Gordon Childe and Marxist archaeology

Issue: 116
Posted: 28 September 07

Neil Faulkner
It may not be an accident that Vere Gordon Childe (1892-1957), perhaps the greatest
archaeologist of the 20th century, committed suicide within a year of the Hungarian Revolution
of 1956.1 For Childe was not just a leading academic, prehistorian and social theorist; he was
also, throughout his adult life, an active and deeply committed socialist, but one who retained
illusions in Stalinism to the end.
Childe, as both academic and activist, was heavily influenced by Marxism. The compelling
interpretive sweep of his grand narratives of prehistory and antiquity are rooted in his materialist
approach. That is what has made Man Makes Himself (1936) and What Happened in History
(1942), Childes two popular syntheses that between them chart the history of Europe and the
Near East from the Old Stone Age to the fall of the Roman Empire, probably the most widely
read archaeology books ever written. On the other hand, the limitations and contradictions in
Childes view of the past, though partly to be explained by the inadequacy of the data available
to him, were largely a consequence of the rather desiccated version of Marxism to which he
adhered.
The fiftieth anniversary of Childes death turns out to be a good time to assess and critique his
work. Marxist interpretations of history are under sustained attack. Postmodernist thinkers are
denying the capacity of human beings to understand, control and improve their world through the
application of knowledge, science and reason. Revisionist historians are rediscovering the virtues
of empires and imperialist wars. These are academic echoes of a new world order dominated by
imperial warlords, corporate profiteers and neoliberal ideologues. Childe, by contrast, believed in
science, progress and radical change. Returning to him today, we find rich sources of inspiration.
This is not the place to set out Childes grand narrative. Man Makes Himself and What Happened
in History, though empirically and theoretically flawed, remain excellent and highly accessible
introductions to prehistory and antiquity. A short summary, moreover, with some useful
correctives drawing on more recent evidence, can be found in the first part of Chris Harmans A
Peoples History of the World.2 The aim here is threefold: first, to identify the key themes in
Childes interpretation of history and to explain their importance in our understanding of the
past; second, to locate Childes ideas in the context of his own engagement in the struggle for
socialism, and to explore the way in which his politics both advanced and limited his
understanding; and third, to suggest ways in which an authentic revolutionary Marxism may
allow us to move beyond Childe and develop a more comprehensive understanding of what
happened in history.

An epoch of war and revolution

Childe held two successive academic posts in archaeology, first that of Abercromby Professor of
Archaeology at Edinburgh University (1927-46), then that of Director of the Institute of
Archaeology in London (1946-56). When appointed to the Edinburgh chair he was already 35,
and it was only five years prior to this that he had finally committed himself to archaeology.
Between 1917 and 1922, despite outstanding achievement at university, Childe had in fact been
embarked on a career in labour politics. He had therefore lived his young adulthood immersed in
the ferment of struggle and ideas that followed the First World War.
He had been born into a conservative middle class family in Sydney, Australia, but had come
under radical influence while studying at Sydney University, from which he graduated in 1914
with first class honours in Latin, Greek and philosophy. He then won a scholarship to Oxford,
where he studied classical archaeology from 1914 to 1917, becoming heavily involved in the
anti-war movement there. By the time he returned to Australia, Childe was a committed guild
socialist, having become politically close to G D H Cole.3
Australia was unique in 1917 in having had experience of elected Labour governments. The trade
union movement was large, militant and heavily influenced by syndicalist ideas about workers
control. On the one hand there was a strong organic link between the Labour Party and the
unions; on the other the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies) were agitating for
One Big Union and direct action to effect change. The vibrant workers movement sustained a
self-confident radical intelligentsiaChildes social milieuthat thought of Australia as a
social laboratory.
The war had polarised society. A population of five million people had produced over 400,000
volunteers for the trenches, of whom half became casualties. Despite this, a Labour government
had proposed conscription, only to face defeat in a referendum in October 1916. Labour prime
minister Billy Hughes then split from his own party and joined with the Liberals to form the
National Party, winning an election in May 1917 but losing a second conscription referendum
that December.
The Hughes government reacted hysterically to all forms of dissent. In June 1916 Childe became
assistant secretary of the newly formed Australian Union of Democratic Control for the
Avoidance of War and was one of many radicals systematically spied on by Australian military
intelligence.4 He was also blacklisted by the fossilised gentry who compose the senate of the
University of Sydney.5 After participating in a radical peace conference in Easter 1918one
whose official report declared that only by the abolition of the capitalist system can justice be
secured and the fundamental causes of international friction be permanently removed6Childe
was forced to resign from a new university post and then immediately afterwards had his
application for a Workers Educational Association tutorship blocked. He was later hounded out
of a grammar school post by pro-war protests orchestrated by the local press and ended up as a
local government clerk. He paid a serious price for his politics.
He was rescued by his appointment in August 1919 to the first of a series of posts in the office of
John Storey, at the time Labour opposition leader in New South Wales and, from April 1920,
state premier. For almost three years Gordon Childeanti-war activist, advocate of workers
control and friend of the Wobbliesfound himself at the centre of a reformist administration.

