V.

Gordon Childe (1892-1957) made himself the most influential

Australian scholar in the humanities and social sciences. Forty years
after his death, his ideas stimulate thinkers well beyond his own field of
Prehistoric archaeology. Humphrey McQueen has returned to Childe’s
writings to reflect on current disputes about facts, theorising and politics
in the piecing together of our past.    

What happened to Childe? 

On 19 October 1957, Vere Gordon Childe removed his spectacles and
went climbing at Govett’s Leap in the Blue Mountains. This method of
giving himself to death was typical of how he had accounted for what had
happened in history, leaving a place for chance within a web of
necessities. In a farewell message he declared that the ‘British prejudice
against suicide is utterly irrational. To end his life deliberately is in fact
something that distinguishes Homo sapiens from other animals even
better than ceremonial burial of the dead.’ That comparison was
inevitable from the man who had lifted the study of our pre-literate past
from the antiquarianism of amateurs towards a social science.

In twenty books and 240 learned articles, Childe systematized the study
of earlier humankind by treating its rubbish as more than evidence for the
stylistic analysis of relics. Classification of objects remained invaluable
bur as one means to approach how homo sapiens continue to remake
ourselves.

Undergraduate achievements in Classics and geology at the University

of Sydney earned Childe a scholarship to Oxford in 1914 where he
studied comparative philology and the iconography of Greek ceramics. In
England, Childe became active in Guild Socialist and anti-conscriptionist
circles, commitments he continued after his return to Sydney in 1917.

The thought police, including his professors, hounded him from several
teaching positions in Sydney and Brisbane until he worked as policy
advisor to a Labor premier of New South Wales who sent him back to
London, only to be sacked upon a change of government.

V. Gordon Childe achieved three reputations during his lifetime, and he

sought a fourth, which he has now attained. His international reputation
grew from his scholarship on preliterate societies, with translations into a
dozen languages, one or two of which even he could not read. After his
return to England in 1921, he wrote three major works, including The
Dawn of European Civilisation (1925) which remained a standard text
until the 1960s. These volumes brought him to the foundation
professorship of Prehistoric Archaeology in the University of Edinburgh in
1927. Digs on sites around the British Isles resulted in more publications
before he moved to London to direct the Institute of Archaeology in 1946.

Childe fashioned evidence to establish the eighteenth-century

assumption that human society had moved through three stages - from
‘savagery’ past ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilization’. Those terms were not
judgemental, referring only to levels of technology. Civilization was
defined by the achievement of writing, cities, agriculture and metallurgy,
none of which assured any refinement in behaviour or the arts. Childe
labelled these changes ‘revolutions’ to emphasise that his subject matter
had been a momentous as the Industrial Revolution.

Public esteem came from his two surveys of human action, Man Makes
Himself (1936) and What happened in history? (1942). Popularisation
was never simplification since these works refined arguments and
offered fresh insights to their author as well as his audience. His
treatment contrasted with the sensationalism that followed the
excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. That pair of volumes had
sold more than 300 000 copies at his death and were part of the
movement for extra-mural education in which Childe had worked.
Historians of ideas need to consider how many novelists, painters and
scientists gained their understanding of the evolution of human society
from Childe.

Shy in address, unprepossessing in manner, and as clumsy with his

hands as he was agile in thinking about how earlier peoples had used
theirs, Childe was memorialised as ‘excellent, endearing and
authoritative’. His prose was elegant and wry as when he explained that
‘Magic is a way of making people believe they are going to get what they
want, whereas religion is a system for persuading them that they ought
to want what they get.’ The only flaw in his style was an addiction to the
exclamation mark. His talents as a teacher included the ability to explain
complicated processes such as how to cast a bronze dagger. On reading
his account I felt that I could make one, ignoring the attention that Childe
had placed on how protracted and hit-and-miss the mastery of that
technique had been for our forebears.

