Vere Gordon Childe: biography and contributions of this Australian archaeologist

Vere Gordon Childe was an Australian archaeologist who helped archeology to be taken seriously as an independent science rather than merely an auxiliary science.

His work helped to understand the cultural evolution of the prehistoric human being, in addition to contributing to the idea that it is through the contact of the different peoples, breaking their isolationism, that progress.

Next we are going to know the life of this researcher through a biography of Vere Gordon Childe.

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Brief biography of Vere Gordon Childe

Gordon Vere Childe was born in Sidney, Colony of New South Wales, Australia, on April 14, 1892.. He was the son of middle-class English immigrants. He spent his childhood living in the oceanic country, studying there and graduating from the university in his hometown.

Later he moved to Oxford, England, where he was initially interested in studies of classical philology. However, Gordon Childe he chose to change fields under the influence of professors Arthur Evans and J. Myres, finally opting for prehistoric archeology.

As a student, he was active in the Oxford Fabian Society and was an outspoken opponent of the First World War.

Round trip from Australia

After finishing his studies in England, he returned to his native Australia. He joined the Australian Union of Democratic Control, which succeeded in rejecting compulsory military service. He became personal secretary to the Labor Governor of New South Wales but left in 1921, deeply disenchanted with politics, he would return to Europe. From his raw experience with the governor he would write a book "How Labor Governs".

Vere Gordon Childe made a trip to central and eastern Europe to see first-hand the archaeological remains found there. He would return to Britain, where he held various jobs, including Librarian of the Royal Institute Anthropological until in 1925 he published "The Dawn of European Civilization" ("The origins of the civilization").

Thanks to the success that he obtained with this work the University of Edinburgh offered Childe the newly created chair of archeology, which allowed him to be one of the first professional archaeologists of his time.

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years of popularity

In the following years he published more works, both specialized and for the general public, all of them giving him international fame.

The most outstanding specialized publications of his are "The Dawn of European Civilization", "The Danube in Prehistory" (The Danube in prehistory, 1929) and "The Bronze Age" (The Bronze Age, 1930).

His books for laymen, marked by his interest in cultural evolution, we find “What Happened in History ”(What happened in history?, 1942), in which he synthesizes his vision of history and the culture.

These works made the figure of Vere Gordon Childe someone very recognized before reaching 40 years of age. His great field work and literary production earned him the fame of one of the most renowned archaeologists of his time.

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end of his life

After a stay in Edinburgh in 1945 he moved to London to teach at his University, at the same time he directed the Institute of Archaeology. During his last years his literary production focused on the study of working methods in archeology, having the intention of renewing this discipline.

His ideas regarding this task were collected in his posthumous work "The Prehistory of European Society" (The prehistory of European society, 1958). In 1956 he returned to his native Australia, dying the following year.

The circumstances of his death are considered extremely strange.. Childe is said to have believed that the best time for life to end is when one is happy and strong which, added to an almost pathological fear of old age, it is said that he intended this to be so with his life of his own. hand.

On October 19, 1957, Childe left for an area at Govett's Leap in the Australian Blue Mountains where he had been raised. He climbed a mountain, left his hat, glasses, compass, pipe and raincoat on top and fell to his death from a height of 300 meters. He was 65 years old.

The official report of the time indicated that his death was accidental, although acquaintances would reveal that, judging by the content of letters left by Childe himself before the tragic event, this incident had been entirely hers.

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The thought of Vere G. Childe

Gordon Childe's thought can be approached from two angles. One is from his ideas about archaeology, which changed the mentality of this discipline, and the other is from his conception of history and its evolution. These points are strongly intertwined in Childe's literary output. Nor can his work be separated from the Marxist ideology that he maintained and that is evident in his thesis on the progress of the human being. and the importance given to social and economic aspects.

Childe tried to stop seeing archeology as a mere auxiliary science, an idea widely accepted in his time. For him, the information revealed by archeology constituted a historical document of great importance, far superior to that available in the written texts of treaties, books and other documents of past times. The method of extracting the archaeological remains, together with the interpretation of what they were used for and what say of the people who used them, constitute the fundamental pillar of archaeology, a science of pure right.

Gordon Childe is considered a diffusionist. He defines a culture as certain types of remains, such as pots, ornaments, funerary remains... that appear repeatedly together. The changes of these cultures throughout history would correspond to ethnic modifications due to migratory movements, invasions or as a consequence of the diffusion of an object or idea. Childe's method was to seek to reconstruct prehistory by chronologically ordering the sets of objects that were exponents of those displacements or that exerted in one way or another influences between towns.

With the rise of Hitler in Germany and the expansion of the Nazi theses, Vere Gordon Childe showed very concerned about the possibility that his ethnographic and archaeological theories they will misunderstand Childe denied that his concept of the people had racial implications. and he defended the idea that cultural progress is achieved by breaking with the isolation of human groups, getting them to share his ideas. He considered that it was important to study the common heritage of mankind.

He dedicated several works, both academic and informative, to refute the ethnic archeology of Gustaf Kossinna, highly supported by the Nazis, which argued that it was possible to trace the origin of races to their prehistoric roots and relate it to the degree of progress acquired. Naturally, those who shared these Nazi theses defended that the white Aryan race was the one that historically had given more evidence of its capacity for progress and development.

Childe's concern about Nazism and its pseudoscience led him to expose his idea of ​​history from a Marxist perspective in two books.: “The origins of civilization” and “What happened in history?”. In them he reflects on the progress of the human being. After analyzing the first peoples and the organization of ancient civilizations, he concluded that the main factor of brake in the technological and cultural development in a society is the class dominant. The elites, in order to prevent them from losing their privileges and changing their social status with the change in society, contain social transformations.

However, this strategy of the ruling class increases the costs of maintaining the State and, because of also from the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the leaders, will continue to damage the economy until civilization collapse. But this decline of a society does not necessarily imply something negative, but it can be an opportunity to reorder the economy and put wealth and ideas back into circulation.

Gordon Childe is credited with being the first to propose a socioeconomic interpretation of early European societies and being the leading Marxist archaeologist in the West. In addition, he contributed concepts as distinctive today as the "Neolithic revolution", a change in the history of human being in which our species intelligently used cultivation and domestication to survive and prosper. Nowadays, this concept has become essential to talk about the origins of agriculture, a key milestone for the human species to reach what it is today.