The result was Childes first book, How Labour Governs: A Study of Workers Representation in
Australia, published in 1923.
Childes politics at this time were a centrist mix of guild socialism, One Big Unionism,
Labourism, and even Bolshevism (he described the Wobblies as foreshadowing the Bolshevik
dictatorship of the proletariat).7 Centrists are activists moving from reformism to revolutionary
socialism in a period of radicalisation, retaining elements of both in their outlook and activity. If
the class struggle advances, many become revolutionaries. If it retreats, most relapse into
reformism or inactivity. After 1921 working class militancy and revolutionary expectations were
waningboth in Australia and across the globeand Childe, moreover, had been drawn into
high level government work, where the pressures to accommodate to the system were especially
intense. But instead of retreating from radicalism Childe produced a devastating, and at the time
highly original, critique of reformist practice.
Announcing at the outset that the present organisation of society involves some sort of
exploitation and enslavement of the workers,8 Childe set out to describe the shabby record of
ratting (Australian for selling out) that had characterised the previous 20 years of Australian
Labour history. He attacked both reformist politicians and trade union officials with all the
bitterness of a disillusioned activist. He focused especially on the way in which hostility to the
Wobblies had exposed the hollowness of official Labours radicalism. But his analysis was
limitedratting was simply a matter of selfish and cowardly opportunism and a scramble for
political honoursand the conclusions were pessimistic.9 He even ventured dismal predictions
about the imminent political corruption of the Wobblies:
While One Big Union may be realised, it will have to sacrifice its revolutionary idealism, and
will degenerate into that state of soulless mechanism which seems to come over all Labour
activities in the hour of their apparent triumph. As the Labour Party, starting with a band of
inspired socialists, degenerated into a vast machine for capturing political power, but did not
know how to use that power when attained except for the profit of individuals; so the O B U will,
in all likelihood, become just a gigantic apparatus for the glorification of a few bosses. Such is
the history of all Labour organisations in Australia, and that not because they are Australian, but
because they are Labour.10
Childe had remained a socialist but he had not become a revolutionary. He had not grasped the
centrality of the working class and its potential to overthrow the existing capitalist state
altogether and replace it with a system of democratic power based on workers councils forged in
revolution: one of the basic lessons of the Bolshevik Revolution. Without this vision he could not
see a way forwardnor even understand that ratting was not simply a matter of moral failure but
something structured by the way in which labour parties and trade union bureaucracies under
capitalism were mediators of conflict within the system rather than instruments of its
revolutionary overthrow. Childe did not capitulate, but he was trapped in a political impasse by
the contradictions of centrism.
He was in London when he learned that he had lost his job in April 1922 following a Labour
election defeat at home. Childe decided to stay. Shortly afterwards, though still politically active,
he committed himself to prehistory. The visions of the past he went on to create would be richly

coloured by his experiences as a political combatant in the great epoch of war and revolution
from 1914 to 1921.

Mapping prehistoric Europe

Childe set himself the conventional but ambitious task of explaining the foundation of European
civilisation as a peculiar and individual manifestation of the human spirit.11 This involved
creating a grand synthesis of current archaeological knowledge of prehistoric cultures in Europe.
The term culture is used in a specific way in archaeology. It refers to the appearance in the
archaeological record of uniform assemblages of material at specific points in time and space, or,
as Childe put it, certain types of remainspots, implements, ornaments, burial rites, house
forms-constantly recurring together.12 These material culture assemblages are commonly
assumed to represent distinct social groups in the pasttribes, peoples and even, sometimes,
races.
Childe was convinced that the roots of European civilisation lay in the Near Eastern civilisations
of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and that ideas had been transmitted from there down the Danube
Valley (rather than via the Mediterranean). He therefore travelled across south east Europe
taking advantage in his poverty of massive post-war inflationstudying museum collections,
visiting sites, interviewing local archaeologists, reading specialist reports, and making notes and
sketches. He was helped by a phenomenal visual memory, enabling him to make numerous links
between widely dispersed material, and by the speed with which he acquired a reading
knowledge of obscure European languages.
Five books followed in rapid succession,13 amounting together to a comprehensive overview of
current knowledge of European prehistory and its integration with the chronological sequences
already established for the Near Eastern civilisations. The impact was huge. The publication of
the first bookThe Dawn of European Civilisationsecured Childe his Edinburgh chair. It was
later described by leading British archaeologist Glyn Daniel as a new starting point for
prehistoric archaeology.14
But Childe had drifted into dangerous water. When he began work, archaeology was developing
along two parallel lines: some scholars remained primarily interested in chronological sequences
and what they saw as the progressive evolution of human society as a whole; others, influenced
by the nationalism and racism prevalent in Europe in the heyday of empire, were busy searching
for the cultural traces of putative master races. While Childes first book, The Dawn, had plotted
the spread of material culture from Egypt and Mesopotamia to Europe, his second, The Aryans,
conceived as a complementary study, aimed to show how the benefits of this process had been
reaped by a distinctive group of Aryan settlers in Europe. The Aryans were defined
linguistically as speakers of a primeval Indo-European language from which most modern
European languages were derived. Much effort was expended on detecting them in the
archaeological record, especially in Germany, where Gustav Kossinna was attempting to prove
the Indo-European purityand therefore superiorityof the Germans.15
Material assemblages (cultures in an archaeological sense) are often equated with past social
groups (cultures in a sociological sense). There are many problems with such equations. Cultures

are difficult to define, cultural identities overlap, and culture forms are dynamic and changeable.
Important social divisions are often obscured by cultural uniformity and, conversely, important
connections may cut across cultural differences. A relationship between material assemblages
and past social groups is, nonetheless, a reasonable and necessary working hypothesis in
archaeological research. Without it, given that archaeology is the study of the past through
material remains, we could make very little progress of any kind. But to equate material
assemblages with races is an altogether different matter.
Childe was ambiguous about race in The Aryans. On the one hand, the lasting gift bequeathed
by Aryans to the conquered peoples was neither a higher material culture nor a superior
physique, buta more excellent language and the mentality it generated. On the other:
The fact that the first Aryans were Nordics was not without importance. The physical qualities of
that stock did enable them by the bare fact of superior strength to conquer even more advanced
peoples and so to impose their language on areas from which their bodily type has almost
completely vanished. This is the truth underlying the panegyrics of the Germanists: the Nordics
superiority in physique fitted them to be the vehicles of a superior language.16
In 1933 Adolf Hilter became chancellor of Germany. His mission was to act out anew the racial
fantasy of Aryan superiority. Kossinna was the Nazis favourite archaeologist.
Childe recoiled in horror. He effectively disowned his own book: The Aryans was never updated,
hardly ever referred to again, and its central thesisthat language and ethnic characteristics can
explain cultural developmentwas completely abandoned.17 As committed to the struggle
against fascism in the 1930s as he had been to that against imperialist war in 1914_18, Childe
now dumped wholesale an explanatory paradigm that had become central to European
archaeology. Henceforward cultural development would be explained not by the movement of
peoples, but by the growth and sharing of knowledge.

