FOUNDATIONS OF

SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY
Selected Writings of V. Gordon Childe

EDITED BY
THOMAS C. PATTERSON AND
CHARLES E. ORSER ]R.

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CHAPTER I
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Changing Methods and Aims in Prehistory 25
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CHAPTER 2
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Archaeology as a Science 45
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Library of Congress CataIoging-in-Publication Data CHAPTER 3

Childe, V. Gordon (Vere Gordon). 1892-1957. Archaeological Ages as Technological Stages:

Foundations of social archaeology : selected wricings of V. Gordon Childe / Hux1ey Memorial Lecture for 1944 47
edited by Thomas C. Patterson and Charles E. Orser, Jr.
P: em.
lncludes bibliographical references and index. CHAPTER4
ISBN 0-7591-0592-8 (aIk. paper)-ISBN 0-7591-0593-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Archaeology and Anthropology 7I
L Social archaeology. L Patterson, Thomas Car!. lI. Orser, Charles E. m. Tide.
CC72.4C48 2004
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Archaeology as a Social Science: Inaugural Lecture 8I
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CHAPTER 7

Organic and Social Evolution 101 Acknowledgments

CHAPTER8

The Urban Revolution 107

CHAPTER 9

Old World Prehistory: Neolithic 1 17

CHAPTER 10

The Constitution of Archaeology as a Science 139

CHAPTER 11

Early Forms of Society 155 ARE GRATEFULTO PROF. PETER UCKO--Oirector of the lnstitute of
Archaeology, University of London, which is the literary executor of
CHAPTER 12 ~ V. Gordon Childe's estate-for permission to reprint the articIes in this
book. We wish to thank the foIlowing for perrnission to use copyrighted material:
The Evolution of Society 17I
V Gordon Childe, 1935, "Changing Methods and Aims in Prehistory," Pl'ocetdings oj the Pre-
CHAPTER 13 bistoric Society, voI. 1, no. I, pp. 1-15. Reprinted by perrnission of the Prehistoric Society,
V Gordon Childe, 1943, "Archaeology as a Science," Nature, vol. 152, no. 3844, pp.
The Bronze Age 177
22-23. London: Macmillan Publishers Lrd. Reprinted by perrnission of Nature.
V Gordon Childe, 1947, "Archaeological Ages as Technological Stages:' Journal oj the Royal
CHAPTER 14
Anthl'opological lnstitute, voI. LXXIV, pp. 7-24. Reprinted by perrnission of Blackwell
Retrospect 191 Publishing Ltd.
V Gordon Childe, 1946, "Archaeology and Anthropology," Southwestern [ourna! oj Antbro-
lndex 199 pology, voI. 2, no. 3, pp. 243-51. Reprinted by perrnission of the Joumal oj Anthropolog-
ical Researd»
About the Editors 211 V Gordon Childe, 1947, "Archaeology as a Social Science," Thil'd Annual Repo«, lnstitute oj
Archaeology, pp. 49-60. Reprinted by perrnission of the Institute of Archaeology, Uni-
versity College London.
V Gordon Childe, 1947, "Society, Science, and History" and "Exarnple of an Historical
Order," In History, by V Gordon Childe, pp. 1-15. London: Cobbett Press. Reprinted
by permission of the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.
V Gordon Childe, 1949, "Organic and Social Evolurion," Tb« Rmionalist Annualfor the Yeal'
1949, voI. 44, pp. 57-62. London: Watts and Co. Reprinted by permission of rhe Ra-
tionalist Press Association, http://www.rationalist.org.uk.
V Gordon Childe, 1950, ''The Urban Revolution." Town Planning Review, voI. 2 I, pp. 3-17.
Reprinted by permission of the Town Planning Revir».

VII
 viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

V. Gordon Childe, 1952, "Old World Prehistory: Neolithic:' Anthropology Today: An Encydo-
pedic Inventory, edited by A. L. Kroeber, pp. 193-210. Chicago: University of Chicago Introduction:
Press. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press.
V. Gordon Childe, 1953, "The Constitution of Archaeology as a Science."In Science,Med-
V. Gordon Childe and the
icine, and History: Essays on the Evolution c:f Scientific Thought and Medical Practices Written in Hon- Foundations of Social Archaeology
our c:f Charles Singer, edited by E. Ashworth Underwood, voI. 1, pp. 3-15. Oxford:
Oxford Universiry Press. Reprinted by perrnission of Oxford University Press.
CHARLESE. ORSERJR. ANO THOMASC. PATTERSON
V. Gordon Childe, 1954, "Early Forms of Sociery,"In A History c:f Technology, edited by
Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, and A. R. Hall, voI. 1, From Earliest Times to Fali c:f Ancient
Empires, pp. 38-54. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reprinted by perrnission of Ox-
ford University Press.
V. Gordon Childe, 1957, "The Evolution of Society,"Antiquity, vol. XXXI, no. 124, pp.
210-14. Reprinted by perrnission of Antiquity Publications Ltd.
V. Gordon Childe, 1957, "The Bronze Age." Past and Present, no. 12, pp. 4-15. Reprinred
by perrnission of Oxford University Press.
V. Gordon Childe, 1958, "Rerrospect," Antiquity, vol. XXXII, no. 126, pp. 69-74. ERE GOROONCHILOE(1892-1957) WASONEof the most eminent ar-

'I
I
I
Reprinted by permission of Antiquity Publications Ltd.

Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders but if any have
been inadvertent1y overlooked, the editors and publisher will be pleased to make
V chaeologists in the twentieth century. Many believe that prehistoric ar-
chaeology "is still a dialogue with the ghost of Childe" (Sherratt
1989:185), even though he died before archaeology was transformed into today's
diverse discipline. Archaeologists who survey the disciplines theoretical history are
the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.
inexorably drawn to evaluate Childe's influence. He was a prolific writer, a well-
We are especia11ygrateful to Ms. Christina Halperin of the University of Cal-
traveled scholar-activist, and a thoughtful and insightful student of the philoso-
ifornia, Riverside, for her help in assembling and making electronic files of the
I
phy of history; he also had an encyclopedic knowledge of museum collections as
materials that appear here.
,I
! well as the archaeological literature. His impact on archaeology continues to be
felt in myriad ways. Many of his most frequent1y cited ideas retain their currency
simply because he was uncommonly sagacious about human history. Simply put,
Childe was "the most renowned and widely read archaeologist of the 20th cen-
tury" (Trigger 1994:9), and we believe that the same comment will be applicable
for many years to come.
Our goal in thís book is to present a selection of Childe's writings that per-
tain direct1y to social archaeology. Archaeologists who use the term "social ar-
chaeology" are concerned with the relationship between how we theorize society
and history, on the one hand, and what they write about particular societies that
are known from archaeological, historical, and ethnographic evidence, on the
other. They are concerned with the social relations and organization of the peo-"""
ple who made the artifacts recovered in excavations and surveys. They look at
those relations and their manifestations in economics, politics, and religion. They
pay special attention to the sociallinkages between past and present. From the mid
1930s onward, Childe was instrumental in fostering an early interest in both so-
cial and societal archaeology. This collection of his essays is intended to illustrate,
 2 INTRODUCTION
among Childe's many accomplishments and contributions, the strong influence he
exerted on the initial development of social archaeology. Social archaeology
gained a steadily increasing number of advocates in the 1980s and 1990s, when
many archaeologists encountered Childe's works for the first time.
V. Gordon Childe
Childe's prominence as a scholar-activist and an intellectual has understandably
occasioned considerable debate as well as a number of biographical accounts. Bio-
graphies written between 1980 and 1992 examine Childe's life and work through
different lenses (Tringham 1983). Barbara McNairn (1980) surveys Childe's
method and theory and how it built on and contributed to the development of ar-
chaeological knowledge at the time he was writing. Bruce Trigger's (1980) monu-
mental intellectual biography explores much of the same ground but from the
perspective of an archaeologist who had long studied Childe's work and made use
of his insights in his own work. Sally Greens (1981) is a more traditional biog-
raphy of Childe's life and times. William Peace (1992) focuses on his career as an
activist-scholar and explores the sociopolitical and intellectual milieus in which
Childe worked. Other works-such as Trigger (1987), Peter Gathercole (1989),
andThomas Patterson (2003:33-62, I 52-54}--examine how Marxist social the-
ory and praxis informed Childe's intellectual project and development, and how
he juxtaposed the findings of archaeologists and sociologists, like Émile
Durkheim and Herbert Spencer, with the sociohistorical perspectives forged by
Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and their successors. Each of the works provides
unique insights and interpretations of Childe, the person, and Childe, the intel-
lectual and scholar-activist. As a result of their texture, we provide here only the
briefest sketch of his life and work.
Childe was born in Sydney, Australia, on April 14, 1892. He entered the Uni-
versity of Sydney in 191 1 and graduated three years later with first dass honors
in Classics. During these years he developed his lifelong interest in prehistoric ar-
chaeology and the philosophy of history and his participation in trade-union and
left-wing political movements, such as the Australian Workers' Education Assoei-
ation; he also began reading Marx, Engels, and other progressive writers during
this period. In 1914, he sailed for England and enrolled in Oxford University with
the intention of studying dassical archaeology. His reading soon convinced him
that he could use pottery to unravel the cultural complexities of prehistoric cen-
tral Europe in the same manner that dassical archaeologists used it to reveal as-
pects of daily life in ancient Greece and Rome (see "Retrospect'"). Childe's
self-appointed task was formidable because no one had yet satisfactorily accom-
plished it. In keeping with this interest, then, he combined his interest in ancient
V. GORDON CHILDE AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY 3
Europe with his commitment to studying dassics; his B.Litt. thesis at Oxford,
completed in 1916, was entitled "The lnfluence of lndo-Europeans in Prehistoric
Greece" (Green 1981:18).
At Oxford, Childe continued to participate in progressive political groups; he
quickly joined the socialist Fabian Society and the No-Conscription Fellowship,
some of whose members were jailed for opposing British intervention in World
War I. He returned to Australia in 1917 and worked for the Labour Premier of
New South Wales. The Labour government, which had sent him back to England
in December 1921 as a research and publicity officer, was toppled in 1922.
Childe found himself unemployed, with no employment possibilities in Australia
because of his political activism, and with Iittle money. For the next three years,
he eked out a living as a translator for Kegan Paul, a publishing house in Lon-
don, and working for the Labour Research Department, which had dose ties with
the Communist Party (Gathercole 1989; Green 1981:1-57; Peace 1992:51-87).
He published his first book, How Labour Governs: A Study oj Workers'Representation in
Australia, during the hard times of his marginal employment in the early 1920s
(Childe 1923).
In 1925, Childe was appointed Librarian to the Royal Anthropological In-
stitute, the world's oldest scholarly association devoted to the pursuit of an-
thropological knowledge. He used the appointment as a means to visit museums
and other repositories throughout central and eastern Europe and, in the
process, to deepen significantly his knowledge of the prehistoric archaeology of
Europe. The results of these wide-ranging travels were codified in his massive
synthetic work, Tbe Danube in Prehistory, which was published in 1929. It followed
his first books on archaeology: Tbe Dawn oj European Civilization, which had ap-
peared in 1925; The Aryans: A Study oj Indo-European Orígins, which was published
the next year; and The Most Ancient East: The Oriental Prelude to European Prehistory,
which appeared two years late r in 1928. Tbe Dawn, read by every practicing ar-
chaeologist of the time, has been described as a book that "changed archaeol-
ogy forever" (Fagan 2001:12; also see Daniel 1975:247). Childe's insights and
his commanding knowledge of the field proved to his colleagues the value of a
pan-European understanding of history.
Childe's first two books on prehistory quickly established his archaeological
credentials, and in 1927 he accepted the first Abercrornby Chair of Archaeology
at Edinburgh University. He resigned nineteen years later to assume the post of
Director of the University of Londons Institute of Archaeology, a position he
held until his retirement in 1956. He returned to Australia a year later to deliver
a series of university lectures and seminars. On October 19, 1957, Childe
trekked into the Blue Mountains outside Sydney and fell from a diff to his
death. Rumors over whether his death was accidental or deliberate soon swept
4 INTROOUCTION
through the archaeological community, The truth was finally revealed publicly in
1980. ln a letter Childe had written to W. F. Grimes, his successor at the Insti-
tu te of Archaeology, he said, "An accident may easily and naturally befall me on
a mountain cliff" (Childe 1980:3). Childe claimed to have lost faith with all his
early ideais, and he insisted that, at age 65, it was time for him to step aside for
younger scholars with more innovative ideas and approaches. The development of
radiocarbon dating contributed to his sense of impotence because ir had done
much to demolish many of his carefully devised cultural chronologies. On a more
personal Ievel, Childe was also terrified of becoming ill and thus being a burden
on society. As a lifelong socialist, he could never see himself in this siruation.
Childe's life spanned the period that witnessed the formal institution and sub-
sequent development of archaeology as a professional, scholarly pursuit. By 1892,
pioneering archaeologists had investigated many of rhe ruins associated with the
world's great civilizations, including those in Egypt, the Near East, around the
Aegean Sea, and in Mesoamerica. The period from 1860 to 1930, described as ar-
chaeology's "coming of age" (Stiebing 1993), circumscribed Childe's formative
years in archaeology. Schliemann's over twenty years of excavation at Hisarlik,
which had captured worldwide attention before Childe's birth, helped to trans-
form archaeology into a public exploit that projected an image of thoughtful male
excavators unearthing the hidden secrets of ancient civilizations (Hinsley
1989:91-92). Reporters and other popularizers created awe among an eager pub-
lic by presenting the adventures of archaeologists who traveled to far-ofE, exotic
lands as daring and exciting, and in the process helped to stereotype the archaeo-
logical profession up to the present. Closer to the reporters' hornes, English ar-
chaeologists such as William M. Flinders Petrie and Augustus Pitt Rivers toiled to
establish archaeology as a serious scientific endeavor (Daniel 1968:69-70). Ar-
chaeology was thus growing increasingly newsworthy at the time of Childe's birth
in 1892. Only six months later, the Illustrated London News breathlessly reported
Flinders Petrie's discovery of Tell el Amarna in Egypt, and in 1906, before Childe
entered the university, the same paper recounted Arthur Evans's discoveries in
Crete (Bacon 1976:112-13, 124-26). Evans, one of the world's most renowned
archaeologists at the time, would late r sit as a reader for Childe's undergraduate
thesis (Green 1981:15).
Childe's scholarly interests were rooted in his attempt to understand Old
World prehistory; as a result, he had Íittle sustained interest in American archae-
ology. This is not to say, however, that he was entirely unaware of the cultural hís-
tory of the Americas or that he thought its history insignificant. Childe was
deeply committed to encouraging and fostering international exchanges between
scholars, and he maintained a wide correspondence with many American archae-
ologists (Green 1981:75). His painstakingly compiled cultural sequences and his
Y. GOROON CHILOE ANO THE FOUNOATIONS OF SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY 5
theoretically oriented perspectives-particularly on cultural evolution-though
inspired by European prehistory, had an impacr on many archaeologists trained in
North America (Flannery 1994; Patterson 1995:88). But, even though all prac-
ticing North American archaeologists would know something of Childe's work, it
is nonetheless true rhat few American archaeologists may have bothered to read his
works carefully unless they were interested in western Asia (McGuire 1992:72;
Trigger 1994:20). The prehistory of Europe and that of the New World were of-
ten viewed as disparate pieces of rhe human story.
Childe visited the United States in 1936 and met many of the scholars with
whom he had corresponded. His trip across America by train and his visits to sev-
eral significant archaeological sites increased his interest in American cultural his-
tory and caused him to rethink some of his earlier interpretations, both
prehistoric and political. He was particularly vexed by the way the Maya appeared
to tlaunt his general evolutionary outline by effectively being Neolithic in form,
but yet establishing a distinguishing mark of civilization: a cornplex system of
writing (Trigger 1980:127). Thus, while Childe's visit to the United States was
personally rewarding and intellectually stimulating, he never considered North
American prehistory to any serious degree in his professional or public writings.
On the political front, Childe, a committed Marxist, stated that he "only felt sym-
pathetic to capiralisrn" while he was in rhe United States (Flannery 1994:II4).
This was probably because of the New Deal works programs that had been put
in place by the Roosevelt administration to ameliorate the devastating effects of
high unemployment and grinding poverty during the Depression of the 1930s.
During the Cold War, which was launched by the U.S. government in the months
following World War lI, Childe's leftist political affiliations and sympathies as well
as his increasingly more explicit expressions of Marxist social thought made it dif-
ficult for some anthropologists in the United States to engage seriously with his
work and to acknowledge fully its significance in the postwar years.
Childe was a complex individual whose voluminous writings reflect his deep in-
tellect and a wide-ranging mind. He possessed arare talent that enabled him "to
combine a professional mastery of the subject with a wider vision of its signifi-
cance" (Sherratt 1989:151). At the time of his death, Childe was memorialized as
the greatest synthesizer of his generation, a renowned scholar who made a global
contribution to knowledge, and an archaeological visionary (Braidwood 1958;
Grimes 1959). In 1927, when Childe accepted the post at Edinburgh Universiry,
professional archaeology was just becoming a recognized and respected field of in-
quiry. When he died thirty years later, the discipline was widely known, albeit of-
ten misunderstood, by the general public, even though Childe made a sustained
effort to increase public knowledge and understanding of its importance. His re-
search and vision, combined with his ability to explain rhe past to lay audiences,
 1-'-'
6 INTRODUCTION
helped to transform archaeology into today's respected, scholarly pursuit and to in-
crease the public's general awareness of the discipline.
Two of Childe's Contributions to Archaeology
Childe's intellectual milieu was shaped by the intersection of liberal empiricism,
neo-Kantianism, and Marxism. His writings demonstrate an ongoing engagement
with and interrogation of these three social theoretical traditions. As a result, his
views matured and changed over time. Ideas that were barely developed in the
1920s appear honed and refined ten or twenty years later. Not only did he rethink
and reformulate earlier interpretations and ideas, he also rejected them when they
no longer made sense. He openly acknowledged that some of his earlier views may
have been erroneous, ill-founded, or inadequate, and that archaeologists following
in his footsteps might reject much of what he had proposed (see "Retrospect").
In spite of his own reservations about the lasting impact of his work, his contri-
butions to archaeology remain profound. In this section, let us explore two of his
achievements-his conscious application and elaboration of the concept of cul-
ture, and the perspective he developed for understanding large-scale processes of
sociohistorical change or social evolutionism.
Archaeologists regularly used the word "culture" when Childe entered the dis-
cipline; however, the concept was not a dynamic one. Many relied on E. B.Tylor's
(1958:1) definition of 1871: "Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethno-
graphic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief art, moraIs,
law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member
of society." Most archaeologists working at the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury employed an overtly enumerative definition of culture that rested on the com-
pilation of trait lists. The individual traits, considered as a whole, were perceived
to íunction as a tangible identifier of a past living culture. Archaeologists worked
to recover the material components of past culture, literally identified as "mate-
rial culture" (Kroeber and KIuckhohn 1952:43-46). Their main task centered
upon locating, identifying, and describing the material culture of extinct or radi-
cally changed cultures. From Europe to Peru and the American Southwest, they
quickly recognized that the spatiality of culture was inextricably linked with the
distribution of artifact types or material culture. U.S. archaeologist William H.
Holmes (1903:21) described this method in a paper on prehistoric North Amer-
ican pottery published at the beginning of the twentieth century: "We soon ob-
serve that the pottery of one section differs from that of another in material,
form, color, and decoration, and that groups may be defined each probably repre-
senting a limited group of peoples, but more conveniently treated as the product
of a more or less well-marked specialization area." Once archaeologists understood
V GORDON CHILDE AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY 7
the spatial dimensions of culture, they could devise ways-stratigraphic excava-
tions or seriational arguments-to arrange the cultural units into temporal se-
quences; they could begin to write the history of cultures that lacked writing
systems-that is, they could write what happened in prehistory, the era before
writing appeared. This kind of archaeological research was becoming standard
practice at the time of Childe's birth; it has remained so in many areas since then,
Culture, as literary critic Raymond Williams (1983:87) noted, is "one of the
two or three most complicated words in the English language." Childe's use and
elaboration of the concept of culture reflects the complexity of the idea itself as
it was developed differently in various national intellectual traditions of the times;
it also reflects his lifelong engagement with the claims of neo-Kantian and em-
piricist thought. Childe accepted the neo-Kantian claim that the subject matter,
methods, and aims of the human and natural sciences were different. In his view,
archaeology was a human science to which "the concepts of the natural sciences •
could not be applied without modiíication" (Childe 1935:2). As a result, he was
not concerned, as were Herbert Spencer and later the logical empiricists (posi-
tivists) of the Vienna Circle, with elaborating naturallaws that applied equally to
both the natural and human realms or with developing a unified science and sei-
entific methodology. He also engaged the neo-Kantian claim that the human sei-
ences were concerned with culture-that is, the genius of a people, For many
anthropologists, like Franz Boas, who engaged in a dialogue with neo-Kantian
thought, the culture of a group-the subjective and objective elements that gave
meaning to their lives, that incorporated foreign materials, that were modified by
geography and history, and that were transmitted from one generation to the
next-were most clearly ernbodied in the language, folklore, and sentiments of a
people,
ln The Dawn, Childe, using the convention of the time, does not actually de-
fine what he means by the term "culture,' He simply delineates archaeological cul- e
tures by the presence of a few kev, diagnostic artifact types (Trigger
1989:170-71, 1994:1 I). Writing about Greece, for example, he notes that the be-
ginning of the Middle Helladic period is indicated by the appearance of gray pot-
tery (Minyan ware) and a mortuary practice in which the deceased were interred
in small cists or jars among their houses (Childe 1939:68-69). ln his next book,
The Aryans Childe (1926) strives to identify the Aryans as a discrete cultural en-
J
tity and, once identified, to chart their presence in various parts of ancient Eu-
rope. The first indication of their presence rested in philological evidence,
an interest that harkened back to Childe's earliest university days. Using Indo-
European lexicon, Childe attempts to reconstruct the Aryans' way of life and to
discern the location of their elusive homeland. Childe's (1926:209-12) condu-
sion that the Aryans were Nordic founders of Western Civilization was later to
 8 INTROOUCTION
cause him a significam degree of mental torment when his ideas were used by
Nazi scientists to promote their racist agenda (Green 1981:55). He had resisted
the racist assignments attributed to the Aryans by German nationalist Gustaf
Kossinna (Trigger 1989:170, 1994:1I), but me modern reader may still be sur-
prised by Childe's easy linkage between language and intellectual progresso Childe
(1926:212) denies that the Aryans' success was the result of a "higher material
culture" or a "superior physique," but states that their success derived from "a
more excellent language and the mentality it generated:'
Three years larer, in the preface to The Danube in Prehistory, Childe
(1929:v-vi) explicitly defines culture as consisting of "pots, irnplemenrs, orna-
ments, burial rires, house forms." He states that when these objects occur to-
gether they constitute a "cultural group," or simply a "culture," He further
. extends the meaning of culture to equate it with a "people," and proposes that
me adjective derived from a "people" is "ethnic," In keeping with the thoughts
of the time, Childe also proposes that a people constitute a "race" when thev
are represented by skeletal remains that can be associated with a specific physi-
cal type. The conflation of race with culture was common in anthropology and
archaeology during the period rhat Childe was writing (Orser 2003:39-74).
Specific peoples of prehistory-identified as cultures and races-were identifi-
able because of the spatial distribution of their material culture. The prehisto-
rian's main objects, when interested in large regions-like the entire Danube
River valley-is to discern migrations, cultural interactions, and the presence of
material survivals, those telltale, diachronic cultural holdovers. Cultural change
was thus largely viewed as exogenous.
But even in his early work, Childe makes it clear that culture as he perceives it
is not necessarily a chronological concept. A particular culture can exist for many
generations, but internal changes will be suggested by the discovery of "acciden-
tal traits" that indicate the temporal differences between the two assemblages
(Childe 1929:vii). In other words, archaeologists should not expect cultures to re-
main static over time; changes in material culture can indicate modifications of
subsistence, behavior, and thought. His goal in The Danube in Prehistory, rhen, is sim-
ilar to his plan in The Aryans: He strives to present archaeological information
about discrete cultural entities in chronological order, to explore cultural origins
and migrations, and to chart some of the relations between the various prehistoric
cultures in the region.
Childe does more than to identify discrete ancient cultures based on artifacts.
He argues that discrete peoples are more than mere collections of artifacts and
notes that, as was true for the Aryans, some elements of material culture were de-
veloped purely as ethnic markers. Childe believes also that rather rhan merely be-
ing indicated by a single key artifact-the discrete ethnic marker of much early
V. GOROON CHILOE ANO THE FOUNOATIONS OF SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY 9
research in American historical archaeology. for instance-ethnicity is only dis-
cernable on the level of a "whole culture complex," This complex can survive for
many generations and be archaeologically signaled by a common set of cultural at-
tributes (Childe 1926:204n). In tracing the ethnic unity of the Aryans, Childe
uses a cornplex combination of pottery. battle axes, and megalithic tombs as co-
)
I occurring ethnic attributes that indicate their cultural cohesiveness over time.
In The Danube, Childe conceptualizes culture as a cornplex of certain types of
remains that constantly occurred together. From the mid I930s onward, he recon-
ceptualized culrure and regularly portrayed it as "observable facts,' a "social tra-
dition,' or "the whole life of a community," In his words, "The traits of a culture
are thus presented together to the archaeologists because they are the creations of
a single people, adjustments to its environment approved by its collective experi-
ence; they thus express the individuality of a human group united by common so-
cial traditions" (Childe 1935:3). A decade later, Childe (I 946c) implies that
material culture, the means of production in Marxist terrns, belongs to the eco-
nomic foundations of a society, while the symbolic, signifying aspects of culture
reside in the superstructure. Put somewhat differently. the mernbers of a society
are constrained by tradition; they work out their destinies using the material and
symbolic forms available to thern, In a phrase, culture is the arena in which they .,
live and experience everyday Iife.
From the mid I930s onward, CI-íilde also turned his attention increasingIy
toward the dynamic forces of society-those that prornoted historical develop-
rnenr or social evolution and those contradictory ones that impeded socio-
cultural change. He had been interested in these problems since his first encoun-
ters with the works of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Herbert
Spencer, or Lewis Henry Morgan. Evolutionism had been a major thread of
nineteenth-century anthropological thought, and many practitioners of ernbry-
onic anthropology and archaeology sought to use its principies to explain the
progress of humaniry, The broadest scheme proposed that humans had steadily
progressed from savagery to civilization. Childe is credited with reinvigorating ,
the serious consideration of sociocultural evolution in the early twentieth century
(Voget 1975:552). Childe presented his perspective on the subject in both pop-
ular and scholarly books; for exarnple, his Man Makes Himsel] (I 95 Ia), first pub-
lished in 1936. was originally a series of lectures delivered to trade unions; it was
also one of the most important syntheses of archaeology written at the time.
Though Childe developed, refined, and modi6ed his ideas on cultural evolution
over time, the germ of evolution appears in his earliest works. For exarnple, in The
Danube in Prehistory, he notes that when archaeologists attempt to use typoIogies
for chronological interpretation, rhey must recognize that types "evolved (or de-
generated) regularly" (Childe I929:viii).
..
 ,.I!~li
\~l JO INTRODUCTION
ln Man Makes Himselj, Childe addresses the difficult question of "what is
progress?" His notion of progress is peppered with Marxian terminology and
concepts. He unabashedly writes about changes in the means of production and
the role of technology-whose implernents are archaeologically observable-in
generating cultural change. His stated goal in the book is to present an objective,
impersonal, and scientific investigation of human progress and to equate the his-
torians' concept of "progress" with the zoologist's idea of evolution (Childe
195Ia:I5). Using the modern Industrial Revolution as a starting point, Childe
seeks to demonstrate that human history witnessed earlier and equally dramatic
revolutions as well. He perceives these sweeping cultural changes--events that rap-
idly pushed hurnanity forward-as profound mornents in human history. The first
revolution, the "Neolithic," allowed humans to assert some measure of control
over their subsistence base, and hence their survival, by developing horticultural-
ism and pastoralism. The transition from hunting and collecting wild flora and
fauna to producing domesticated species represented a key moment in cultural
I
progresso This revolution, and the subsequent changes it occasioned, established
II1
1
the conditions for the second revolution, the "Urban" revolution. This momen-
tous change witnessed the developmenr of cities and the rise of states through rhe
I transformation of small village communities composed of farmers and herders
(see "The Urban Revolution"). The development of industry, foreign trade, and
other amenities of urbanity allowed ancient peoples to create states and empires,
The economic revolution experienced by the world's earliest states would not have
been possible without a concornitant revolution in human knowledge, which in-
cluded the development of writing and mathematics, as well as the standardiza-
tion of weights and measures.
I[i In a book that was much less widely read, Scotland BeJore the Scots, published in
1946, Childe carefully works out the six stages of Scottish cultural development
from their earliest history until the arrival of the Romans. Rather than working
through the entire sweep of human history, he strives to illustrate his overall the-
oretical framework of cultural evolution in one small, European region. Using
11,
ideas he had formulated earlier through his reading of Marx and other materi-
II alists, Childe promotes the idea that archaeological assemblages in Scotland
connote ordered stages of "technical and economic progress" (Childe 1946a:2).
!iII The objects within the differential assemblages-graves, houses, tools, weapons,
,
ornaments-are "systadial," meaning that rhey occupied "the same relative po-
sition in the [evolutionary] sequences as defined by the common criterion of
technology" (see "Archaeology and Anthropology"; also Childe 19 56a: 74). By
this time, however, Childe's use of anthropological concepts had grown consid-
erably more sophisticated and his view of culture more nuanced. ln other words,
his conception of the past had evolved from a largely trait-list conceptualization
V. GORDON CHILDE AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY II
of culture to an understanding of the profound irnportance of social relations
in transforming human history. He had essentially transformed his understand-
ing of history from a static notion into a dynamic conception that openly em-
braced social interaction and all that it entailed. This transformation marks
Childe's full entry into the earliest strains of social archaeology.
Childe and the Roots of Social Archaeology
Childe was a significant, early proponent of social archaeology as many archaeol-
ogists currently conceive ir, even though the term "social archaeology" has diverse
meanings (Ashmore 2002:II73, II75; Hodder 2002; Meskell et ai. 2001:7-8).
We wish here to draw a distinction between societal archaeology and social archaeology.
The former is concerned with the archaeology of society or social organizations;
the latter is concerned with "understanding past societies in terms of their social
contexts and lived experiences, while, at the same time, ... remain[ing] cognizant
of how the knowledge of the past that we produce is used in the present" (Meskell
et ai. 2001:9). Childe contributed to both kinds of archaeology; his contributions
have persisted and had an irnportant impact on todav's archaeology. It was his
commitment to social archaeology, however, that drew us to Childe's writings.
Archaeologists have been inrerested in the archaeology of social groups for a
long time (Chippindale 1989), and they have long recognized and appreciated the
complexities inherent in interpreting social differentiation in past sociohistorical
formations (Hawkes 1954:161-62).1t was precisely the use of archaeological ma-
teriais for identifying social group distinctions that puzzled Childe during the
course of his earliest research.
The material distinctions expressed by social groups intrigued many profes-
sional archaeologists. For example, British prehistorian Graham Clark, an associate
of Childe's from the late 1920s onward, was an early and pioneering advocate of
societal archaeology. Clark's Archaeology and Society, first published in 1939, was
largely written as a textbook designed to outline a way to reconstruct ancient his-
tory from a societal perspective (Fagan 2001:98). Chapters concentrate on the re-
consttuction of economic, social, intellectual, and spiritual life. Clark's avowed
intent is to inrerpret archaeological data "in terms of social history," a reconstruc-
tion that can only be accomplished if the functioning of communities is adequately
grasped (Clark 1964:169-70). For Clark, the ecological setting constitutes the
"economic base" of a society-a foundation cornposed of subsistence, shelter and
clothing, technology, transport, and trade. The reconstruction of sociallife rests on
conceptualizing the people's past social organization. Clarks overall approach was
unquestionably forward-Iooking and innovative for the time, but his interpretation
of past social organization was overwhelmingly functionalist: an archaeologist

