Gordon Vere Childe was born on April 14, 1892, in Sydney, Australia. He studied there and graduated from the university in his hometown, from which he transferred to Oxford. At first he was interested in classical philology but under the influence of professors A. Evans and J. Myres he turned to prehistoric archaeology.
After completing his studies in England, he returned to Australia and began to collaborate with the Labor Party. He was secretary to the Prime Minister of New South Wales until in 1921, disenchanted with politics, he decided to return to England to focus on his studies, but not before making a trip to central and eastern Europe to see the remains first-hand. archeological found there. During his stay in England he held various jobs, such as librarian at the Royal Institute of Anthropology, until in 1925 he published The Dawn of European Civilization whose success made the University of Edinburgh offer him the newly created chair of archaeology, which allowed Childe to be one of the few professional archaeologists at that time.
In the following years he published various works, some specialized and others for the general public, which gave him international fame. Among the former stand out The birth of civilizations, The Danube in prehistory and The Bronze Age . Among the latter, marked by his interest in cultural evolution, we find The origins of civilization and What happened in the story? , books in which he synthesizes his vision of history and culture.
After his stay in Edinburgh in 1945 he moved to London to teach at the University of this city and direct the Institute of Archaeology. During the last years of his life, his literary production was largely focused on the study of working methods in archaeology, thereby seeking to renew this discipline. His approaches will be collected in his posthumous work The prehistory of European society . In 1956 he returned to Australia and died the following year.
We can approach Gordon Childe's thought from two angles:from his ideas on archeology (which changed the mentality of this discipline) or from his conception of history and of its evolution. Both starting points are intimately intertwined in the production of the Australian archaeologist, without being able to separate and analyze them independently. In the same way that the Marxist ideology that he maintained and that impregnates the theses defended around the progress of man and the importance given to social and economic aspects cannot be separated from his work.
One of Childe's main claims was the attempt to overcome the conception of archeology as a mere auxiliary science, which prevailed at that time. For him, the information obtained by archeology constitutes a historical document of great value, far superior to the written texts that end up subordinating human knowledge to the limited information that appears in them. The study of the information transmitted by archaeological remains constitutes the core of this discipline which, through the maximum refinement of a complex methodology, has reached the rank of science.
Within the history of archeology, Gordon Childe has been classified as a supporter of the diffusionist current, according to which “cultures” are conceived through material remains. It defines “culture” as “certain types of remains – pots, utensils, ornamentation, funerary remains, habitation forms – that appear repeatedly together ”, Although he clarifies that the same types of artifacts do not necessarily always have to appear in the deposits of the same culture. The changes in these "cultures" would respond, then, to ethnic modifications due to migrations, invasions or as a consequence of the diffusion of an object and/or an idea. Specifically, Childe seeks to reconstruct prehistory by chronologically ordering the sets of objects that were exponents of these movements or the influence of some peoples over others.
Childe starts from the premise that “archaeological culture” is a formal unit and, therefore, must be defined in terms of its constituent artifacts and not by temporal or geographical limits . Once defined and delimited, the different "cultures" can be ordered chronologically, always attending to empirical criteria obtained from the archaeological record.
In his writings, Childe was able to reconcile archaeological discoveries with ethnographic analyzes and a progressive approach to history. The union of these elements led him to conceive human history as a whole, in which the idea of social evolution stands out, applied to the whole of humanity through an orderly and rational process subject to dialectical categories. Childe, however, distinguishes between organic evolution (characterized by the principle of variation and differentiation) and social evolution (whose guiding criterion is convergence). It will be "culture", understood according to the definition given by the Australian archaeologist, that will make the union between the two since, thanks to the mechanism of social inheritance, the individual contribution ends up becoming the heritage of the social group.
Hitler's rise to power and the spread of National Socialist ideas greatly worried Childe who, in particular, feared that his ethnographic and archaeological theories would be misunderstood and used to give a theoretical background to the Nazi postulates. He denied that his concept of the people had racial implications and delved into the idea that cultural progress is achieved through breaking down the isolation of human groups and sharing their ideas, on an increasingly larger scale. more espacious. He highlighted the importance of studying the common heritage of humanity above the particularities of peoples.
His concern for him led him to deepen his idea of history marked by Marxist ideology in two books written for the general public: The origins of civilization and What happened in the story? In them he reflects on the vicissitudes of humanity and affects the progress of man. After analyzing the first peoples and ancient civilizations, he concludes that the development of a dominant class was the main factor that slowed down their technological development as this class minimized technological change with a view to containing the concomitant social transformations that could alter the social control that they held But this blockade will end up increasing the costs of maintaining the State and, together with the unacceptable concentration of wealth in the hands of the leaders, will undermine the economy until the collapse of that civilization. The decline of a town is not necessarily a negative element but rather allows the economy to be reordered and wealth and ideas to circulate again. In addition, a series of principles or ideas that make human progress possible continue to survive generation after generation. In this way he tried to formulate an explanation of the forces that promote and inhibit cultural development centered on social, political and economic institutions.
Gordon Childe we owe the spread of archeology as a proper branch of history. Beyond the correctness or not of his thesis, he managed to provide it with a method and a system of studies of its own that distanced it from the antiquarian practice in which he had fallen. He was the first to propose a socioeconomic interpretation of primitive European societies and contributed, among others, the concept of "Neolithic revolution" (new economy in which man cooperates with nature in obtaining plant and animal food resources through the application of an intelligent selection that allows him to discover cultivation and domestication), a concept that is common today but that at that time was very novel.