Charting social development

In the second phase of his academic career, while not abandoning culture history, Childe
focused on using material remains to chart the progressive evolution of human societies over
time. He was heavily influenced by the evolutionary scheme first proposed by the 19th century
American anthropologist Lewis Morgan, and then adopted and developed by Frederick Engels in
his Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Engels had proposed an
economically determined progression from hunter-gatherer savagery, through agricultural
barbarism, to the urban_based civilisation of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome.
Childe built a hugely elaborated and much modified version of this scheme, presenting it in a
series of landmark publications between 1934 and 1946, some of them grand syntheses, others
detailed case studies reflecting his particular engagement with North British material during his
tenure of the Edinburgh chair.18
The Morgan-Engels scheme had been adopted in the Soviet Union, which Childe visited for the
first time in 1935, making contact with Soviet archaeologists, becoming familiar with their
material and allowing himself to be influenced by the theoretical framework they were using to

structure data. It was at this time too that Childereacting like many left wing activists to the
misery of the great depression and the rise of fascismbecame sympathetic to Stalinism.
Though he never joined the British Communist Party, he was a regular reader of its paper, the
Daily Worker, often spoke at party organised events, attended meetings of the Communist Party
Historians Group, and was a high profile advocate of friendship and cultural contact with the
Soviet Union. He was, in short, publicly and proudly, for the next two decades, what was
typically described as a fellow traveller.
But the relationship was never straightforward. Childe introduced several important but
unorthodox refinements to the Morgan-Engels scheme. First, firmly rejecting the idea of
human social evolution as a smooth, gradual, upward progression, he posited two revolutionary
breaks in the sequence, comparable in significance with the Industrial Revolution that had given
rise to modern capitalism. These were the Neolithic Revolution, marking the transition from
hunting and gathering to an existence based on cultivation and stock raising, and the Urban
Revolution, marking the further transition to city based civilisation. The implication was that
long periods of relative stagnation could be followed by sudden leaps forward. An accumulation
of innovationsmetallurgy, the wheel, the ox-cart, the pack-ass, and the sailing ship in the
case of the Urban Revolution in Mesopotamia, for examplecould provide the basis for a
sudden revolutionary advance to a new, higher stage of society.19
Second, Childe denied that progressive evolution was inevitable, insisting that human societies
were essentially conservative and required external shocks in order to innovate and advance.
Climate change, desiccation and the decline of naturally occurring food supplies, for example,
were used to explain the Neolithic Revolution, and it was not the most advanced hunters who
were the revolutionaries, but humbler groups who had created less specialised and less
brilliant cultures further south.20
Third, if social evolution was subject to marked ebbs and flows, Childe argued that this could be
explained by internal and external contradictions that could block progress or even cause
regression. Bronze Age societies, for example, had come up against the barrier that copper and
tin, the essential raw materials in their metallurgy, were available only in limited supply (an
external contradiction). On the other hand, Childe blamed the lack of technological innovation
between 2600 BC and 600 BC on the conservatism, mysticism and waste of a ruling class of
priests and their bureaucracy of scribes in the Mesopotamian cities (an internal contradiction).21
Finally, because of the complex interplay of environment, tradition, innovation and
contradiction, there was no single uniform sequence of social development. In the long term it
was possible to detect a pattern of accumulating knowledge, increased productivity and
successively higher stages of social development. But within this framework each society had its
own distinctive characteristics and trajectory: its own history. This insight, indeed, was essential
to Childes primary projectunderstanding the rise of European civilisationsince Europe had
adopted the innovations of the Near East and then leapt ahead. Because Europe was less priestridden and bureaucratic, he claimed, its workers had the freedom to realise the full potential of
new technologies:

European societies were never the passive recipients of oriental contributions, but displayed
more originality and inventiveness in developing oriental inventions than had the inventors more
direct heirs in Egypt and Hither Asia. This is most obvious in the Bronze Age of temperate
Europe. In the Near East many metal types persisted unchanged for two thousand years; in
temperate Europe an extraordinarily brisk evolution of tools and weapons and multiplication of
types occurred in a quarter of that time.22
Childes vision was of a global economy in which societies were meshed together in
communication networks through which new ideas could be spread and generalised, such that if
innovation was blocked in one place, it might advance in another, and humanity as a whole move
forwards. In archaeological terms, Childe the evolutionist remained Childe the diffusionist.
The concept of diffusion had always been central to his vision of the past. His starting point had
been the diffusion of ideas from the Near East to Europe along the Danube Valley. It now became
the cutting edge of his response to the racist archaeology of the Nazis. But it also put him at odds
with Stalinist orthodoxy.

The spread of culture

In 1933 Childe delivered a series of lectures and published two articles attacking Nazi abuse of
the archaeological concept of culture:
In the prehistoric past as obviously today, culture was independent of physical race, was not a
matter of biological heredity but of social tradition. Ignorance of this fact, or rather the careless
use of the word race as coloured by biological theory for the prehistoric group distinguished by a
peculiar culture, has naturally reinforced the false analogy between man and poultry in
misleading racial hygienists and their political interpreters. If we replace the word race in
this context by people we shall more easily avoid such confusions.23
But the decisive weapon in his anti-fascist armoury was the concept of diffusion in explaining
cultural development.
Evolutionism and diffusionism are often sharply counterposed in archaeology. They need not be.
Childe combined both: he believed that societies evolved in their own way, but that they were
strongly influenced by the spread of ideas from elsewhere. This seems so obviously correct that
it is difficult to fathom how serious scholars can argue otherwise. Neither extreme diffusionism
(the idea that all innovations flow from a single centre of enlightenment to an otherwise
benighted periphery) nor extreme evolutionism (the idea that each society constitutes a complete,
integrated, self-contained unit that develops independently) carry conviction. Such
straightforward observations, however, spell doom for the archaeological fantasies of
imperialists, nationalists and racists. Childe had always been aware of this. The Aryans, despite
some unfortunate passages, was not in general a racist text, as the historian of archaeological
thought Bruce Trigger explains:
By universalising this concept [of cultural heterogeneity] he [Childe] sought to refute Kossinnas
argument that German greatness resulted from their racial and cultural purity. Childe expiated on