No one was more aware than Childe that, despite his stone and bronze
artefacts’ having endured for millenia, his data, like his hypotheses, were
fragile. His genius flourished in the synthesising of details for which he
never relied on his memory so that he made no more slips than any
other pedant. Rather, his difficulty was that the facts would not stay
factual. At the head of the bibliography of his last book, he advised:

Most of the statements in the foregoing pages are supposed to be

justified by archaeological facts and technical arguments set forth in
tedious detail in the following of my books.

If ‘tedious’ was another instance of Childe’s playing at being ‘naughty

Gordon’ - childish, not Childeish, as he put it in his ‘Retrospect’ - his use
of ‘supposed’ to describe his life’s work was neither loss of confidence
nor false modesty. Blessed with a scepticism that never slid into
cynicism, Childe suspected that his fear of being proved wrong was
subverted by ‘an equally irrational desire to overcome my own
prejudices.’

All Prehistoric archaeologists at that time faced four challenges. The first
was that their excavations dug graves for their own previous
explanations. Childe had to revise The Dawn five times within thirty
years. From 1945, upheavals from the accumulation of evidence were
compounded by new techniques for dating artefacts by the application of
carbon dating, (C14). After Childe’s death, those revised chronologies
had to be re-callibrated against the tree-rings of bristlecone pines. Some
of Childe’s timetables were out by 2000 years, which would not have
surprised him.

Had his charts been wrong uniformly the structure of his argument might
have survived. However, the new tools showed that cultures he had
nominated as sources for civilization had come later than those they
were supposed to have irradiated with their inventiveness. Western
Megaliths preceeded Eastern pyramids. In do justice to Childe’s
mistakes, we need to recall that Piltdown Man was not exposed until the
early 1950s, while genetics wanted the confirmation of DNA. No critic
has suggested that Childe could have done much better with the
evidence then available. Indeed, he is praised for his ‘flexibility’ to absorb
revisions.

The fourth disturbance had come with new ways of considering society
whether from Durkheim’s sociology, Margaret Mead in anthropology or
Jung on myths. These challenges drew Childe deeper into philosophy,
as would his contacts with Soviet archaeologists who focussed on the
social significance of technologies, spurning the fetishism of relics.
Hence, he pondered how we might know anything at all about our past.

Childe’s reputation as a social theorist has emerged now that his earlier
fame has faded. For a while, younger archaeologists felt some need to
slay the father of their profession. Within a few years, he was so wrong
that no one needed to refute him. That his ideas still can evoke interest
throughout the humanities and social sciences would be amazing were it
not for the qualities of his intellect. To read any page by Childe is to
engage with a mind which accepts its parameters yet can delight in its
powers.

Childe had always woven his reflections on methodology into his

recounting of facts so that his perceptiveness about human knowledge
appears in books that he designated as history, as in this passage
from Man Makes Himself:

The constructive character of the potter’s craft reacted on human

thought. Building up a pot was a supreme instance of creation by man.
The lump of clay was perfectly plastic; man could mould it as he would.
In making a tool of stone or bone he was always limited by the shape
and size of the original material: he could only take bits away from it. No
such limitations restrict the activity of the potter. She can form her lump
as she wishes; she can go on adding to it without any doubts as to the
solidity of the joins. In thinking of ‘creation’, the free activity of the potter
in ‘making form where there was no form’ constantly recurs to man’s
mind; the similes in the Bible taken from the potter’s craft illustrate the
point.

Understanding came from activity, just as all knowledges, like language,

were social products and possessions.

The transition from ‘man’ to ‘she’ in that passage was typical of the
attention Childe paid to women in Prehistory. Elsewhere he brought his
political outlook to bear on the limits to power that the agricultural
revolution had allowed them. The fact that women in the 1930s did so
much of the hardest labour in rural England had not given them social or
economic control, which he took as reason enough not to assume that
their productivity during the stone age had ensured a Matriarchy.