12 INTROOUCTION
could use the number of hearths at a site to infer whether the community was or-
ganized in nuclear or extended families; excavators could discern social differentia-
tion or egalitarianism by the community-wide distributions of grave goods,
dwellings, weapons, ornaments, and dress.
Early proponents of processual archeology further attempted to raise the pro-
file of societal analysis in archaeology. In a famous exarnple, Lewis Binford
(1962:219) argued that an extinct social "subsystern," one identifiable through the
presence of "sociotechnic" artifacts, provided a "means of articulating individu-
als one with another into cohesive groups capable of efficiently maintaining thern-
selves,' Under this framework, archaeologists could expect to discover
sociotechnic artifacts within a past cultural system that vary in quantity, form, and
structure in conjunction with the character of the social system. The difference be-
tween a hierarchical and an egalitarian social subsystem should be identifiable
through an examination of the archaeologically recovered sociotechnic artifacts.
Oavid Clarke (1968:105-10), another prominent processual archaeologist, also
argued that a "social subsvstern" existed within a larger cultural system. In his
rnodel, the social subsystem was composed of individuaIs linked together through
diverse and constantly changing ascribed and achieved social positions. The social
subsystem was structurally analogous to four other identifiable subsystems: eco-
nomic, religious, psychological, and material. Clarke used the language of systems
theory to outline his understanding that social networks would oscillate and seek
equilibrium.
Subsequent processual archaeologists also endeavored to model and interpret
past social organizations. For instance, archaeologists who worked in the overtly
behavioral strain of processualism perceived society in strict behaviorist terms, as
a "social unit of activity performance" -a group of individuaIs voluntarily
joined together during the course of a specific activity (Schiffer 1976:51). Most
recently, social elements have practically been excised from behavioral archaeol-
ogy with the proposition that humans do not actually interact with one another,
but rather with one another "cornpounded with artifacts" (Schiffer 1999:3; also
see Schiffer 2000).
Several archaeologists expressed a desire to develop a reinvigorated societal ar-
chaeology, along the lines proposed by processualists, in the late 1970s (Redman
et al. 1978). These authors of Social Arcbaeology had as their overt goal to advance
archaeology "beyond subsistence and dating."They wished to transform archaeol-
ogy into an explicitly social science, whose analyses would rest on, but not cease
with, the economic base. In other words, their goal was to encourage those ar-
chaeologists committed to a processualist framework to move away from environ-
mental and technological analysis toward a more open analysis of society and
social organization. 1n accordance with this goal, the authors of the various chap-
· I
I .
V. GOROON CHILOE ANO THE FOUNOATIONS OF SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY 13
ters explore issues that inherently require sociability. ldeology, the social impact of
art, the nature of belief systems, and measures of social differentiation mean
nothing outside the sphere of human interaction. The strong nornothetic contem
of the articles strikes many readers today as somewhat naive, but the overt and un-
apologetic focus on social organization provides a strong and consistent current
for the collection.
The cause for an archaeology of society was significantly advanced by Colin
Renfrew with the publication of his inaugural lecture at the University of
Sourhampton (1973) and a collection of his essays a decade later. His inaugural
lecture touched upon the archaeologists' need to understand past social variables;
his collected essays significantly expanded upon this therne with a series of case
studies. Renfrew (1984:4) noted that social archaeology-when composed of an
explicít body of theory-was actually a new subject in archaeology, even though
societal archaeology had ostensibly been pursued for many years. But one practi-
cal goal of societal archaeology as he envisioned it was to link it inextricably to so-
cial anthropology, but only after archaeologists clearly understood and appreciated
its underlying philosophical assumptions. Social archaeology developed along the
lines advocated by Renfrew would resemble social anthropology but it would re-
main distinct in important ways. Whereas archaeological research could contribute
nothing to knowledge about ancient kinship terms or oral communication, its
practitioners could provide abundam, important new information about the rela-
tionships between social situation and tangible material culture.
Renfrew proposed five avenues of inquiry that he believed societal archaeology
could develop, One avenue would examine societies as spatial entities, where the
landscape is perceived as an inseparable part of the social equation and is assessed
as such (see Ashmore 2002). Another topic for research involves the creation and
maintenance of exchange networks, with the underlying idea being that men and
women who engaged in face-to-face economic interaction were also intimately in-
volved in social exchange. The study of a society's framework of authority consti-
tutes a third topic for archaeological investigation. In this kind of analysis, societal
archaeologists investigate the associations between the structures of social control
and the construction and placement of monuments and other immovable symbols
of leadership. A broader topic for examination revolves around the dynamics of
systemic growth. Inquiries of this nature would involve the conscious application
of Clarkes (1968) ideas on the use of systems theory in archaeology. Renfrew be-
lieves that the adoption of a systems model in conjunction with the language of
systems theory would perrnit archaeologists to examine large-scale social change in
a manner conducive to understanding its multivariate complexiry, The study of dis-
continuous social change, as distinguished from continuous, steady-state change, is
also a topic for serious attention by social archaeologists. Here, archaeologists are
111!1
14 INTRODUCTION
I
eoneerned with changes that appear sudden and diseontinuous-changes that are
analogous to Childe's revolutions.
Renfrew (1984, 2001) fUl1yunderstood rhat the topics, and the approaches
he advoeated to address thern, were far from perfect. At rhe same time, however,
his willingness to tackle such overtly societal aspects of prehistory demonstrated
his commitment to the notion of societal archaeology. Renfrew (1984:7-8) notes
his intellectual debt to Childe, even though he remains critical of Childe's short-
comings, including his enduring belief that archaeology was inadequate for pro-
viding significant information about some aspects of past society,
I Childe's earliest research eannot be accurately deseribed as soeietal archaeology.
I
I Following the conventions of the time, his focus was on delineating cultures in
I
r
terms of their material and spatial expressions. ln The Danube in Prehistory (1929),
for example, he charted the course of different cultures up the Oanube corridor by
reference to the artifacts recovered from known archaeological sites. He refers to
these key artifacts, even in his later works, as "type-fossils" (Childe 1956b:21), and
he employs a somewhat simplistic, albeit then commonplace, archaeological
methodology. Childe's innovation was the breadth of the knowledge he had
amassed as a result of his wide-ranging visits to Europes archaeological museums
and repositories. His earliest, traditional, culture-historical research is thus distin-
guished more for his overcly pan-European perspective and the shear depth of his
knowledge, rather than for his advocacy of societal archaeology. By the 1940s,
however, Childe was increasingly writing about societies when he was mentioning
cultures. Though Childe clearly had his own ideas and his unshakeable perspectives,
he was openly impressed by Clark's Archaeology and Society. His reading of such books,
in concert with his active thinking about history, made ir possible for Childe to
transcend the archaeological methods of his earliest research and to transform his
own archaeological efforts into a more self-conscious societal praetice.
ln his paper for the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, published in 1946, Childe
reeognizes the affmities between the work of archaeologists and sociocultural an-
thropologists (see "Archaeology and Anthropology"). He observes that when
conducting ethnographic research, anthropologists are able to perceive the many
societal abstractions that are expressed through overt human action. The associa-
tion between interpersonal behavior and kinship terms provides a clear example.
But unlike anthropologists, archaeologists must content themselves with cultural
activity largely defined on the basis of material culture. They eannot witness soei-
etal interactions as they occur, and so, personal and group interactions can only be
inferred. At the same time, however, Childe mentions his interest in societal evo-
lution and proposes that only archaeology could document the "earlier and sim-
pler" states of the evolutionary processo In his mind, then, archaeological research
is indispensable for providing information about the evolution of past societies.
V. GORDON CHILDE AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY 15
As an archaeologist principally engaged in the examination of the tangible remains
of past human organizations, Childe still feels compelled to define a culrure as "an
assemblage of artifacts that recur repeated1y associated together" in Prehistoric Mi-
grations in Europe, first published in 1950 (Childe 1969:2). Significantly, though, he
also notes the paramount importance of understanding societies as groups of in-
teracting individuaIs. He makes his position mostly clearly in his statement that
archaeology constitutes a social science, a discipline that can examine "the dy-
namics of social change" over vast periods of time (see "Archaeology as a Social
Science"). In Piecing Together the Past, Childe (I956a:7) does not abandon his belief
in the archaeological prominence of culrure, but observes that archaeologists in-
vestigate the results of group behavior when individuaIs form themselves into so-
cieties. He chooses to define society in a classic anthropological manner, as groups
of individuais "inspired by common purposes and needs and guided by a com-
mon tradition [i.e., culture r In Society and Knowledge, he further outlines the socio-
logical aspects of archaeological research and argues that "most distinctly human
characters are derived directly from society" (Childe 1956c:97). But Childe pres-
ents his most well-developed statement on the archaeology of society in Social Evo-
lution, a book that deserves extended comment.
As the title indicates, Childe's goal in Social Evolution (1951b) is overtly and un-
apologetically evolutionary, He proposes that the goal of societal archaeology is to
establish sequences of cultures in various regions, with the cultures representing so-
cieties or the societies' developrnental phases. Childe is thus overt1y concerned, from
a strict1y theoretical standpoint, with the distinction between culture and sociery, He
begins by elaborating a familiar therne: that archaeologists define a culture as "an as-
semblage of associated traits that recur repeatedly" (p. 30). The methodology of ar-
chaeological cultural analysis, when viewed in this manner, is straightforward: The
perception of a past culture is only slowly amassed through the careful process of
excavation, classification, and interpretation. Archaeologists have much to learn from
sociocultural anthropologists about rhe nature of culture because anthropologists
can gamer information-on language, symbolism, kinship--that are difficult or im-
possible for archaeologists to obtain with any measure of certitude. In accordance
with his reading of Marx, Engels, and even Stalin, Childe accepts that cultures are
created on a natural base, and that they are thus limited but not controlled by to-
pography, rainfall, temperature, soil quality, and mineral resources. Because he firrnly
believes in the interpretive and explanatory sense of Marxs historical materialism, he
assigns prominence to me dialectic connections between the forces and relations of
production. As he had said earlier, "It is not the forces of production that immedi-
ately constitute the determinant, but the mode of production, the economy within
which these forces can function" (Childe 1947:59). This Marxian account of the
motors of sociohistorical change emphasizes endogenous factors and downplays the
 16 lNTRODUCTION V GORDON CHILDE ANDTHE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY 17