the benefits that accrued from migration, trade and other forms of cultural contact. He
maintained that the mingling of peoples with distinct cultures increased the stock of ideas
available in a region, and encouraged progress by upsetting established ways of doing things.24
But this was not the view of Soviet archaeologists. As Childe deployed his moderate
diffusionism with increasing confidence and vigour during the 1930sconsciously perceiving
it to be an argument against fascismSoviet archaeologists adhered to a form of extreme
evolutionism:
Archaeologists were required to abandon the belief that material culture develops by virtue of
some internal logic, and therefore independently of society. Instead it was assumed that
technologies develop because of internal contradictions within societies. This required that in any
explanation of cultural change the principal emphasis had to be on the development of society.
The standard series of technological ages was replaced by a unilinear sequence of social stages,
each of which was characterised by distinctive productive forces, relations of production, and
ideology. These stages were labelled pre-clan society, clan or gentile societyand class
society Migration was ruled out as a mode of explaining changes in the archaeological record,
and strong emphasis was placed on independent parallel development.25
This stages theoryof independent evolution through a series of socially determined
developmental stageswas not derived from fieldwork and material evidence: it was imposed
from above. At this point, a short digression is necessary. It is made necessary by the fact that
Childe mistook the official Stalinist ideology of the Soviet Union in the 1930s for Marxism, and
all discussion of Childes Marxism since seems to have shared this mistake. I have not
encountered a single academic paper either by or about Childe that unequivocally rejects this
basic equation between the theories of Marx and the ideology of Stalin. This constitutes a black
hole of misunderstanding that has prevented any proper evaluation of Childes supposed
Marxism.
Marxism can be defined as the theory and practice of international working class revolution.26
The proletariat is the first subject class in history with a universal interest in general human
emancipationa reflection of its distinctive character as the collective labour force of an
integrated global economy, such that it can take control of the economy, transform society, and
emancipate itself only by acting collectively and globally. The class struggle of the proletariat,
pregnant with this revolutionary potential, is therefore the seedbed of Marxism and its attempt to
comprehend human history as a whole through critical scientific analysis.27 The authentic
Marxist tradition is inextricably connected to the class struggle of workers. It cannot be adopted
and utilised by other social forces without ceasing to be Marxism.
The Bolshevik Party of 1917, rooted in a revolutionary working class, was a thoroughly Marxist
organisation. That party and the workers democracy it had helped to create were destroyed
during the 1920s.28 The process culminated in bloody counter-revolution as a new ruling class of
state-party bureaucrats raised itself above society and, at massive cost to the people of the Soviet
Union, engaged in great power competition with other states by constructing a state capitalist
economy based on heavy industry and armaments. The new regime based its claim to legitimacy
on the 1917 Revolution. Its propaganda was therefore packaged in pseudo-Marxist jargon. But

Stalinist ideology had as little in common with the revolutionary Marxism of Lenin and Leon
Trotsky as did the committees of apparatchiks and security goons who ran the Soviet Union in
the 1930s with the workers councils of 1917. Forms were sometimes similar; content was
always profoundly different.
The power of the 1917 Revolution was reflected in the forces that had to be mobilised to destroy
it: only the most brutal, repressive and totalitarian of dictatorships was sufficient to obliterate the
revolutionary democracy. This impacted on every aspect of Soviet societyincluding the
academic discipline of archaeology. Having abandoned revolutionary internationalism, Stalin
claimed to be building socialism in one country. With workers democracy suppressed, the task
would be performed by an all powerful party machine. As a bureaucratic procedure, the
(inevitable) progression to socialism would be orderly and predictable. Accordingly, Soviet
archaeologists were ordered to interpret prehistory as a preordained succession of stages, and,
moreover, as one which could proceed in one society independently ofindeed, in complete
isolation fromthe rest of the world. To advocate diffusion (the sharing of ideas between
societies as a vital mechanism in social evolution) was considered reactionary; dissidents risked
incarceration or worse (and it is to Childes lasting discredit that he never protested against the
persecution of academic colleagues in the Soviet Union).
Stalinism interpreted the past as a mechanical succession of predetermined stages of independent
social development. The moderate cultural diffusion that Childe advocated, with its implication
of global cultural cross-fertilisation and distinctive political histories, was therefore anathema not
only to fascists, who peopled the past with conquering master races, but also to the Stalinists
whom Childe regarded as mentors. Childes vision was much closer in spirit to Trotskys theories
of combined and uneven development and permanent revolution than it was to the rigid
dogmas of socialism in one country. His public political allegiance and his brilliant academic
insights were in sharp contradiction. That contradiction intensified through the rest of his life,
and probably played its part in ending it.

The growth of knowledge

Culture-history, social evolution, the diffusion of ideas: these were the basic building blocks of
Childes perception of the prehistoric past. In the third stage of his career, reflecting on bourgeois
civilisations descent into the barbarism of fascism, world war and the atomic bomb, he became
preoccupied with progresswhat it was, how it happened, whether it was inevitable.29
Progress can be defined as the accumulation of effective knowledge that makes possible better
control over nature, increases in labour productivity, and an enlarged store of economic resources
available for the satisfaction of human need. Because Childe rejected the idea of a fixed human
nature and universal laws of social development, such as might give rise to a permanent impetus
to progress in the sense just defined, he was bound to deny that progress was inevitable. For
hundreds of thousands of years, for example, the Old Stone Age inhabitants of Europe had made
no discernible progress of any kind, using the same set of simple flint tools throughout. Even
as late as the medieval period, continuity rather than change dominated human experience. A
European peasant of the 15th century might live out her entire life without ever experiencing a

significant innovation in either agricultural or domestic equipment. Only capitalism, as Marx

