(Vere) Gordon Childe

Archaeologist, born in Sydney, New South Wales, SE Australia. He studied at Sydney and Oxford universities, and his early books, notably The Dawn of European Civilisation (1925), and The Most Ancient Near East (1928), established him as the most influential archaeological theorist of his generation. He was professor of archaeology at Edinburgh (1927–46) and director of the University of London Institute of Archaeology (1946–56). He returned to Australia on retirement, where he committed suicide.

He wrote accounts of European and Near Eastern prehistory, and his contributions to the theory of archaeology and prehistory were fundamental.

Given the sketchy amount of information available in the 1920s and 1930s, and the lack of a rigorous body of archaeological theory and method, it was fairly easy to manipulate a version of prehistory that gave the key role to the Aryans, or the Indo-Germanic peoples. In order to counter such abuse of archaeology, Childe had to gather a huge amount of information, and think out for himself some methodology and theoretical basis for the interpretation of prehistoric archaeology.

Having written his first archaeological book, The Dawn of European Civilization , Childe focused on the prehistory of central Europe, which he realised was pivotal to understanding the prehistory of Europe. His major works on European prehistory soon followed, The Aryans and The Danube in Prehistory.

By this stage Childe had established clearly the concept of a culture, or cultural group, associating a recurrent assemblage of artetacts and other material features with communities of people at a particular time and in a particular part of the world:-

'certain types of remains, - pots, implements, ornaments, burial sites, house forms - constantly recurring together.

With this concept in place, it was possible to write an account of the prehistory of a region, a country or a continent as a story whose historical characters are cultural groups that interact with one another and change through time.