role of migration, conquest, and war, the exogenous causes of change typicaIIy em- of prehistory, he perceived archaeological information as "historical documents in
ployed in much archaeological explanation during rhe time Childe wrote. their own right" (Childe 1956b:9). In History, because he is unrestricted from
Social Evolution reveals Childe's long-term cornrnitment to perceiving human his- purely archaeological data, he is perfectly free to explore rhe ways in which differ-
tory as composed of a number of progressively more technologically advanced ent philosophers of history have devised and advocated their perspectives. Childe
stages. These cultural sequences overwhelm most of his broadest inrerpretations dedicates the final chapter of the book, entitled "History as a Creative Process,"
of human history. But chapter 5, entitled "The Sociological Interpretation of Ar- to expound his views on the utility of using historical materialism as a framework
chaeological Data:' constitutes an eloquent statement of just the topics that a po- for understanding social evolution,
litically progressive societal archaeologist would wish to investigate: the power and An irnportant aspect of History stems from Childe's cornrnents about the place

1
!'
authority inherent
classes, the development
in the rise of states,
of labor
the division
specialization,
of society
and rhe institution
into hierarchical
of privare
of historiography in the relationship
notes that "In class societies rhe literati
between literacy and class-based
or clerks, the minority
societies,
of who can read
He

property. These social characteristics describe the inner workings of a culture; they and write, have nearly always belonged to the ruling class or been closely identi-
exist within the evolution of cultures, but they are distinctIy social in practice. fied with it" (Childe 1947:21). He notes that beginning with the Sumerians, run-
Childe had an active and far-ranging mind, and he undoubtedly felt parrly ning through the Greeks and the Rornans, and extending into medieval Europe,
constrained by the material demands required by his commitment to the study of the men who transcribed history were either members of the ruling elite or were
prehistory. This commitment sometimes served to imbue his work with a certain nurtured and protected by them. But Childe's evaluation of the role of elites in
ambiguity and partially accounts for the difficulty modern scholars have in creating the documents of history is not limited to the pasto He wryly observes
clearly separating the many intellectual treads that run through his voluminous that "Even in contemporary Britain" the primary market for history books is the
work (Trigger 1994: 10). As a prehistorian, Childe had few if any opportunities ruling class "and its favoured dependants and imitators in the middle classes" (p.
to use text-based sources of information in his archaeological research, and 50 he 22). He does not view the historical constancy demanded by the elites and their
continued to define individual cultures in terms of their material manifestations. agents as impartial or benigno An une qual access to history is self-perpetuating
The materiality of culture often made it difficult for him to distance himself and self-fulfilling. Publishers are willing to distribute histories thar are consistent
from a purely functional interpretation of prehistory, As a cornrnitted Marxian with the worldviews, outlooks, and the desires of the ruling class; they are much
scholar, Childe also tended to perceive a linkage between the material manifesta- less eager to promote alternative readings of history that may upset or even out-
tions of culture and the broad outlines of human cultural evolution. In his work rage this constituency. Childe gives his important perspecuve on historiography
in the philosophy of history, however, he was not as constrained by material cul- added emphasis by observing:
ture, even though he never moved toa far away from thinking about it. Childe
[NJo chronicler nor historian can attempt to record aIl events; from the super-
never lost his interest in the major transformation of human culture from sav- fluity of happenings he must select what he regards as memorable. His selection
agery to civilization, but his work entitled History (I 947) reveals his profound is dererrnined to a very smaIl extent by his personal idiosyncrasies, but on the
concern with the nature of historical analysis and inrerpretation, and rhe philo- whole by tradition and social interests .... The writer cannot help being influ-
sophical meaning of history. enced by the interests and prejudices of the sociery to which he belongs-his
History is a book unabashedly about human societies. The first sentence in the class, his nation, his Church. (p. 22)
book reveals Childe's attachment to the concept of the social and his more overt
conflation of society and culture when compared with his purely archaeological This insight is centraIIy important for understanding Childe's cornrnitment to
writings: "Within the last hundred years the societies inhabiting western Europe social archaeology in addition to societal archaeology. Childe's willingness to point
and North America have achieved conspicuous success in control over external na- toward the development of social archaeology was so foresighted that it helped to
ture" (see "History"). He accordingly defines "social environrnent" -what devise an archaeology that would not arise until many years after his death.
processualists would later term the "social subsystem"-as composed of the "re- In their introductory editorial to the Journal oJ Social Archaeology, the editors ex-
lations between individuals, groups, nations, and classes." In History, Childe self- pand the meaning of social archaeology in such a way that it encompasses diverse
identifies as a historian and states that the goal of the historian is "to disclose an approaches and varied theoretical perspectives (Meskell et alo 2001:8-10). The
order in the process of human history. When Childe worked purely as a historian inclusive meaning of social archaeology departs from a more restricted societal
 18 INTROOUCTION
archaeology because it includes the recognition that archaeological information
and interpretations can be used for purposes that are entirely oriented to the
present. It overtly expounds the now-commonplace understanding that archaeol-
ogy is not simply "about" the pasto Archaeologists now appreciate that their dis-
cipline can have significant implications for the present (for recent citations, see
Little 2002; Zimmerman et al. 2003).
Archaeologists have long pondered the social utility of archaeological research.
In Archaeology and Society, Clark (1964:251) voices a growing concern among archae-
ologists about the infusion of public money into archaeological practice. Many be-
lieved that the acceptance of public funds was necessary to meet the rising costs of
excavation materials and labor, but concomitantly, that once accepted, the money
carried with it a responsibility to make prehistory relevant to modern society. Clark
understands that this issue is profoundly social in character and that it means that
archaeology cannot be easily divorced from the present-day social context within
which it is performed. He proposes that prehistoric archaeology has several social
benefits: it is educational; it expands the human imagination; it stimulates an inter-
est in geography; it promotes an appreciation for the use of style in material cul-
ture; and it contributes to broad historical knowledge. But for Clark, the "highest
purpose" of archaeology is to promote human solidarity; archaeology has the abil-
ity to instil1 in men and women around the globe a sense of their common ances-
try and to offer an essential linkage through their shared hurnanity. Clark fUlly
recognizes that this sense of solidarity could be tragically misused-as the Nazis
employed archaeology for theír own nefarious goals in the 1930s and 1940s-but
in the end, his outlook is optimistic,
Childe was also a firm believer in the power of social archaeology. He fre-
quently tacked back and forth between the modern world and the distant past in
his attempts to make prehistory understandable both to serious students of the
discipline and to an interested public. To explain the intricacies of archaeological
I classification, he uses automobiles and European fashions (Childe 1956b:31); to
explore the Hegelian theory of the state, he employs Elizabethan history and
li modern-day England as examples (Childe 1956c); and to illustrate the archaeol-
II
til ogists' problem of interpreting the presence of long-term, material survivals he
I'
uses flintlock rifles in archaeological deposits (Childe 1929:vi). Analyzing the
II evolution of human history allows him to travel intellectual1y from "clubs to how-
itzers, from promiscuity to strict monogamy, from magic to monotheism, from
waist strings to trousers" (Childe 1956a:165). We may wish to view Childe's use
of such examples as merely heuristic, and he undoubtedly meant them to il1ustrate
his main arguments, but we can also interpret his use of such examples as an in-
dication of his deep commitment to forging archaeology as a relevant subject for
the modern world. His open avowal of the Enlightenment project of improvement
Y. GOROON CHILOE ANO THE FOUNOATIONS OF SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY 19
in two of his most widely read, popular books, Man Makes Himseli (1951a) and
What Happened in History (I 946b), was tempered by his comment in History
(1947:73) that "History does not disclose an unfaltering march to a predeter- ~
mined goal:'
Childe's most overt statement on the use of archaeological knowledge is ar-
guably presented in Society and Knowledge, his most revealing texto This book is a
work in the philosophy of knowledge: how it is acquired, what it means, and how
it is used. This work, more than any other, illustrates Childe's wide-ranging in-
tellect and his willingness to contemplate the most profound questions that so-
cial archaeologists must confronto His ruminations on symbolism, presented in
chapters 3 and 4, were far ahead of their time. In chapter 3, he asks his readers
to pender how patterns evoke meaning. He states that mindlessly tapping your
fingernails on a board has no meaning ~ntil some pattern is created and recog-
nized. To illustrate this with an evocative example, Childe asks his readers to
imagine prisoners held in a dungeon by the Gestapo or the NKVO (the Soviet
Secret police). Accounts from both wartime Germany and the postwar Soviet
Union indicate that prisoners held in such dire circumstances regularly used pat-
terns of tapping to communicate with one another. Childe could have easily se-
lected another example, but his goal is to link past and present. In the next
chapter, Childe provides an especially enlightening example of the misuse of
words as descriptive symbols:
"Communist" once meant a person who had joined a political party with a clearly
stated poli ti cal and economic program and was thereby committed to work for the
realization of the programo It is applied to an old-fashioned liberal, not of course
to describe his polirical and economic views which are diametrically opposed to
Cornmunism, but as an opprobrious epithet to prevent his employment. "Fascist"
is abused in precisely the same way in Communist circles! (p. 4 I )
Childe, a visitor to the Soviet Union, a reader of the Daily Worker, and an intel1ec-
tual Marxist, wrote this passage during the days when left-wing scholars were be-
ing regularly attacked and denied positions because of their beliefs (see, e.g.,
Harris 1968:637-38; Patterson 2001:II8).
The final chapter of Society and Knowledge, entitled "My Beliefs," is a self-
consciously revealing personal statement. In accordance with his view that knowl-
edge is a social construct, Childe unambiguously states that "The function of >
knowledge is practical, to guide action" and that "Knowledge is not to be con-
templated but to guide action" (Childe 1956c:I26, 127). He elaborates by fur-
ther stating that as an archaeologist, his job is to gather and interpret information
about men and women long dead. He acknowledges that, even though he is well
paid to conduct this often-esoteric research, his society (postwar England and the
 20 INTROOUCTION V. GOROON CHILOE ANO THE FOUNOATIONS OF SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY 2I