famously observed in The Communist Manifesto, makes change the norm:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production,
and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.
Conservation of old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first
condition of existence of all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production,
uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation
distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their
train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones
become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his
relations with his kind.30
Progress in pre-capitalist society, then, was accidental, something contingent on exceptional
events, and it was often impeded by external and internal contradictions. But it had happened,
and this, for Childe, was a matter of supreme importance, both in explaining the rise of European
civilisation, and more generally in assessing the history and prospects of humanity as a whole.
In his belief in the desirability, possibility and reality of progress, Childe was, of course, a man
of the Enlightenmentas Marx had been. He was withering in his condemnation of ruling
classes that blocked progress by wasting resources on war, religion, monuments and luxury. The
great dynastic struggles at the end of the Bronze Age, of which Homers Trojan War is the
legendary exemplar, squandered humanitys accumulated resources. The ziggurat temples of
Mesopotamia, the pyramid tombs of Egypt, and the megalithic monuments of Neolithic and
Bronze Age Europe were examples of prodigious waste expenditure in the service of false
ideologies, contributing nothing to social evolution. The filling of tombs with splendid treasures,
like that of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen, were displays of conspicuous and extravagant
consumption that drained resources from productive activity.
Progress, by contrast, was contingent upon true consciousness or knowledge, which, because
it corresponded with external reality, was an effective guide to human action. This, moreover,
was the real subject of archaeology, because the results of knowledge were directly represented
in the structures and artefacts in which it was embodied. Magic and religion, on the other hand,
because they had no reality and were unconstrained by the exigencies of practice, constituted
thought-worlds too obscure and variable to be readily reconstructed from material remains alone.
They were, in any case, ephemeral, being cultural cul-de-sacs. It was knowledge that mattered;
and it was this, as it happened, that archaeology was better able to study.
Childes argument that progress was the accumulation of knowledge, and that real knowledge
was always practical, or at least potentially so, was linked with a third observation: that the
separation of theory and practice, of mind and matter, of literacy and labour, was a barrier to
progress. Magic is a way of making people believe they are going to get what they want, he
declared, whereas religion is a system for persuading them that they ought to want what they
get.31 More than that, they were concoctions of rulers and priests who were divorced from, and
looked down upon, practical labour:

The relegation of craftsmen to the lower class excluded them from literacy and isolated the pure
sciences of Egyptian and Sumerian clerks from the applied sciences of miners, smelters, smiths
and potters. Craft lore could not be committed to writing but continued to be handed on by
precept and example. Just for this reason it remained empirical and particular while learned
science was not fertilised by experience gained in workshop practice.32
Quite different was the status of the worker in the looser social world of Bronze Age Europe.
Here metal workers were not tied to any one patron or even a single tribal society. This meant
that their services were in demand, they enjoyed high status, and they were free to share ideas
and innovate:
A market of this kind offered every inducement to originality on the part of the producers. At the
same time their very itineracy and far-flung commercial contacts should fertilise native genius.
They met on the frontiers of their territories colleagues working to satisfy the divergent tastes of
other societies and perhaps employing ores or metals of different composition. Among the wares
they handled they would see products of more distant schools of metal work for comparison with
more familiar types. Thus the peculiar structure of the European bronze industry induced an
effective pooling of experiences, gained in different environments, and of traditions evoked by
divergent popular tastes. As a result European bronze workers did display an inventiveness and
ingenuity to an exceptional degree.33
Childes image of the inventive craftsmen, relatively free of the control of kings, priests and
bureaucrats, as the bearers and builders of humanitys store of accumulated knowledge is a
powerful one. It had become central to his understanding of the rise of a distinctive European
civilisation. He claimed a vital thread of continuity linking the itinerant metal smiths of the
Bronze Age with the scientists of the Renaissance:
The metics at Athens, the wayfaring journeymen of the Middle Ages, and the migrant craft
unionist of the 19th century are the lineal descendants of the itinerants just described. But so
were the natural philosophers and sophists in classical Greece, the travelling scholars of
medieval Europe, and natural scientists who from the days of Galileo and Newton to 1945 freely
exchanged information and ideas by publication, correspondence, and visits regardless of
political frontiers.34
Here is the idea of diffusion, the vital transmission belt of knowledge and progress, made flesh
and blood. Here, too, is a Marxist vision which places the intelligence and skills of the worker at
the centre of the human story. The 1917 guild socialist was still very much alive inside the Cold
War fellow-traveller. Childes trajectory during the late 1940s and early 1950s, like that of
other Marxist-influenced Western intellectuals, was undoubtedly away from the sterile dogmas of
Stalinism. His work, like that of Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson and Geoffrey de Ste Croix,
anticipated the break that was to come in the aftermath of 1956 with the formation of the New
Left. Childe is known, in his dissatisfaction with Soviet orthodoxy, to have been rereading Marx
at this time, and this seems to be reflected in the humanism and originality of his later research.
Despite this, Childes understanding of Marxism remained one-sided, and his interpretations of
prehistory and antiquity essentially mechanical. To build on Childes lifes work, we have to be
clear about these limitations.

Marxism without class struggle?

Gordon Childe had mapped the cultures of prehistoric Europe, integrated them into a sequence of
social evolution, charted the lines of communication and interaction that had shaped them, and
seen in the longue dure of the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages the progressive accumulation of
knowledge and productivity which underpinned the rise of civilisation. His vision of the past
amounted to a thoroughgoing critique of several narrower, more partial and sometimes
ideologically twisted conceptions.
Extreme diffusionists had maintained that all ancient innovations had flowed from the cities of
the East, just as they believed that all that was progressive in their own world was a gift to
humanity of modern European empires. Childe exposed the conservatism and stagnation of the
ancient empires, and contrasted this with the leapfrog progress possible in the freer conditions of
prehistoric Europe.
Extreme nationalists had searched for archaeological evidence of master races whose purity
had guaranteed superiority. Childe buried their fantasies beneath a mountain of evidence that
prehistoric societies had languished if isolated but blossomed when interacting and mixing with
others.
Extreme evolutionists had imagined a world of separate societies, each evolving independently
on similar lines, each moving through a succession of predetermined stages of social
development. Childes vision, by contrast, was a richly historical one, in which each society had
distinct characteristics, its development ebbing and flowing, sometimes forging ahead,
sometimes stagnating, even regressing, but still part of a stream of human evolution that was
broadly, in the long term, a progressive accumulation of knowledge and resources.
Childes theories also provide a powerful alternative to the currently fashionable postprocessualism (the archaeological version of postmodernism). In post-processualist prehistory,
humans seem to drift around in a socio-economic vacuum, wholly unconcerned with such
prosaic matters as labour, production and the food supply, concentrating instead on such
essentials as investing the landscape with meanings, constructing alternative identities and
engaging in multiple negotiations.
All of this makes Childe probably the most important archaeologist in the history of the
discipline. But it does not make him a Marxist. That he was a deeply committed socialist heavily
influenced by Marxism is beyond doubt. But his work stands in need of substantial revision and
development. This is obviously true in an empirical sense: 50 years of new data have undermined
many of Childes conclusions. The most important example is the development of radiocarbon
datingjust beginning at the end of Childes careerwhich has provided a chronology for
prehistoric Europe independent of the king-lists of Egypt and Mesopotamia, demonstrating,
among much else, that the east-to-west flow of ideas posited by Childe was often incorrect. The
megalithic monuments of north west Europe, for example, are now known to pre-date those of
the eastern Mediterranean.