Politics always stimulated Childe’s scholarship. His belief in social

equality paralleled the history he wrote from the bottom up by looking at
domestic buildings rather than temples, potsherds more than painted
vases. Similarly, his earliest books opposed the German scholars who
stressed an Aryan centre, a view which Childe considered chauvinist.
Perhaps his antipodean origins helped him to perceive a social economy
across Europe before the borders to nation-market-states. Whatever the
reason, his continental outlook distanced him from any single font for
civilization and he never supported that extreme diffusionism which, in
1969, inspired Thor Heyerdahl to voyage in a reed raft, the Ra, from
Morroco to test whether the Phonecians had reached Central America,
which he did not. In that year, Erich von Daniken drove the diffusionist
thesis to its illogical conclusion by arguing that the pyramid-builders had
dropped from outer space.
By the middle of the 1930s, more urgent political questions were exciting
Childe who feared that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were
dragging all of Europe towards another Dark Age. In that circumstance,
he wondered whether Prehistorians could redeem some notion of
progress. Childe knew that progress could not inhere in a single culture,
as the Germanists argued, since cultures rose and fell, with some of the
most civilized being over-run by barbarians. Instead, Childe redefined
progress in terms of technologies and science. His ground was that their
results had been more cummulative, even if fractured through time and
place.

Contact with archaeologists in the Soviet Union modified Childe’s views

about diffusion. If he considered the Slavism of Soviet excavators as
misguided as the German assertion of preminence, he nonetheless
gained from his Soviet co-workers a readiness to accept internal reasons
for changes in society. Although Childe never grasped at every domestic
disagreement as a prefigurement of the class struggle, he accepted that
his initial vision of light from the East had suffered from long-sightedness.
Fluency in Russian enriched his footnotes with the reports from Soviet
digs.

Despite Childe’s never joining a Communist Party, he was not merely a

fellow travellor but became a non-party Marxist. One way to follow how
Childe remade his ideas after 1925 is to ask when did he decide that he
had become a Marxist? The answer seems to be during the early 1930s.
For a further twenty years he deepened his understanding of what that
commitment involved in intellectual terms. If Man Makes Himself was as
brief a statement of Marxism as is possible to give, its thrust also applied
to Marxism. In order to become a Marxist, Childe had to contribute to its
making.

Childe was but one of a number of British Marxists from the 1930s who
were leaders in their fields. Britain’s chief scientist during the war, J. D.
Bernal, author of Science in history was one, while J. B. S. Haldane
initiated the continuing Marxist heritage in biology. Other contemporaries,
such as Jacob Bronowski, had had their eyes opened to the links
between social power and technology by a Soviet delegate to the 1931
British Association who lectured on the relevance of Newton’s
experiments to British merchants. Archaeology had already taught Childe
about the connections between economics and science.

When Childe and his comrades acknowledged that researchers were

driven by commerce as well as by calculus they did not dismiss those
discoveries as no more than political prejudices. Hence, a chasm divides
their sociology of ideas from that of today’s theorisers who treat all
claims to knowledge as assertions of power, and nothing more. One of
Childe’s appeals remains how he integrated awareness of the ideological
impetus for research with a recognition of its objective residue: ‘Magic
was the placenta of science’, he once wrote. Notwithstanding, he was
more impressed by craftspeople who passed on their skills through
practice than by a magus spinning abstractions.

Typical of the contraries that Childe cherished was his reaction against
‘Prehistory’ as the label for the academic discipline that he had founded.
The distinction between the Prehistory and History began as a
demarcation line between those professionals who relied on written
sources and those who had nothing to go on but artifacts. Childe set out
to break down that division by demonstrating continuities in human
achievement. He aimed to have pre-literate eras incorporated in ‘History’.

One obstacle was that the archaeological record set limits to our
knowledge of earlier human beings. Technologies could be deduced
from the classification of tools, bones and buildings. Social and political
structures might be supposed, though with difficulty and caution. Our
knowledge of their ideologies could never be more than guess work.

In addition, Childe hoped that historians would abandon their fixation on

texts and learn how to read objects. Despite the emergence of industrial
archaeology and social history, professional historians remain blind to
material sources, treating even the visual as mere illustration for their
words.