West) hnds little immediate, practical use for the knowledge he provides. As he
phrases it, archaeological data "will not increase the production of bornbs or but-
ter:' Childe fUlly understands that the cultural chronologies he worked so dili-
gently to devise, and of which he was forever proud (see "Retrospect"), taken in
isolation, would not have much impact on the quotidian life of the modern world.
But despire this reality, he sincerely hoped that archaeological data would eventu-
ally be usetul to "some society," His most profound hope was that people would
learn to use archaeological knowledge "to behave more humanlyf Though Childe
was clearly pessimistic about the future, as evidenced by his suicide, he was in the
long run an optimist who hoped that alI of his toils, and those of his colleagues,
would not simply generate knowledge for knowledge's sake.
Some of what Childe thought about the ancient world has turned out to be
wrong. Some of his early research now appears amateurish, and his commitment
to the basic outlines of the savagery-to-civilization sequence is now woefUlly out
of date (Sherratt 1989:183). The same may be said for any pioneering scholar
who charted a course through unfamiliar intellectual territory,
But the enduring aspects of Childe's body of work in social and societal ar-
chaeology remain fresh because he was an original thinker who was not afraid to
be wrong about something or to misinterpret the arcana of history. We hope, by
presenting this collection, that students will appreciate the depth of Childe's
thinking and will begin to understand his ability to reach beyond the bounds of
conventional archaeological thinking to explore new intellectual ground.
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Patterson, T C. 1995. Toward a Social History if ArchaeoÚJgyin the United States. Fort Worth: Har-
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Wanser. 1978. Social Archaeology: Beyond Subsistmce and Dating. New York: Academic Press.
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---o 1984. Approaches to Social Archae%gy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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---o 1987. Y. Gordon Childe: A Marxist Archaeologist. In Studies in the Neolithic and Ur-
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I'
,I
I
Changing Methods and Aims in Prehistory I

T
H15 15 THE F1R5T PRE5IDENTIAL AOORESS TO BE OELIVEREO before our
Society since it has become the Prehistoric Sociecy without qualification.
It seems therefore appropriate to choose in preference to any particular
problem the general topic of the aims and methods of our science. The last ten
years have witnessed an extraordinary increase in the data available to rhe prehis-
torian and a remarkable expansion in the field he must survey. For this very rea-
son we have been led to a revaluation of the methods and concepts to be employed
in the interpretation of our material. To arrange and classify data pouring in from
every corner of the world parochial categories that worked well enough for local
collections can no longer serve.
Prehistoric archaeology has twin roots and a dual function: it tries on the one
hand to prolong written history backward beyond the oldest literary records, on
the other to carry natural history forward from rhe point where geology and
palaeontology would leave it. In practice prehistoric remains were first systemati-
cally studied with a view to supplementing the information about Celts, Oruids,
Britons, Picts and Germans provided by ancient authors. But it was the union with
geology after the acceptance of Boucher de Perthe's discoveries that made prehis-
tory a science.
The first step to making archaeology a science was to establish a systematic
and significant classification for its materials. From geology prehistory learnt not
only the need for a logical classification but the most significant basis for such.
That basis must be chronological. Archaeology cannot supplernent history or be-
come prehistory unless its material is arranged in the true historical order and
temporal sequence. But it has taken some time for archaeologists to realize the pri-

Previously published in Procud;ngs oj tk Prebistoríc soc;,ty. vol. I, no. I, pp. 1-15. Carnbridge: Prehisroric Sociery,
1935.