But we can easily separate changes in the archaeological data-set from the theories we deploy to
organise data. Much of Childes theoretical frameworkculture history, social evolution,
materialism, diffusion, the accumulation of knowledgestill stands. It was this that he regarded
as potentially of lasting value:
The most original and useful contributions that I may have made to prehistory are certainly not
novel data rescued by brilliant excavation from the soil or by patient research from dusty
museum cases, nor yet well-founded chronological schemes nor freshly defined cultures, but
rather interpretative concepts and methods of explanation.35
The problem is that this framework does not add up to a comprehensive and coherent account of
the prehistoric and ancient past. The framework is essentially static. The engines of history are
missing.
In 1949 Childe submitted a short article entitled A Defence of Prehistory to the journal
Antiquity, offering a summary explanation of his Marxist approach.36 He began by explaining
that the Marxist account:
is deterministic in as much as it assumes that the historical process is not a mere succession of
inexplicable or miraculous happenings, but that all the constituent events are interrelated and
form an intelligible pattern. But the relations are not conceived mechanistically. The process is
not repetitive or predetermined as are the operations of a machine which, however complicated,
grinds out just that which it was built to make and nothing else. It produces a pattern nonetheless,
and its uncompleted portions must harmonise with what is already there, though there may be
various combinations to complete the pattern.
He then stressed the obvious truth that men cannot live without eating, such that the way
people get their living should be expected in the long run to determine their beliefs and
institutions. Consequently:
Marxists have been at pains to show that in any given environment, with a given equipment of
tools and knowledge, one form of organisation secures the smoothest and most efficient
exploitation, while any other is likely to impede production or may even paralyse it. And in
general just one kind of ideologyinstitutions, beliefs and idealswill keep that organisation
functioning most smoothly It is not the individual human animal that has to be adjusted to his
environment in order to survive, as each rabbit or rat must be. It is his society that must be
adjusted, and the adjustment iscalled culture.
He then explained that, because environments were changeable, and because knowledge has
been accumulated and production techniques improved, social organisation in turn must be
adjusted to each advance, and the reorganisation must be supported and sanctified by appropriate
innovations in institutional behaviour and beliefs. The result was an evolutionary succession of
economic, social and cultural stages:
Today archaeology can show that the logical seriessavagery, barbarism, and civilisation
corresponds to a temporal succession, provided the criteria be made the ways in which the

societies classified got a living. In fact at first, throughout the Old Stone Age, all societies lived
entirely by collecting or catching the wild food nature offered. Then in the New Stone Age some
societies began producing food by cultivating edible plants or breeding animals for food or
combining both activities, but still without regular division of labour and without dependence on
foreign trade for any necessities of life. Finally, a few farming communities began producing a
surplus of food large enough to support full-time specialists who engaged in secondary industry,
in trade or in organising social cooperation.
He stressed that this scheme was very abstract and that in relation to the archaeological
evidence of actual prehistoric societies the application of these principles is harder than it
sounds. But he was able to offer little in the way of theoretical help with the problem of
analysing specific social formations in the context of the general evolutionary scheme. Even the
vital concept of diffusion was simply tacked on to the end of the article as an afterthought (no
Marxist would deny the importance of diffusion).
Most curious of all, for a would-be Marxist exposition, is the final sentence: So prehistory may,
after all, in a Marxist sense be the history of thought that Collingwood said all history must be.
Collingwood did indeed say this.37 Marx, on the other hand, had said that the history of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.38 Nowhere in Childes article is there
any reference to class, class exploitation, or class struggle. And this absenceas Christopher Hill
among others notedis true of Childes work generally.39 Even when Childe used the term
revolution, it was not class struggle that he had in mind. His Neolithic and Urban Revolutions
were the prehistoric and ancient equivalents of the Industrial Revolution: rapid accumulations of
knowledge and productivity that made possible a relatively sudden leap forward to a higher stage
of social development. This use of the term is quite different from that implied when we talk of
the English, French and Russian Revolutions, which were climactic class struggles.
There is precious little in Childes evolutionary scheme that is different from the functionalism
that was prevalent in 1950s British and American sociology, and later, as processualism, in
1960s archaeology. These theories depicted human societies as logical and socially integrated
adaptations to specific environments, technologies and productive systems. They amounted to a
view of history every bit as dehumanised and deterministic as that of Stalinist ideology. What are
missingin functionalism, in Stalinism, in Childes workare the twin motors of history:
competition within ruling classes, and the struggle between dominant and subject classes. Let us
consider some examples.

Towards a Marxist archaeology

The building of proto-states, kingdoms and empires was not simply the result of accumulating
knowledge and surplus, as Childes conception of the Urban Revolution rather implies. The very
fact of accumulation has to be explained in terms of competition between rival elites. The
protection of land, labour and resources, in a world divided into separate communities and
polities, demands military organisation, leads to military clashes and stimulates specifically
military accumulation. This has been called political accumulation, in contrast to the capital
accumulation characteristic of capitalist societies.

