Vere Gordon Childe of Skara Brae

Vere Gordon Childe 

The most famous monument on Orkney is Skara Brae, dubbed the “Neolithic Village” and excavated by, among others, the equally famous V. Gordon Childe. His excavation was undertaken between 1927 and 1930. He wasn’t the first to excavate the site, but he did become the most famous and influential archaeologist to be linked to Orkney at the time, and the account of his work gives an interesting impression of the decline of the settlement.

Vere Gordon Childe (1892-1957), was born in North Sydney, Australia, the son of London-born parents Rev. Stephen Henry Childe, and his second wife Harriet Eliza, née Gordon. He was to become an archaeologist and political theorist.

Known as Gordon, he was educated at Sydney Church of England Grammar School, and the University of Sydney. He graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in 1914 with first-class honours in Latin, Greek and philosophy.

He then won a scholarship to Oxford, in Great Britain, where he studied classical archaeology from 1914 to 1917, becoming heavily involved in the anti-war movement there.

At Queen’s College, Oxford, he was awarded a B.Litt. in 1916 for research on Indo-European archaeology and next year obtained first-class honours in literae humaniores.

In July 1918, as a result of his political views, and his heavy involvement in the anti-war movement at Oxford during the war, the Sydney University senate refused to confirm his appointment as tutor in ancient history. The university had apparently been advised by the Department of Defence that his appointment in wartime was undesirable.

In Sydney, from August 1919 he was private secretary to John Storey, who was the leader of the opposition, in the Australian government, becoming premier from March 1920 until October 1921. Following that, he left for England, where he worked for six months in the New South Wales Agent-General’s Office.

In 1923, in London, he published How Labour Governs, an account of the trade union movement in Australia, and how it developed a working-class party which won power in their parliament.

Disenchanted with the status quo of political systems where those from worker backgrounds once in power, would shrug off their socialist principals in favour of self promotion and profit, he sought to search for some kind of human dignity in the study of prehistory.

In 1925 he became librarian at the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, and that year published The Dawn of European Civilization

Over the next three decades he published some 20 books and 200 papers where he argued that archaeology was more than the listing of stone tools and pottery types, and should become the evidence based substitute for the written history.

He considered the shift from hunting and gathering to food production, and the emergence of professional groups who did not produce their own food so significant that he called them the Neolithic Revolution and the Urban Revolution.

In the 12 months after May 1922, Childe began research into prehistory, visiting museums in Central Europe and writing six authoritative articles on Indo-European influences on Greek prehistory.

His reputation would be established with the book, The Dawn of European Civilization, published in 1925.

In 1927 he became the first Abercromby Professor of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. He organised 20 Scottish excavation sites in the 19 years between 1927 and 1946, including the internationally famous 5,000 year old Neolithic village at Skara Brae on the Orkney Islands (1928-30).

Edinburgh’s elite elected him to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1935, and in 1946, he was appointed director and professor of European prehistory at the Institute of Archaeology in London, where he remained until his retirement in 1956.

Childe wrote a series of books designed to present the results of his research in a non-academic form for the general public. The most popular were Man Makes Himself (1936), and What Happened in History (1942), which by 1957 had sold over 300,000 copies.

The most cited Australian author in the world, Childe was finally recognised at his first university in April 1957 when the chancellor bestowed on him the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters, just months before his death.

Childe committed suicide on 19 October 1957 in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales, but it was not an act of despair. In a letter that he requested not to be opened until January 1968, he wrote: “To end his life deliberately is in fact something that distinguishes Homo sapiens from other animals even better than ceremonial burial of the dead”. (Faulkner, McVey, Terry, and Allen)

In “The Aryans, a study of Indo-European origins” 1926, he wrote “....... the Indo-European languages and their assumed parent- speech have been throughout exceptionally delicate and flexible instruments of thought. They were almost unique, for instance, in possessing a substantive verb and at least a rudimentary machinery for building subordinate clauses that might express conceptual relations in a chain of ratiocination. It follows then that the Aryans must have been gifted with exceptional mental endowments, if not in enjoyment of a high material culture. This is more than mere inference. It is no accident that the first great advances towards abstract natural science were made by the Aryan Greeks and the Hindus, not by the Babylonians or the Egyptians, despite their great material resources and their surprising progress in techniques, in astronomical observation, for example. In the moralization of religion too Aryans have played a prominent rôle. The first great world religions which addressed their appeal to all men irrespective of race or nationality, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism, were the works of Aryans, propagated in Aryan, speech.

It is quite possible that the Iranian Zoroaster anticipated even the Hebrew prophets in sublimating the idea of divinity, emancipating it from tribal or material trappings and enthroning an abstract righteousness where personified natural or magical forces had previously reigned. It is certain that the great concept of the Divine Law or Cosmic Order is associated with the first Aryan, peoples who emerge upon the stage of history some 3,500 years ago. Even the original Aryans themselves worshipped at least one deity, a Sky Father, who, although still anthropomorphic, materialistic and barbaric, was, nevertheless, exalted far above the nameless spirits and magic forces of mere savagery.”

“Aryans...... gifted with exceptional mental endowments” was a theme promoted and endorsed by far right European governments in the 1930s, with horrific and tragically genocidal results which were gradually exposed in the years that followed the second world war. Although the use of one of his themes for such awful purposes may not have driven Gordon to suicide, it certainly cannot have made for an easy retirement.

(Terry) Irving, Terry, 2020, The Fatal Lure of Politics: The Life and Thought of Vere Gordon Childe (Monash University Publishing).

(McVey) International Socialism: Vere Gordon Childe and prehistory: a way of thinking, and much more, by Judy McVey

(Faulkner) International Socialism: Gordon Childe and Marxist archaeology, by Neil Faulkner