25
 26 CHAPTER I CHANGING
ority of the chronological classification. I know museums where the stone axe-
heads, flint arrow-heads.whetstones, wrist-guards, querns and spindle-whorls have
been catalogued together because all happen to be made of stone.
Geology not only taught archaeologists the necessity of a chronological elas-
sification, it also indieated how sueh can be seiemifieally established, The rule of
stratigraphy has been taken over from geology. Though Lueretius could deduce the
sequence of Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, the proof thar such typologieal ages
succeed one another in the assumed order ean strietly speaking only be given by
stratigraphy. But archaeology went on to borrow from geology methods and eon-
eepts that eannot appropriately be applied to a human seience.
,i, In geology the sequence of sedimentary rocks is indeed established by stratig-
:'j
:1 raphy, But, once that has been done, the place of a given deposit in the sequence
can be diagnosed by the type fossils-Leiifossilen-eomprised in it. The arehaeo-
!:~
·.·:1' logical counterpart of this proeedure is the establishment of a typological
,il' chronology. The relative position of an assemblage of relics should be diagnosed
,I
'.'·,·"1
by a few typical artifaets included in it. In the classical division imo Stone, Bronze
11 and Iron Ages, established for Denmark by Thomsen in 1836, axes and knives fUI-
1 '[
,1,,: fil the role of type fossils. In the more arnbitious scheme of de Mortillet ' groups
1
,.1 :.1'
111'
li'[ ,
of distinctive artifacts, proved stratigraphicalIy to succeed one another in Western
ii, Europe, are presented as Leiifossilen indicative of archaeological periods; his very
li, nomenclature is modelled on the geological and suggests an analogy between ge-
ological and archaeological units of time. But the analogy is false, and during the
last fifty years prehistorians have had to waste much time in clearing away rhe mis-
conceptions it induced.
The concepts of natural science cannot be applied without modification to
human sciences; natural history is far more abstract than human history, and pre-
historians must advance from the abstractions of the former to the concreteness
of the latter. That involves in the first place new conceptions of time and differ-
ent sorts of chronological units. Geological periods have an absolute value and are
applicable equally to alI continents and latitudes only because they are so enor-
mously long that temporal differences between events in distinct areas are relatively
insignificant. Natural history must take these periods as units. The fossil flora or
fauna characteristic of a geological period did not presumably appear simultane-
ously all over the world, but originated in one centre from which it slowly spread.
But with the geological period, defined by the fossils, as unit, the time occupied
by the spread is irnperceptible. With his limitations and for his purposes the
palaeomologist must ignore time lags between regions; for him alI Edaphosauri are
li! "contemporary,"
1.i'i,:
·,:1
The prehistorian of humanity cannot afford to make abstraction of such lags.
Judged by their industries the New Zealand Maoris in the days of Captain Cook
"
I',[
L
METHOOS ANO AIMS IN PREHISTORY 27
and the Tasians of the Nile Valley before 5000 B.e. were both "neolithic," Polished
stone axes, treated as Leiifossilen} would rnake the Maoris of the 18th century A.D.
contemporaries of Egyptians who nevertheless lived sixty centuries earlier in terms
of human history! A period which telescopes imo nothingness the whole of writ-
ten history is useless as a chronologieal terrn for prehistory.
Typological periods can have at best a regional validity, can provide a conve-
nient but provisional framework for classifying local antiquities. Thomsen's three
ages did enable him to arrange his colIection of Oanish relics in the right ehrono-
logical order, Ir would have broken down had it been extended to colIections from
Greece and Greenland. To determine what Danish products should be displayed
as comemporary with Bronze Age relics from Greece or Esquimaux Stone Age ar-
tifacts a time scale quite independenr of the material must be invoked. Ideally the
prehistorian must aim at applying the scale naturally given by the earth's revolu-
tion round the sun and giving dates in terrns of solar years; failing that he must
look for some natural phenomenon that affected the whole world relatively fast.
Ice ages and pluvials offer a chronometer of the requisite independence, though
the time units it records are excessively longo
Second1y the classes studied by natural history are highly abstract: the natu-
ralists' species and genera are arrived at by ignoring the manifold differences be-
tween individual oak trees or sheep to focus attention on a limited number of
common traits. Literary history on the other hand is concerned with individual
men. Prehistory cannot be content wirh an abstract humanity. Ir cannot indeed
reach the individual, but it can appreciate differences between nation and nation,
differences due to distinct social traditions. Only then can prehistoric arehaeology
be in a position to answer legitimate questions put to it by philologists and liter-
ary historians: whence carne the Indo-Europeans? when did Celts first reach
Britain? were Sumerians or Serrutes the first to settle in Mesopotarnia? That in-
volves the application of more discriminating categories to its material. "Polished
stone celt" is a very abstract term grouping together a variety of objects differing
in forrn, material and function.
The significance of this variety becomes apparem when we consider how the
implérnent was manufactured, hafted and used, when we regard it not as a natural
object but as a tool made by man to enable him to cope with his environment. The
study of living human societies as fUnctioning organisms has revealed to archaeol-
ogists this approach to their materials, It has led to the correct definition and in-
terpretation of the concept of a culture. And with this concept archaeology can
advance from the abstraction of natural science to the comparative concreteness
of prehistory.
The culture is not an a priori category elaborated in the studies of philosophers
and then imposed from outside upon working archaeologists. Cultures are observed
 1 28 CHAPTER I CHANGING
I,
11' 1.
facts. The 6eld-worker does 6nd speci6c types of tools, weapons, and ornaments
repeatedly associated together in graves and habitations of one kind and contrasted
with the artifacts found in graves and settlements of another kind. The interpreta-
tion of the observed phenornenon is supplied by ethnography. The traits of a cul-
ture are thus presented together to rhe archaeologists because they are the creations
i i
of a single people, adjustments to its environment approved by its collective expe-
rience; they thus express the individuality of a human group united by common so-
cial traditions. With thís idea prehistory vindicates its character as a human, in
contrast to a natural, science. But it is obliged thereby to modiíy still further and
redefme methodological concepts borrowed, as we have seen, from natural science.
1 must beg leave to elaborate this point because the concept of a culture is not yet
so 6rmly established and its implications are not so generally familiar in Britain as.
say. in Central Europe.
The classi6cation of remains by cultures was early forced upon Scandinavian,
German and Italian prehistorians because in North and Central Europe groups of
rernains, distinguished by pottery, burial rites and so on, are quite dramatically jux-
taposed and contrasted throughout the New Stone Age. The rnethod was used by
British archaeologists working in the Orienr like Petrie or on local protohistoric
periods like Arthur Evans. But it has been only slowly adopted by the majority of
workers in Great Britain for three reasons.
Our Neolithic and Bronze Ages long seerned relatively homogeneous. The
Swede Ãberi was the first to attempt to distinguish cultural provinces in the
New Stone of Britain in 1912, and it is only ten years since Menghin. Kendrick
and Leeds provided a reliable basis by teaching us to recognize two classes of
neolithic ponery. Our bronzes could be presented as a self-contained evolu-
tionary series till Crawford in 19123 recognized that the sudden appearance of
a whole complex of fresh types without local precursors was symptomatic of an
invasion.
In the second place British prehistorians in their efforts to identify rhe Kelts
or to trace prehistoric invasions to their sources relied on physical anthropology.
Antiquaries paid more attention to skeletons than to the tombs in which they lay
or to the grave goods accompanying them. Ir was generally held last century that
peoples named by ancient writers, Celts, Gerrnans, Picts and so on, would be pure
races: each would possess a distinct physical type easily recognized by such simple
criteria as the cephalic index. ln Britain that belief was fostered especially by an
excepcional coincidence. The dominant group in our early Bronze Age does actu-
ally exhibit a physical type easily distinguished even by the cephalic index from
that of the builders of our Long Barrows. And so Abercrornby, though perfectly
familiar with the idea of a culture, habitually speaks of a race and defines his in-
vaders by their physical type. The coincidence of zoological race and archaeolog-
METHODS AND AIMS IN PREHISTORY 29
ical culture exemplified by our Beaker-folk is in fact unusual. And the science of
genetics has exploded the old, simple conception of race.
Even by Upper Palaeolithic times the populations of the temperate zones were
already mixed. Apure breed, a race characterized by uniform physical peculiaritíes
easily recognized in the skeleton, can only arise in a mixed population by excep-
tionally prolonged isolation and inbreeding. ln a normal mixed population, owing
to the complexity of mans genetic constitution and the particulate inheritance of
the several genes determining head form stature and so on, a uniform racial type
is not to be expected. Similarities between individuals as indicated by a few skele-
tal measurements need not imply blood relationship. "There is a fair probability
that two piebald cats will have the same ancestor. In the case of two piebald men
(not known to be related) the opposite is probably true," writes Haldane in the
last Encyclopedia Britannica. Biometric methods may yield a workable definition of a
race where a large number of skeletons are available. But no reputable biologist
would now use the cephalic indices of a few skulls to define a race or deduce mi-
grations or anything else therefrom.
These unpalatable truths are penetrating but slowly to the general publico But
British prehistorians are now abandoning excessive expectations from anatomy.
The peoples named in hisrory or deduced by philology. Kelts, Iberians, Belgae.
Semites and Indo-Europeans were most probably racial mixtures. All we know is
that they were united by a common social heritage-by community of language.
institutions, artistic and industrial traditions. The culture, reflecting a common
social herirage, not race, the product of biological inheritance, can alone give a
clue to the recognition of such peoples.
Finally the idea of culture has only quite recently been applied to the classifi-
cation of remains of the Old Stone Age. Students of the palaeolithic, trained in
geological rnethods, long remained content to accept evolutionary concepts and
seem to have despaired of chronological systems independent of typology. As
long as excavated material was available only from Western Europe, the groups of
artifacts labelled Chellean, Acheulean, Mousterian, Solutrean and Magdalenian
could be accepted as a simple evolutionary series. They could be taken as charac-
teriz~g temporal phases in a continuous process of cultural development, For in
France and Spain the groups in question do follow one another in a temporal se-
quence. The extension of the archaeologists' purview to East Europe, Africa and
Asia ultimately upset this evolutionary conception. And the establishment of the
glacial sequence as a chronological framework made the system unnecessary.
Already in 1916 the Bavarian, Oberrnaier," translated to Spain, had distin-
guished core-cultures and flake-cultures in lower palaeolirhic industries. His ideas
were taken up by other Central European scholars, notably by Baier, and by 1925
Menghin5 was classif}ring palaeolithic material in cultural groups precisely like
 I
30 CHAPTER I
--
I CHANGING
'I those used for the neolithic and later periods. But in the classic lands of palae-
olithic research the chronological system of de Mortillet persisted much longer;
the evolutionary idea still dominated the great textbooks of Macalister, Burkitt
and MacCurdy, and Oberrnaier's ideas, though mentioned in the third edition,
have not transformed the presentation of Sollas in Ancient Hunters.
The impetus to the reorganization of palaeolithic studies in western Europe
carne primarily from our last president, Henri Breuil, and was perhaps not un-
connected with his Voyagepaléolithique en l'Europe centrale in 1923.6 His article on the
Levallois flake in Man, 1926,7 marks the turn of the tide. And in 1928 Dorothy
Garrod's Presidential Address to this Society'' crowns the victory of the new con-
ceptions. But quite apart from foreign ideas the experience of our own field-
workers made a reorientation essential. Thus a former president, Leslie
Armstrong, showed that at CresweU Crags, an industry, typologically a late Auri-
gnacian, was parallel in time with the French Magdalenian.
Even the recent textbooks in English, on the palaeolithic, like Burkitt's Old
Stone Age and still more Leakey's, Adam': Ancestors, are now dominated by the human-
historical as contrasted wirh the naturalistic evolutionary view. The existence of
distinct but contemporary cultures is now adrnitted for the Old Stone Age as fully
as for later periods. The implications of the admission are not yet fUlly or gener-
ally grasped. Types cannot at once serve to characterize cultures and to mark pe-
riods of time. The flat stag's horn harpoon and associated types define very
satisfactorily an Azilian culture but not an Azilian period. The Azilian relics from
the 25-foot beach of Scotland are almost certainly late r, when judged by the in-
dependent and reliable time scale fUrnished by geology and climatology, than the
corresponding relics in Franco-Cantabria. Such a chronological discrepancy,
which typology alone would have obliterated, gives the clue to the direction of a
prehistoric movement of peoples.
Ín rhe motor car age we can still find communities relying for transportation
on rhe ox cart and others lacking wheeled vehicles altogether: in Indian villages the
same sort of wagon is used to-day as at Ur 5000 years ago. The time lag here is
patent. But in prehistoric times, too, there were backward communities amongst
whom old-fashioned implements, weapons, ornaments and dweUings persisted
long after more progressive neighbours had abandoned these for superior types or
more modern styles. All this is obvious, but we need to subject ourselves to con-
tinuous drilling.
For instance I was inclined to accept the flat axe and triangular dagger as reli-
able signs of an Early Bronze Age that could be dated between 1800 and 1400
B.C. in Britain. 1 was quite surprised when, applying to the Scottish material the
numerical methods brilliantly expounded by our former President Fox," I found
that the flat axe must probably have remained in use till the introduction of the
METHODS AND AIMS IN PREHISTORY 3I
socketed axe in the Late Bronze Age. Or again this very summer I excavated a thor-
ough1y prehistoric looking promontory fort in County Antrim. Luckily an im-
ported glass bangle dated the site to the 8th or 9th century A.D. Judging the
pottery by standards valid for southern England, I should have called it Hallstatt
and dated the site a thousand years too early! We have always to be remembering
that tricks of flint-work or potting, types of tools or weapons, burial rires and
artistic styles may express just techniques, ways of working or fighting, beliefs and
tastes consecrated by the social traditions of a particular people, Other contem-
poraries may have favoured different fashions and devices so that the traits noted
in rhe first instance cannot be set up as standards of technique and fashion that
should characterize and dominate any absolute period of time.
Of course alI this has seriously complicated the archaeologist's task in fUlfill-
ing his primary duty of classifying his material chronologicaUy. In the classifica-
tion of relics perhaps the first step should now be to assign them to their proper
cultural group; it is the cultures which should be classified chronologically rather
than individual relics. Naturally the position of a given culture may vary from
place to place. Despire the chronological sequence established stratigraphically for
Cambridgeshire and Wiltshire, we suspect that in some parts of Britain Windrnill
Hill pottery may be as late or later than some Beakers!
The technique of archaeological mapping which has been so splendidly devel-
oped in this country thanks to Crawford, Curwen, Chítry, Clark, Fox, PhiUips and
others is very helpful both in deciding to what culture a type belongs and in de-
termining the chronological relation between several cultures. For instance con-
temporary cultures tend to exhibit mutually exclusive distributions while
successive cultures may and successive phases of the same culture should partly
occupy the same area. Ir is the geographical discrepancy in the distribution of
Windmill Hill and Beaker remains that encourages me to think that the two cul-
tures overlapped in time in Scodand.
The cultural classification must eventually impose modifications on archaeo-
logical nomenclature. De Mortillet's terms were designed to denote periods of
time. But we have now agreed that the Chellean, Solutrean, Magdalenian and Hall-
statt tvpes he figured really distinguish cultures to which other contemporary cul-
tures have to be compared and contrasted. But the terms Hallstatt and Chellean
are still often loosely used as denoting periods of time. Within limits this usage is
doubtless convenient. In British archaeology "Rornan period" is a loose but handy
substitute for the more accurate designation "Ist to 4th century A.D.;' and is con-
ventionally applied to native remains even from Scodand or Ireland. The domi-
nant culture of a region can, that is, be used to define a local period; in a
chronological classification, contemporary "backward" cultures may still be as-
signed to the period designated by the standard dominant culture.
I"
32 CHAPTER I CHANGING
,I
But where there is the slightest danger of confUsing the chronological with the
cultural classification, such usage is to be deprecated. The Hallstatt cemetery
yielded a typical set of relics illustrative of the fashions current in Central Europe
during a limited period of historical time-say from 750 to 450 B.C. Is the term
Hallstatt to denote that period of time or the principal culture then flourishing
in Central Europe? Shall we apply it to any sort of relic that was current between
750 and 450 B.C. even though such were unrepresented at Hallstatt, or only to the
types found in the cemetery? Current usage is ambiguous. The term "Hallstatt pe-
riod in Britain" is not applied to relics current here between 750 and 550 B.C.-
the Late Bronze Age assemblage to which the type site offers no significant
parallel-but to certain groups, derived from Continental Hallstatt cultures but
not appearing here appreciably before 500 B.C. There is the same ambiguity about
the use of Chellean. The term ought to designate a culture, characterized by hand-
axes that flourished in France in pre-Russian times. But Homo heidelbergensis is often
called a "Chellean man," Today that designation implies that he made hand-axes
which is certainly untrue. All thar is intended by its abusers is that Homo heidelber-
gensis lived in pre-Russian times. Why not say so? Let "Chellean man" denote the
hominid who made hand-axes such as characterize the classical Chellean culture.
In the interests of clear thinking I would urge archaeologists to confine the
terms Chellean, Magdalenian, Hallstatt to the designation of cultures. When it is
desired to speak of the period of time during which any of them flourished, use
geological or climatological terms or dates in calendar years. For Mousterian pe-
riod in Europe sayWürm I, instead of kitchen-midden period say Liuorina or early
~1
Atlantic.
I
;.1
What then is to become of the hallowed terms Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Bronze
Age, lron Age? Can they survive as designations of true periods of time which
II could be expressed in terms of solar years in our calendar? Obviously noto But I
,I.
1,' should like to believe that they may be given a profound significance as indicating
I~
vital stages in human progresso I would suggest that the classification Old Stone
II Age, New Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age draws attention to real revolutions
'I" ,
that affected all departments of human life.
i!, The first steps in progress that distinguish man from other animals-the con-
I'
li,.I' trol and production of fire and so on-go back to the Old Stone Age. But all
palaeolithic peoples relied for sustenance, as far as we know, exclusivelyon hunt-
li ing, fishing and collecting. The first revolutionary advance was made when some
I'
group or groups began to cultivate plants and/or to breed food animals. Culti-
vated plants and domestic animaIs put the cultivator, the herdsman and the mixed
farmer in control of their own food supply; they can within certain limits augment
the supply according to demando And so population can expand to a degree im-
possible even among the most favourably situated hunters like the Magdalenians
METHOOS ANO AIMS IN PREHISTORY 33