This dynamic, once operational, is self-sustaining. Each political elite is forced to continue
military accumulation in order to prevent its defeat by rival elites. One result was the clash of
east Mediterranean empires in the Late Bronze Age, in which a competitive, slow motion arms
race and a series of large scale wars exhausted society and led directly to the collapse of
Mycenaean Greece, the Hittite Empire and New Kingdom Egypt in the 12th century BC.
New evidence is allowing us to trace the origins of this process, and to observe the rise of
military elites in the context of clashes over land and resources between neolithic farming
communities emerging from the primitive communism of hunting and gathering. Communal
control over cultivated land and domesticated animals, and over the surpluses that they yield at
certain points in the agrarian cycle, necessitated military preparation and the privileging of
military specialists. We now know that in the middle of the 4th millennium BC, in parts of early
neolithic Britain, there was large scale organised warfare (numerous skeletons with evidence of
death by arrow shot and blows to the head), the use of hilltop enclosures for meetings,
ceremonies and defence (causewayed camps), and the construction of monumental tombs for
high status burial (long barrows): a package that seems to represent the simultaneous
development of warfare, communal organisation and some sort of elite.
As elites emerged from the social mass, tensions developed, and the proto-states which the elites
controlled were used not only in competition with rival elites, but also to mediate internal
tensions, to legitimise the social order and, when necessary, to suppress opposition from below.
Childe seems to have regarded magic, religion and ideology as aberrations, a form of social
pathology that blocked the normal process of progressive social evolution. But the class
struggle pervades all aspects of the life of class societies, and magic, religion and ideology, as
systems of mystification and control, are therefore essential features of elite power. Childe was
right to regard megaliths and pyramids as monuments to mumbo-jumbo. But his analytical
treatment of them was shallow, because the class struggle of which they were an expression was
almost entirely missing from his conception. Nor, in relation to such things, did he grasp the
potential explanatory power of Marxs use of the concepts of reification and alienation.
Megaliths and pyramids are triumphs of social organisation, cultural sophistication, and
engineering skill; simultaneously they turn these things into monstrous caricatures of themselves,
where human labour, instead of being productive and useful, is wasted in the construction of
temples of the sun and tombs for god-kings.
Even culture, a concept so vital to Childes archaeology, turns out to be essentially untheorised.
His attempts to define it amounted to little more than lists of archaeological features and
artefacts. We are left wondering about more than the relationship between culture in an
archaeological sense (material assemblages) and culture in a sociological sense (past social
groups). In so far as there is correspondence, such that archaeological remains can be read as
culture history, we want to understand the dynamics of the culture formation implied.
Contradiction and conflict, almost entirely missing from Childe in this context, are essential to
understanding. Prehistoric and ancient peoples defined themselvesas family groups, as kinship
clans, as tribes, as citizens of Athens, as soldiers of Rome, as followers of Christ, as whatever
in contrast to others, from whom they were separated by gulfs of class and polity, and with
whom they would sometimes be in conflict. People created cultural identities to define and

legitimise difference, to create social organisation and solidarities, and to articulate grievances
and oppositions.
There is a similar problem with diffusion, another vital concept in Childes vision, but also
largely untheorised. He charts the movement of ideas, and describes their impact and further
development. But he fails to explain why some ideas were adopted and others not, or to discuss
who made such decisions and why, or to explore whether such decisions were contested and a
focus of struggle. Without an understanding of the internal dynamics of different social
formationsthat is, of the class struggle within themwe cannot truly understand diffusion.
Consider for a moment all of these issues in relation to the history of the Roman Empire. It was
class struggle between patricians and plebeians in the 5th and 4th centuries BCthe so called
Struggle of the Ordersthat produced Romes distinctive constitution. The class compromise
enshrined in this constitution was the basis of the power of the Roman legions and the dynamic
of Roman imperialism in the years that followed. The wars between the Romans and their
enemiesSamnites, Carthaginians, Greeks, Celts and othersstrengthened the military
character of the state and fuelled further expansion. Rome evolved into a system of robbery with
violence, in which war and conquest enriched the state, the ruling class and, to a degree, the free
citizen masses that formed the legions. The aristocratic culture of Romeits almost exclusive
focus on military achievement, its worship of menacing war gods, its bloodthirsty pageants and
entertainments, its bragging sense of racial superiorityreflected the citys character as a system
of military imperialism. And Rome absorbed such foreign influences as were useful to this
project while rejecting others as superfluous, if not subversive. Greek art objects were prized as
symbols of civilisation, culture and good taste by Romes thuggish elite; Greek democracy was
bloodily suppressed.
Childe had no illusions about Rome. He hated empires and wars. He understood that Roman
domination meant ignorance and waste, and even suggested that the fall of Rome unshackled
humanity and prepared the ground for fresh advances. But he failed to construct a theory of
history that could account for the rise and fall of empires.
Though Childes work on prehistory is thoroughly materialist and provides an excellent
foundation on which to build understanding of the historical process, it never throbs with the
living reality of the class struggle in the manner of Geoffrey de Ste Croixs work on the Greek
city-states, Christopher Hills on the English Revolution or Edward Thompsons on the making
of the English working class.

A political suicide?
There seems to be no record of any contact between Childe and the tiny forces of Trotskyism in
the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. He struggled alone to get beyond the banality of Stalinist ideology.
His reservations grew, but he kept them private, clinging to his political allegiance as a life-raft
of hope in a world scarred by unemployment, fascism and world war. But in 1956 the prism of
wishful thinking through which he had viewed the Soviet Union was finally shattered, first by
Nikita Khrushchevs secret speech admitting the crimes of Stalin, then by the crushing of
working class revolution in Hungary.

