early commitment to historical
materialism. As a classicist, Childe's original approach to prehistory was by
way of comparative philology. The Aryans (1926) still showed clear traces of
this stage, but his attempt to establish a chronological framework for central
Europe by comparative artifactual stratigraphy fascinated him far more than
his "naturally fruitless" efforts in philology. Childe loved tangible evidence for
interpretative purposes and the artifacts yielded this, although most clearly
and comprehensively-for the time ranges and areas of his greatest concern-
in the more material realms of culture. This led him to increasingly materialis-
tic interpretations, but as Sir Mortimer Wheeler remarks, his Marxism colored
rather than shaped his interpretations. Clearly, however, his two best-read
books, Man Makes Himself and What Happened in History, have had far
greater vogue in the academic context of the social sciences than in the human-
ities.
Although Childe loved the artifacts he could understand, he never forgot
the "Indian behind the artifact" and scolded his colleagues roundly if they
did: e.g., "Menghin insists so strongly on an axe as an expression of a historical
tradition that the reader may forget that it is an implement for felling trees."
He had a fine sense of the necessary interrelatedness of different kinds of arti-
facts in a given assemblage and of the interpretative implications of these inter-
relationships for understanding cultures which once lived. He stimulated
many younger prehistorians to think in like terms. He was not known as a
specialist in any one category of artifact; his Bronze Age (1930) was to him a
vehicle which allowed the delineation of the course of his "second revolution"
in Europe. The anonymous author of Childe's obituary in the London Times
gives Childe's own view of his contribution to knowledge as lying in " 'inter-
pretative concepts and methods of explanation' rather than in the assembly of
fresh evidence." He is said to have been an indifferent excavator, per se.
Childe's natural gift for seeing the woods as well as the trees, his incredible
grasp of detail, his wide acquaintance with colleagues in all corners of Europe,
and his industriousness in pursuing their works in odd journals, was coupled
with his great good fortune in appearing at a time when synthesis was badly
needed and to a fair degree possible. Ex oriente lux had been popular theory
with at least some prehistorians even before Montelius' Der Orientund Europa
(1899), but Childe made his first excursion into the Near Eastern literature in
preparation for the writing of The Most Ancient East (1928). Here, the delinea-
tion of his first or "food-producing revolution," toward which he had been
stimulated by Elliot Smith's and Peake's speculations, began to take on its
familiar dimensions. His Bronze Age also benefited greatly from this first Near
Eastern excursion, and it is here that the "second revolution" comes into relief.
His growing maturity as a synthesizer appears succinctly in his presidential
 Vere GordonChilde, 1892-1957 735
address to the Prehistoric Society in 1935, which foreshadows his interest in
Man Makes Himself (1936). But neither Haddon (History of Anthropology,
1934) nor Lowie (History of Ethnological Theory, 1937) appeared to be con-
scious of him.
Other people, including Toynbee, did notice his work. In The Most Ancient
East, Childe had followed Brooke's speculations on the northward retreat of the
Atlantic storm track and the supposedly enforced propinquity of men, plants,
and animals as a determinative force in the appearance of food-production.
Toynbee made this speculation the "challenge" for his "Egyptaic" civilization.
Childe's impact on American anthropological thought became increasingly
apparent after his participation in the international congress on early man in
Philadelphia in 1937 and his lectureship at Berkeley following it. In making the
1933 supplement to his classic Anthropology, Kroeber had been conscious of
Childe only as the co-author (with Burkitt) of a chronological table; in the
1948 edition of Anthropology, Kroeber explicitly mentions Childe's influence
and cites him often.
Childe did not mind that his materialism made him a convenient whipping-
boy for pedagogical purposes. He never married, could indulge his whims, and
did so. I remember the impact his black broad-brimmed Australian hat and
flowing cape made on the driver of a Chicago bus late one evening in 1939
when he was being returned to his downtown hotel. He must have had to look
hard to find a quotation from Stalin which could be dragged into the conclu-
sions of his Huxley lecture with any pertinence at all, but he did barely manage
it. The last time I saw him, in 1955, we dined very well at his club, but he told
me impishly that he had purchased the trousers he was wearing in Belgrade in
1930 and weren't they still fine-in fact, they were frightful, and he knew it.
No warmer or more generous or more humanitarian revolutionary ever lived,
and he extended his warmth to any serious student regardless of age. Wheeler
reminds us that "in these days of specialization it is not easy to find a leading
prehistorian who, after a satisfactory dinner enlivened by a favorite hock, can
take down a Pindar from his shelves and declaim an ode in its proper tongue."
Gordon Childe's writings give us an overview of the culture history of the
Western cultural tradition from a rational-utilitarian point of view. He was as
sensitive to factors of diffusion as to those of cultural evolution. His writings
are full of clear and concise perceptions and they have had a natural appeal to
an anthropology which was, very rightly, beginning to concern itself with
generalities about extinct cultures as well as with living ones. Although he
never completely divorced himself from the words, he (more than any other
scholar) rescued Lubbock's neo-Grecisms "paleolithic" and "neolithic" from
the evolutionary strait-jacket into which de Mortillet's "loi du
progris..."
and "loi du d6veloppement similaire" had cast them. There is no better defini-
tion of "neolithic-ness" than his " 'a self-sufficing food-producing economy' "
(Anthropology Today, 1953). On a higher level, his short paper on "The
Urban Revolution" in the Town Planning Review (1950) is a gem and shows
his consciousness of the comparative value of the civilizational bursts in the
736 American Anthropologist [60, 1958]J
New World. In later years, he became concerned that people in the United
States took him to be a specialist in the Near East, which he roundly asserted
he was not, although he did make several tours of the area, knew its literature
well, and spent a few postwar weeks of digging with Garstang at Mersin.
But any overviewer, like Childe, especially a rational-utilitarian oriented
one, is bound to oversimplify if the subject matter be man. Thus Thorkild
Jacobsen (1945) could justifiably complain that "Childe speaks as if the inven-
tion and introduction of writing were a measure proposed by a pan-Meso-
potamian congress of priests and adopted-as scholars may adopt a uniform
terminology or other set of symbols at a scientific congress-in consideration
of its present and future utility . . . but great intellectual achievements do
not happen in that manner." Still, Jacobsen would be the first to admit that
no professional Near Eastern culture-historian had bothered to or been able to
produce a "What Happened in History" for the Near East which can touch
Childe's in general provocative usefulness. Nor, curiously, has a generalizing
Americanist counterpart for Childe yet appeared, although one or two may be
on the horizon. For archeology, as Wheeler writes, Childe "made the study
of man as nearly a science as perhaps that wayward subject admits." It is
doubtful whether a man of less than Childe's stature as a humanist could have
achieved the same result. We shall miss Gordon Childe's rare combination very
much.
ROBERT J. BRAIDWOOD,
University of Chicago