in the Dordogne or the Kwakiutl in British Columbia. It is one of the many ser-
vices rendered to prehistory by Prof. Elliot Smith to have insisted on the revolu-
tionary contrast between food-gatherers and food-producers. Following his lead
Harold PeakeIOand others have proposed equating the beginning of the neolithic
with this beginning of food-producing economy. That revolution in human life
may be termed the neolithic revolution. Neolithic will mean "food-producing"
and will point a contrast with the food-gathering economy of the Old Stone Age.
Such a division will agree passably with classical definitions of neolithic: all au-
thorities mention domestic animals and agriculture as well as polished stone axes,
pottery and weaving.
I have tried in my Bronze Age to show how the next of the classical "periods" is
delimited by an economic revolution of almost equal scope. The adoption of
metal tools and weapons that distinguishes the Bronze Age doubtless gave their
users enhanced control over their environment. But the superiority of copper or
bronze over flint and stone tools is, I think, generally overestimated. Not only for
tilling the land, but also for the execution of monumental carvings and even for
shaving the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom were apparently content with stone.
The European as well as the Egyptian evidence indicates that it was for weapons
and ornaments rather than for tools that metal was first extensivelyused. But the
possession of superior weapons is in itself hardly an advance comparable in scope
with the adoption of a food-producing economy.
The economic and social implications of metallurgy are not thereby ex-
hausted. In neolithic cultures, as we know them among contemporary savagesand
as we can reconstruct them in prehistoric Europe, industry is generally organized
on a domestic basis and each cornrnunity is self-sufficing: each household, beside
producing its own food, could and probably did manufacture the tools, weapons,
clothes and vessels needed by its members. At the same time the cornrnunity did
not have to rely on foreign trade for any necessities. The regular use of metal gen-
erally broke down this independence and self-sufficiency. The smith, like the
miner, is a specialized craftsman; his materiaIs, the metaIs or their ores, have nearly
alwaysto be obtained from other regions or peoples by some more or less regular
systern of trade or barter.
The use of copper and still more of bronze is thus the symptom of a radical
change in economic structure in the direction of modern conditions. It indicates
specialization of labour and the beginnings of regular foreign trade. There with
new trades and new possibilities of livelihood are opened up. To secure bronze the
peasant must produce more food-stuffs than are needed for domestic consumption;
on his surplus miners, smiths and traders may live.The term neolithic is thus ap-
plicable only to "self-sufficing food-producing cornmunities," Bronze Age implies
an economic revolution which has evoked and provided a living for specialized
 34 CHAPTER I CHANGING
craftsmen and merchants. Ir will be recalled that twelve years ago Fox! I took a sim-
ilar economic basis for the subdivision of the Bronze Age in East Anglia: he took
as the line of demarcation berween the Late Bronze Age, not rhe socketed axe, but
the founder's hoard and the reorganization of the metal industry that it implies.
The lron Age is demarcated by an economic revolution of even more obvious
significance. The superiority of iron over bronze weapons, generally ernphasized,
is indeed questionable. The real advantage of iron is its cheapness. With cheap and
durable iron tools communities were enabled to undertake on a large scale works
like tree-felling and draining for which bronze tools were toa precious and stone
tools toa fragile. Cheap iron tools opened up new and more fertile lands for set-
t1ement and thus made available new supplies of food. Distribution maps vividly
illustrate the dramatic expansion of population as a result of the lron Age revo-
lution. ln Scotland for instance you see population throughout the local Bronze
Age restricted to the drier and less heavily timbered but agrieulturally poor patches
of sandy and gravelly soi!. ln the Iron Age regions hítherto blank and the fertile
valleys are densely settled. ln terms of population iron does mark a revolution, and
can thus legitimately be used as the criterion of a major division in the classifica-
tion of eultures by stages in progresso
Admittedly there are diffieulties in the functional-economic interpretation
here outlined for Thomsens "ages." The polished stone axe that marks the ne-
olirhic period of the typologist was and is used by food-gatherers. The great
comb-ware culture of northeastern Europe exhibits the typologically neolithic
traits of polished stone and pottery, but its economic foundation was food-gath-
ering; its economy is palaeolithic though its industry is formally neolithic. Con-
versely a typical group of self-sufficing food-producers like the Badarians
apparently used no polished stone axes; presumably they had no use for them,
since timber was scarce or non-existent. A polished stone axe is not, therefore, a
conclusive or necessary sign of a neolithic culture. But, after ali, that truth had
been established long before by the discovery of polished stone axes in Bronze Age
graves and Iron Age forts and crannogs. Still some term like opsipalaeolithic or
opsimiolithic ought to be adopted to describe cultures which are formally ne-
olithic or contemporary with neolithic cultures, but stiU preserve the gathering
economy of the Old Stone Age.
A second objection is more serious. MenghinI2 claims that food-production
goes back to the pleistocene period-palaeolithic times in the strict chronological
sense of the termo His contention is still unproven. But pottery used to be re-
garded as exclusively neolithic. Yet Dr. Leakey found sherds in a pleistocene de-
posit in Kenya. And recently Burchell and Reid Moir13 have eloquently restated
rhe case for palaeolithic pottery in Europe too. Their arguments and others have
convinced me that palaeolirhic pottery is a possibility to be reckoned with. Even
I
I 1/
METHOOS ANO AIMS IN PREHISTORY 35
palaeolithic agriculture then must not be ruled out a priori. If the cultivation of
plants in the upper pleistocene could be established, the significance attached to
the terms palaeolithic or neolirhic would have to be changed.
The Natufian culture discovered by Garrod in Palestine constitutes a less se-
rious objection. The Natufian industry includes sickles that presumably were used
for harvesting grain, but lacks pottery and other neolithic traits. The culture need
not, however, be very ancient-not older than the undoubtedly neolithic Tasian
and Merimdian for instance. It could therefore reasonably be termed neolithic or
proto-neolithic on the definitions here proposed.
Nor does my tenta tive definition fix the lower limits of neolirhic quite unam-
biguously. Even in a typologically pure neolithic culture we sometimes find indi-
cations of industrial specialization and some organized trade (as opposed to
occasional exchanges of luxury articles such as are to be anticipated in any ne-
olithic culture). Flint mining, for instance, is a specialized industry; the products
of Spiennes or Grimes Graves were regularly traded to neighbouring districts. On
the other hand the sporadic importation of manufactured metal objects need not
denote such dependence on external trade as should merit the designation, Bronze
Age. The natives of the Pacific were acquainted with metallic iron when the first
European navigators reached them.l" But they had no idea how it was produced,
and it played no necessary part in their industries; they treated ir, when they could
get ir, as a superior substitute for shell or stone. lt would be absurd to describe
such native cultures as "Iron Age." So in prehistory a few objects of copper and
bronze or imitations of such in stone need not mark the beginning of the Bronze
Age; we have to consider the whole habit of rhe culture in which they were im-
ported and the manner in which the metal is employed.
Copper and bronze were known and probably used in Denrnark from the very
beginning of the passage grave period. But metal tools of that age are so extrernely
rare and stone tools so numerous and well-made that it is clear that the economic
organization needed to secure a regular supply of metal had not yer been achieved;
even the need for ir can hardly have been felt, The Danish passage graves, separate
graves and long cists may still be regarded as illustrations of a neolithic stage of
culture. The same is true of our long barrows, chambered cairns and causewayed
camps; their builders seem to have made no serious effort to import regular sup-
plies of metal or for that matter anything else. The Beaker-folk, though partly
contemporary with the foregoing and very competent workers with stone, never-
theless evince such eagerness to obtain metal, amber, jet and so on as to earn the
traditional title of Bronze Age. At least they pave the way for a full Bronze Age
economy by creating a demando
Provisionally then I would suggest that the terms palaeolithic, neolithic, etc.,
should be regarded as indicative of economic stages. ln adopting as one method a
36 CHAPTER 1 CHANGING
dassification by economic stages, archaeology would not be abandoning that his-
torical character which I daimed the concept of culture gave it. We shall continue
to distinguish cultures and to assign each its proper place in a framework of ab-
solute chronology. Only then shall we consider the economic stage to which a cul-
ture should be assigned on the "functional-economic'' dassification. The latter step
constitutes a comparison between the material equipment, economic organization
and scientific knowledge of one prehistoric people with those of others. We cer-
tainly do not use the culrure exdusively as a means of tracing migrations. But it is
an old-fashioned sort of history that is made up entirely of kings and battles to the
exdusion of scientific discoveries and social conditions. And so it would be an old-
fashioned prehistory that regarded it as its sole funcrion to trace migrations and to
locate the crad1esof peoples. History has recently become much less political-Iess
a record of intrigues, battles and revolutions-and more cultural. That is the true
meaning of what is miscalled the materialist conception of history-realistic con-
ception would as Cole says be better-it puts in the foreground changes in eco-
nomic organization and scientific discoveries. And dearly there is scope for a
realistic conception of prehistory and ample opportunity for the archaeologist to
co-operate with the historian on the cultural and economic side.
Our dumb relics and monuments can never reveal the names of prehistoric
chieftains, the drearns of seers or the issues of individual battles. But they can be
made to disdose the economic organization of a people and a period. We can de-
termine how a given group got its food, how far labour was specialized, what part
commerce played in the community's life, what geological, botanical and chemical
knowledge the hunters, farmers, and craftsmen were applying in their several pur-
suits. That is what is disdosed when we study a culture, not as a dead group of
fossils or curios but as a living, functioning organismoTools and cultivation plots,
vessels and hut-foundations reveal the equipment used by the community in the
daily business of securing food and shelter: the techniques of their manufacture
and cultivation reveal the science, the collective experience that the group is ap-
plying to those ends. We see material culture as an adaptation to an environment,
to use a biological termo
The study and appreciation of a culture from this angle imposes fresh obliga-
tions upon the archaeologist. He can no longer be content with merely describing
and dassifying the objects he uncovers; he must ascertain how they were made and
whence the materials for their manufacture carne. To do that the archaeologist
must enlist the co-operation of geologists, botanists and zoologists, of practical
farmers, artisans and engineers as well as of ethnographers. And to see the culture
functioning the environment to which it was an adaptation must be reconstructed.
I need not elaborate these requirements. They were brilliantly stated by Crawford
in Man and His Past, that in many respects remains a complete and accessible text
METHODS AND AIMS IN PREHISTORY 37
book of archaeological method. Fresh devices have of course been added in sub-
sequent years; the technique of pollen analysis, invented by von Post, has put in
our hands a powerful instrument for reconstructing the dimatic and floristic con-
ditions with which prehistoric man had to cope. Its value is being demonstrated
in England by the work of the Fenland Research Committee led by our Honorary
Editor.
Using what I call the functional conception of a culture British prehistorians
have already made outstanding contributions to history. To take but a single in-
stance. Literary sources have farniliarized us with the invasions of Britain by the
Belgaeand by the Anglo-Saxons. But what did the invasions mean beyond a change
of language and the substitution of one group of barbarian overlords for another,
less or more barbarous? The archaeological investigation of ancient field-systems,
developed particularly by Cecil Curwen.P has supplied the answer: the Teutonized
and Teutonic invaders introduced a new system of agriculture and a superior type
of plough. These for the first time opened up to tillage the fertile but heavy day
lands of the English valleys. The increased food-supplies thereby tapped made
possible a rapid increase in population, reflected in distribution maps but not ex-
plicable by the probable numbers of the invaders. In the instance quoted archaeo-
logical investigation has not only supplernented the written sources but has
revealed quite a new and deeper significance in the recorded facts. Evidently ar-
chaeology can extend and enrich history equally in the wider domain unillumi-
nated by written documents. And such extension and enrichment is essential if
history is worthily to fulfil her functions.
One of these is surely to define progressoTo ask "have we progressed?" is of
course meaningless-the question can only be answered in the affirmative. It is for
history to say what this progress has consisted in and to provide standards for de-
termining it. But the written record is too short, toa broken and toa one-sided.
To reach a judgment unbiassed by private prejudices, one must survey a much
wider field than is adequately covered by written documents. In the short time-
spans they illumine, accidental ups and downs are relatively so prorninent that gen-
eral tendencies can hardly be isolated from them. Archaeology can survey the
vicissitudes of mans material culture, of human econornies, not only over the beg-
garly 5000 years, patchily illumined by written records, but over a span of 5000
centuries. It opens up a horizon wide enough for the accidental features of the
landscape to assume their correct proportions,
The old stages or ages, re-interpreted as above suggested, provide a significant
basis for the dassification of cultures that are to be compared and judged from
this realist standpoint. The major divisions in the dassification should coincide
with critical points in human progresso And the functional conception of a cul-
ture suggests an objective and even numerical criterion for the recognition of such
 38 CHAPTER I CHANGING
critical points. For it re-establishes on a firmer basis the traditional association of
archaeology with natural science. Now one of the outstanding features of natural
science is the objectivity of its condusions; it is in that quarter that we might ex-
pect to learn how to apply impersonal and passionless judgments to the more de-
bateable domain of human affairs.
Prehistoric archaeology, as remarked at the outset, carries on the story of nat-
ural history. Human progress, at least in material culture, can be treated as re-
placing organic evolution among the so-called lower animals, It is a truism that for
Homo sapiens the tools, clothes and refuges that man makes take the place of the
members, Iurrv coats and protective markings that other species grow in order to
I I
obtain food, warmth and security: a tool has been aptly termed an extra-corporeal
i I
limb. The function of the animal's bodily equipment is to enable it to live and
propagate its species, Material culture, as defined here, is just the assemblage of
devices that a community has invented or learnt to enable it to survive and expando
Success in survival, expressible in numerical terms, measures the biological value
of a species' inherited endowments. The same standard should apply to material
culture. Advances in material culture should then promote a numerical increase in
the community that creates or adopts them. Advances of critical importance to
humanity should be foliowed by such a multiplication as to be conspicuously re-
f1ected in the population curve. We should then have a criterion of progress pos-
sessing all the objectivity of number,
A familiar example from English history shows that our expectation is justi-
fied. A dramatic upward twist in the population graph after 1750 ref1ectsthe pro-
found significance to the whole English people of that application of new
methods of production and transportation termed the Industrial Revolution. Pre-
historic revolutions in material culture, ref1ected equaliy in the population curve,
should delimit the stages of human progress in a scientific dassification. In re-
defining the prehistoric stages earlier I deliberately tried to indicate that each made
room for a larger population than the last; the opportunity for an expansion,
i grounds for expecting a kink in the graph, were, I hope, demonstrated.
III Unhappily prehistoric communities ex hypothesí kept no vital statistics that we
can study. And estimates of prehistoric population densities are beset with many
difficulties. Burials provide certain indications, but reliable deductions are im-
peded by the number of unknown factors: how long was a given cemetery in use?
were ali members of the community accorded ceremonial burial or was that priv-
ilege restricted to a small aristocracy? what proportion died away from home on
campaigns or hunting expeditions? above all what allowance must be made for dis-
turbance in the centuries or miliennia since the interments and for graves not yet
discovered?Hut-villages would provide more reliable data if intact and completely
excavated;from the number of contemporary huts at a site it would be possible to
METHODS AND AIMS IN PREHISTORY 39
make a reasonably dose estimate of the approximate population. But a fuliy ex-
plored village like the Goldberg or Kôln-Lindenthal is, alas, arare exception.
Serious estimates of prehistoric populations remain a task, a perfectly feasible
task, for the future. But even the imperfect data now at our disposal permit of pro-
visional comparisons of population-densities at successive ages or stages. No
doubt the chance of a skeleton, a grave, or a hut-site surviving is inverselv pro-
portional to its antiquity. But even so, the number of palaeolithic and mesolithic
skeletons known frorn France is tiny in comparison with the thousands assigned
to the neolithic age.Yet the former have to be distributed over a period of ten or
even twenty times as longoThe comparison gives a distinct if incondusive indica-
tion that the neolithic revolution, the adoption of a food-producing economy, did
promote an expansion of population as it should on our theory.
No similar comparison between the Neolithic and Bronze age can be usefully
instituted while the duration of each pericd remains so uncertain. But in compar-
ing the Bronze and Iron ages particularly in Britain we inevitably get the impres-
sion of a substantially greater population in the later and shorter period.
The establishment of an analogy between organic evolution and human
progress does not mean abandoning the historical character established for pre-
history and returning to naturalistic ideas. A pseudo-Marxist materialism might
indeed represent the stages of progress, the archaeological "ages," as mere adjust-
ments evoked by the environment independently, though not simultaneously, in
various regions. But no sane prehistorian wili contend that the strandloopers who
have left the kitchen-middens in Oenmark began of their own initiative to culti-
vate emmer or to tame sheep. For no wild wheat grew in Oenmark to cultivate and
no wild sheep ranged the forests for the strandloopers to tame. The distinctive el-
ements of Danish neolithic cultures-the plants cultivated and the animals bred
therein-can only have reached the Baltic by some sort of diffusion.
The fact of diffusion, attested unambiguously in cases like this, constitutes
one of the outstanding differences between progress and evolution. An animal
species cannot communicate to another its experiences, the inherited instinctive
and bodily adjustments that guarantee its survival. A human community can and
does borrow from neighbours devices and processes that the latter have found ben-
eficial. Human experience can be pooled. We in Britain benefit today from the ex-
perience not only of our physical ancestors-Normans, Anglo-Saxons, Celts and
the rest-but also of peoples who had never visited or heard of Britain-American
Indians, Greeks, Egyptians, Sumerians, a nameless innumerable multitude.
The diffusionist controversy that raged here ten years ago focused attention on
this continuity in cultural tradition. But of course the idea of diffusion was not
discovered by Elliot Smith or Perry. It was freely admitted last century that the
practice of food-production was introduced into Britain and the rest of cis-Alpine
 40 CHAPTER I
CHANGING METHODS ANO AIMS IN PREHISTORY 41