Childe did not sign the letter of protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary published in the
New Statesman by some leading British Communists and pro-Communists. He claimed it would
have given too much satisfaction to lifelong enemies. But he was deeply disconcerted. Jack
Lindsay, a close friend from the early days in Australia, described him as very hard hit by the
Khrushchev revelations of 1956.40 Childe himself wrote to another friend that he could not
regard events in Hungary with equanimity.41 Most telling, though, is the embittered letter he
sent to his Soviet archaeological colleagues, in which he condemns them for their shoddy
methodology.42 Though Childe did not say so, this was a product of the isolationism, dogmatism
and arrogance of Soviet archaeology under Stalin. A principled academic who always worked
from the material evidence, Childe, now that his political allegiance had been thrown into crisis,
allowed his accumulated irritation and contempt to spill out.
It was well deserved. Childe, because he rejected Stalinist orthodoxy, had long been the target of
patronising little homilies from the Soviet Union. In 1951 Soviet archaeologist Alexander
Mongait had written an article entitled The Crisis of Bourgeois Archaeology, which included
the following:
Among bourgeois scholars there are not only our ideological enemies. There are also progressive
scholars, friends of our country, who understand very well the worldwide significance of Soviet
scholarship. Among such English scholars is Gordon Childe. Childe has not yet succeeded in
overcoming many of the errors of bourgeois scholarship. But he understands that the scientific
truth is in the Socialist camp and is not ashamed to call himself a pupil of Soviet archaeologists.43
Those errors of bourgeois scholarship were, of course, precisely the ideas that had brought
Childe closer to the revolutionary Marxist tradition.
Childe retired as director of the London Institute of Archaeology in the summer of 1956. He
arrived back in Sydney in April the following year. After a few months spent visiting family,
friends and colleagues, he set out walking in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales early on
the morning of 19 October 1957. He never returned, having thrown himself over a cliff to his
death at a spot just a few miles from the place of his birth.
Gordon Childe had never married and had no children. Though he had many friends, he had
always seemed rather detached and distant, and probably suffered greatly from loneliness. He
feared old age and declining powers. His eyesight may have been failing. No doubt there were
personal reasons for him to end his life. But they were not the only ones.
Many of his perspectives were under attack, yet he seems to have lacked the will to embrace new
approaches such as radiocarbon dating and quantification techniques, and to use them to resolve
contradictions, create new insights, and answer the critics. He felt that his lifes work was over
and, this being so, that nothing remained that might fill his old age.
But I think there was something more. Vere Gordon Childe had been a socialist all his adult life.
The struggle against imperialism, fascism and war, against oppression, injustice and lies, had
sustained him for half a century. Once before, his political illusions had been shatteredby the
experience of reformist government in Australia before and immediately after the First World

War. The young activists response had been the bitter critique represented by How Labour
Governs. Now, once again, political illusions had been shattered, this time by the realities of
Stalinist rule in Eastern Europe. But the retired professor lacked the contact with the
revolutionary socialist traditions that were giving birth to the New Left that might have sustained
him in the crisis. He found himself adrift. Perhaps the most significant line he wrote in the last
letter of his life was this one: I have lost all my old ideals.44 Perhaps, in this sense, he was
another of Stalinisms many victims.

Notes
1: Thanks are due to Peter Gatercole, David Harris and Steve Roskams, all of whom read this
article in draft and made useful critical comments.
2: Harman, 1999, pp3-100.
3: Guild socialism was a form of utopian libertarian socialism especially associated with the
Oxford political theorist, economist and historian G D H Cole. It envisaged a -decentralised
participatory democracy based on workplaces and communities, but it lacked any real theory of
either the capitalist state or revolutionary processes. Cole was a leading member of the Fabian
Society and a strong advocate of the Cooperative Movement.
4: Mulvaney, 1994, p58.
5: Evans, 1995, p2.
6: Green, 1981, pp27-31.
7: Maddock, 1995, p111.
8: Childe, 1964, p xi.
9: Childe, 1964, pp55, 169.
10: Childe, 1964, pp180-181.
11: Childe, 1957, pxiii.
12: Childe, 1929, ppv-vi.
13: These were The Dawn of European Civilisation (1925), The Aryans (1926), The Most
Ancient East: The Oriental Prelude to European Prehistory (1928), The Danube in Prehistory
(1929), and The Bronze Age (1930).
14: Daniel, 1975, p247.

15: Trigger, 1980, pp25-26.

16: Childe, 1926, pp211-212.
17: Trigger, 1980, p52.
18: These were New Light on the Most Ancient East: The Oriental Prelude to European
Prehistory (1934), The Prehistory of Scotland (1935), Man Makes Himself (1936), Prehistoric
Communities of the British Isles (1940), What Happened in History (1942) and Scotland Before
the Scots (1946). The volumes on British -prehistory were primarily detailed culture-historical
studies, but they also reflected Childes new concern with social evolution.
19: Childe, 1942, p89.
20: Childe, 1942, p48.
21: Trigger, 1980, pp108-109.
22: Childe, 1957, pp342-343.
23: Childe, 1933, p417.
24: Trigger, 1980, p47.
25: Trigger, 1980, p93.
26: For a brilliant summary of the arguments, see Molyneux, 1985.
27: The contrast is with political ideologies and academic theories that reflect the particular
interests of other, non-proletarian, non-universal classes, both past and present.
28: For an excellent detailed analysis of the degeneration and eventual destruction of the Russian
Revolution, see Haynes, 2002.
29: Important works of this period include History (1947), Social Evolution (1951) and The
Prehistory of European Society (1958).
30: Marx, 1973, pp70-71, my emphasis.
31: Childe, 1947, p37.
32: Childe, 1958a, p96.
33: Childe, 1958a, 169-170.
34: Childe, 1958a, 173.

35: Childe, 1958b, p69.

36: It was not published until 1979 (in Antiquity, volume 53, number 208). The article had been
written in reply to another article in the same journal, which, in Childes view, -misrepresented
his approach. But the editor of Antiquity could not find room to publish. Antiquity was (and is)
a weighty journal. Childe was an internationally famous professor. His article was three pages
long. It was not only in the Soviet Union that the work of dissidents was censored.
37: Collingwoods main work on the philosophy of history is The Idea of History (1946).
38: Marx, 1973, p67.
39: McNairn, 1980, p125.
40: Green, 1981, pxvii.
41: Green, 1981, p122.
42: Klejn, 1994, pp94-99.
43: Klejn, 1994, p80.
44: Green, 1981, p154.

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