Childe thought through these differences between Prehistory and History

in terms of how much to borrow from anthropological investigations into
contemporary stone-age cultures. Should, for instance, he transfer
kinship systems from the Australian Aborigines to describe social life in
the Orkneys 4000 years before the present? He kept away from such
comparative ethnology because it assumed ‘that, when the Arunta had
created a material culture adapted to their environment, they stopped
thinking altogether.’ To attribute timelessness to the mentalities of any
people is to render them pre-human. 

Today, Aboriginal Australians feel slighted when the academic study of

their pasts is consigned to Prehistory, as if their cultures are pre-human.
Hence, they are offended by the sentence that Manning Clark penned
around 1960 to open his six volumes: ‘Civilization did not begin in
Australia until the last quarter of the eighteenth century.’

The solution is not as simple as abandoning Prehistory in favour of

History as the title for the academic category allocated to the recall of
Aboriginal experiences. In seeking that equality of terminologies, they
risk having the experiences of their ancestors distorted by methods of
inquiry which rely on an outlook peculiar to one stratum of recent
Europeans. ‘History’ is the memory-bank of modernity, and as such is
inseparable from colonisation. Aborigines might fare better with the
assumptions of Prehistory. The privileging of written evidence that
underlay History also sustained the doctrine of terra nullius, with its
preference for codes of laws and title deeds.

When Childe returned to Australia in 1957, the disciplines of Prehistory

and Archaeology were still in their own stone-age as intellectuals waited
the diffusion of tools. Childe encouraged John Mulvaney to dig, but knew
that he would not be around to see even the first results. During the next
decade, Mulvaney’s Prehistorians presented Aborigines with proof of a
30 000-year occupation, discoveries which have sagged into the cliché
about 40 000 years of Dreaming.

In Australia, Childe is remembered also for How Labour Governs (1922)

which dealt with how the Labour movement governs itself, not with how
the ALP managed capitalism as a whole. As a democrat, Childe wanted
popular sovereignty extended to places of work and so had little
sympathy for state control, which he condemned as ‘Australian
Prussianism’. Since his intimacy with Labor politicians followed from a
decade of studing Greek demagogues, tyrants and traitors, surely they
were in his mind as he wrote of political machinations among the
oligarchs of democracy. Anyone intrigued by rats in the ranks should
consult Childe’s first classic.

A minor inheritance from How Labour Governs, one which would have

delighted Childe, has been a willingness by Australian historians to
include jokes in the indexes to our books. Childe began his with an entry
for ‘Abusing politicians as a way to securing seats’, proceeded through
‘Beer, free for strike breakers’ and ‘Police. See Baton’ to conclude with
‘Zoo, strike breakers in.’

Childe reached Australia again around his sixty-fifth birthday. Despite his
sympathy for H. V. Evatt, a friend from university days, who was then
leader of the opposition, Childe found Australian society less to his liking
than England’s. He lectured Melbournites on how their cultural level was
lower than that of Iceland’s, perhaps even that of Iceland during the tenth
century.

A career devoted to the interpretation of artefacts rather than of

speeches helped Childe to recognise the transformation of material life
then underway in Australia. He saw better than most lefties then - and
many historians since - how a ‘Menzies revolution’ was producing the
conditions of life that workers had earlier formed unions and a Labour
Party to attain. Were we to apply the criteria that Childe had developed
for the transition from barbarism to civilization to 1950s Australia, we
could substitute suburbia for urbanisation, hire purchase for magic
malechite, the Ad-Mass media for writing.

Further reading:
Peter Gathercole et al. (eds), Childe and Australia, University of
Queensland Press, 1992.

Sally Green, Prehistorian: A Biography of V. Gordon Childe, Moonraker

Press, 1981.

Bruce G. Trigger, Gordon Childe, Revolutions in Archaeology, Thames

and Hudson, 1980. 

The bibliographies in these volumes lead to the writings by and about

Childe used for this essay. All of Childe’s books are out of print.