Europe. Boyd Dawkins and de MortiIlet were frankly diffusiooists, bur they in- Before accepting similar devices, employed by two cultures, as proofs of dif-
terpreted the process in terms of undemonstrated and often incredible migrations. fusion, it is essential first of aIl to determine the chronological relations of the re-
The great masters of Continental prehistory-Montelius and Sophus MüIler- spective cultures. A choice berween the war-cries Miragt orientale and Ex oriente lux
were no less diffusionists. Both have traced how ideas and inventions, notably met- can only be justified finally to science when an entirely independent system of
aIlurgy, traveIle~ from the Onent to Scandinavia. Their systems of chronology chronology can be applied equally to the Aegean and the Baltie. If de Geer's
presume dlffuslOn as a methodological postulare: for they are based on the as- geochronology wins final approbation, the short chronology for the neolithic
sumption that types, invented in the East Mediterranean area, were transmitted to stage in northern Europe will need revision.
II the North
Greece or Egypt
and there adopted.
therefore
The
provides
appearance
a limiting
of a type in a datable
date for its appearance
context
in Denmark
in The likelihood
siderations.
of diffusion
Since the war many intermediate
may be increased by spatial and quantitative
links between Northwestern Europe
con-

or Sweden, But in explaining the mechanism of diffusion these masters were con-
I tent to invoke "trade" and leave the term undefined.
and the Near East have come to light in the Balkans, in Russia and in the West

! Mediterranean. At the same time unsuspected Oriental parallels to North Euro-

One of the positive contributions of our English diffusionists was to insist on pean types have been recognized as specialists on the local material have beco me
I
the concrete implicarions of such a word. Visits from European traders, however familiar with relics from Egypt and Sumer. During the last ten years the defini-
I
; I often repeated, will not teach the Trobriand Islanders how to make safety-matches tion of channels for diffusion and the identification of a multitude of traits thar
or to build chapels in brick. No more could caravans of merchants bartering might have been diffused have rehabilitated the doctrine of Ex oriente lux and won
bronze axes for amber beads initiate prehistoric Danes into the mysteries of met-
li' II acceptance even in Sweden and Germany for the short chronology that has long
aIlurgy. If the neolithic Orkney Islanders reaIly modelled Maes Howe on the been accepted in this country and in Denmark.
I tholoi of ~lcalar or Mycenae, some transfer of population is implied. Only per- The discovery of intermediate spatiallinks and the rnultiplication of common
s~ns acquamted by actual apprenticeship with the technique of corbelling and ini- traits enhance the probability of diffusion between two cultures. But similarities
riated mto the mysteries symbolized by sepulchral architecture could teach the in material culture can nearly always be explained away as parallel adjustments
islanders how to build the tomb and inspire rhern with the desire to erect it. They evoked by a similar environment. But the archaeologist is not entirely restricted to
I
must have sufficient force or prestige to win disciples and have stayed long enough material culture: his material includes items which must be assigned to the domam
to tram such. The diffusionists have ar least taught us to examine in every instance ofspiritual culture. Amulets and megalithic tornbs, sculptures in the round and
how an .,dea could have been diffused and what learning a new technique means designs painted on vases have no obvious utility; from the marerialist standpoint
10 practlce.
they did not help their makers and builders to get more food or rear more off-
The controversy was embittered by certain methodological weaknesses in the spring. Their rnakers may indeed have hoped to obtain such results. And func-
I English school's argumentation. To prove diffusion they toa often relied 00 su- tional anrhropology will show how ritual and art by promotmg social so~,danty
II perficial resemblances and abstract agreements. "Polished, stone celrs" were cited or dispelling anxieties contributed to a group's survival. But a rationalist will
as constituting a common trair uniting rernote cultures quite regardless of how the demonstra te no less plausibly how superstitions hindered matenal progress and in-
"celr" was mounted or whether it was used as an axe, an adze or a battle-axe. Sci- deed precipitated disasters. . .
entific prehistory cannot be satisfied with such abstractions. Opponents can al- A dolmen with port-hole entry cannot be represented as an inevitable re-
ways argue that such abstract agreements may perfectly well resulr from parallel sponse to any set of external environmental conditions that an archaeologist can
but independent developrnents. "Glazed quartz beads," something much more un- hope to discover; its explanation must involve the mternal environrnent, the so-
usual and concrete, would have seemed a convincing case of diffusion between cial traditions of the group. A flock of tame sheep on the contrary can theo-
Sumer and Ancient Egypt. But Beck'sl6 recent examination has shown that the reticaIly be depicted as a natural response to an environment in which sheep
techniques employed in the two regions were distinct. If the idea can stiIl be re- lived wild. Dolmen building in Sardinia and the Caucasus would justity more
garded as a case of diffusion, its significance has been altered, The transplantation positivc conclusions than could be based on sheep breeding ~n the same areas.
of a techmque from one region to another requires a migration also of techni- No valid ground has ever been suggested why two communmes should inde-
cians. A smgle glazed quartz bead reaching Sumer by indirect barrer from Egypt, pendently create such a laborious, complicated and useless device as the port-
or vrce versa, would suffice to prompt local imitations. hole dolrnen to be a receptacle for their honoured dead. The value of such traits

•...
 42 CHAPTER I CHANGING METHOOS ANO AIMS IN PREHISTORY 43

of spiritual culture in supplementing material arguments for diffusion has been Notes
properly emphasized by the English school. I. Musée prébisloríque, 188 I, revised 1902.
A very different account of the mechanism of diffusion is advanced by the 2. Sludier iifver den yngre slena/dern.
Austrian culture-historical school of ethnographers. The very traits, widely dis- 3. Anliquaries Journal, n. p. 27.
persed among savage cultures, that our diffusionists cite as degenerate and dis- 4. Cf. Menghin, WEZ., XIV, p. 31.
torted borrowings from the Aneient East are interpreted there as survivals from 5. Appendix to the 3rd edition of Hoerncs' Urgescbicbte der bilJenden Kunst.
6. L'AnlbropoUJgie, XXXIII-XXXIV The idea of distinct cultures is however already
prirnitive eulture-eyeles that began to spread over me earth in pleistocene times. Ir
implicit in his famous "Sub-divisions," CLE, Geneva, 1912, P: 173.
is these ethnographic conceptions that Prof. Menghin has applied to prehistorie
7. Man, XXVI, 6.
arehaeology in sueh a stimulating and suggestive way. But in judging his conelu-
8. Procudings of Ibe Prebisloric Society of East Anglia, V, P: 260.
sions and his methods four reservations are needed.
9. AnbaeoUJgy of Cambridge Region, p. 18.
I. His eulture-cyeles are not groupings, forced like cultures upon the 10. Journa/ of Ibe Roya/ AnlbropoUJgical lnstitute, LVII, P: 22; cf. Vayson de Pradenne, Antiq-
archaeologist by his field experience: they are categories borrowed from uity, IX, p. 309.
I I. Op. cito
ethnography imo which arehaeological data have to be fitted.
12. Weltgescbicbte der Steinzeit, pp. 154,270.
2. Even in ethnography no culture-cvcle can be observed funetioning in
13. Man, XXXv, 89.
purity to-day: the cyeles are admittedly abstractions obtained by isolating
14. Journal of Ibe Royal Anlhrop%gical Institute, LXII, P: I.
traits cornrnon to several peoples and areas. 15. Antiquity, I, p. 280; cj Karslake in Antiouaries Journa/, XIII, p. 458.
3. The value of the concept and of the rnethod is by no means generally 16. Ancienl Egypt and Ibe East, June, 1935, 13.
aceepted by ethnographers.
4. Finally, both the ethnographic and archaeological exponents of the
method tend to isola te the culture from the environment to which it is an
adaptation, and 50 to ignore function. Menghin insists 50 strongly on an
axe as an expression of a historical tradition that me reader may forget
thar ir is an implement for felling trees. The use of bone instead of stone
as the principal industrial material is used as the sign of a distinction in
traditions, the mark of a culture-cyele. The geographical approach with
which Myres has familiarized us would ask how far the choice of bone
might have been dictated by lack of suitable stone or vice versa.

The culture-cyele as a methodological device deserves most serious consider-

ation by archaeologists. Ir may be a revolutionary innovation, but it is still very
much on its trial. Other innovations recently proposed in less responsible quarters
I '.

ean be passed over in silence. It is the peeuliarly British practiee to ignore in sei-
entific discussions the groundless hypotheses of amateurs and cranks, however
mueh publicity these may have in the provincial press. Whether that result from
laziness, snobbishness, the law of libel or a sound historical tradition I do not
know. My references to unacceptable theories of diffUsion will emphasize my si-
lence on the much advertized drivellings of charlatans. 1'-
. ("
'!

I'
I