by Hugh M. Lewis

Vere Gordon Childe was born in 1892 in Sydney, Australia, and, even though he did not gain a position in archaeology until 1927, he rose to become a noteworthy and important archaeologist in the world before his death in 1957. Genuinely eccentric, having never married, he destroyed most of his private and personal documents before his death, an unfortunate turn of affairs, and yet he has been one of the better published and mentioned archaeologists of all time. His early influence in Archaeology in the 1920's was heralded as revolutionary, marking an era of modern archaeology and modern thought. (Piggott, "The Dawn: and an Epilogue" in Antiquity, XXXII, 1958: 75-79) Though interest in his work continues, at the time of his death and afterward it was held that his influence and importance ended with his demise. Bruce Trigger summarizes his archaeological contribution in the following two lines:

Viewed as a "Outsider" by some ("Childe the 'Outsider'" by Peter Gathercole, after Piggott, 1958, in Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland: Volume 0, Issue 17: pg. 5-6), and criticized for his Marxism by others, his orientation is striking for its erudition, its literary merit and its comprehensiveness. Through his central theme of the origins and uniqueness of European culture history, he expanded thought and made contributions in a number of different areas of scholarship.

Within the brief framework of this paper, I have chosen to focus upon a key autobiographical piece entitled "Retrospective" that was published posthumously by Graham Clark (1958) , as well as upon a related set of key texts in Childe's own hand, particularly his "Valediction" (posthumous publication 1957), "The Framework of Prehistory."(1951) "Prehistory and Marxism" (posthumous publication, 1979) and the last chapter of his last book Society and Knowledge (1956). Collectively, these texts together provide a framework for establishing Childe's own sense of voice and mind in relationship to himself and his work, apart from the elaboration of his social significance via other texts.

By his own words, he was not a great digger of artifacts, or a basement scholar of old museums, nor a developer of chronologies or recorder of cultures. His contributions were of interpretive concepts and explanatory methods to the field of prehistory. (Childe, 1958) His archaeological orientation was known as synthetic and he became a Marxist in theoretical orientation, preferring dialectical materialism and its conceptual framework, with a healthy dose of diffusionism, in accounting for change over alternative modes of

interpretation then available to archaeologists. He was considered more of a prehistorian than an archaeologist, being primarily interested in explaining the prehistoric origins of European culture, and he himself maintained no sharp dichotomy between prehistory and history. He is therefore known as a great synthesizer of archaeological knowledge, during a period of time when archaeology was a professional preoccupation with the description of artifacts and the rise and fall of great civilizations.

Schooled in his boyhood in New South Whales, Australia, he remained always devoutly Australian. Having been an excellent student, with a first class honours degree in 1913 in Latin, Greek and Philosophy from Sydney University, (Trigger, Gordon Childe: Revolutions in Archaeology: 1980:32) he was fortunate to win a graduate scholarship to Queen's College, Oxford, in 1914, where he was trained primarily in the study of Classical archaeology and what he termed "comparative philology." He went on to become the Abercromby Professor, holding a chair of Archaeology in Edinburgh for almost two decades, and then becoming the director of the London University Institute of Archaeology in 1946 until resigning his position a year before his retirement in 1956. He traveled to various places the following year, and returned eventually to Sydney, Australia, in April 1957 where he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by the same university at which he studied during the years of the First World War. In the morning of Oct. 17 of that year he took a taxi to hike in the Blue Mountains during which he jumped to his death, falling more than 1,000 feet below Govett's Leap near Bridal Veil Falls. A final posthumous publication, printed in an editorial of the Journal of Man in 1980, sealed in a correspondence after his death, makes the following prophetic statement:

An accident may easily and naturally befall me on a mountain cliff. I have revisited my native land and found I like Australian society much less than European without believing I can do anything to better it; for I have lost faith in all my old ideals. But I have enormously enjoyed revisiting the haunts of my boyhood, above all the Blue Mountains. I have answered to my own satisfaction questions that intrigued me then. Now I have seen the Australian spring; I have smelt the boronia, watched snakes and lizards, listened to the 'locusts'. There is nothing more I want to do here; nothing I feel I ought and could do. (quoted in G. E. Daniel, Editorial in Antiquity vol. 54: 1)

His last known written words, published posthumously, were "Life ends best when one is happy and strong." His suicide confirms a characterization of Childe as private and as preferring to put forward his professional life above and before his personal, even to the exclusion of the latter. His geist, I will claim, is evidenced by his idealistic transcendence over the material, though the material aspects of life consumed him professionally. His final death by his own hand was a testament to his placing his sense of geist, of his own rational thought, above and beyond the particulars of life itself. It was the same kind of rational thought that could explain the material artifact in a scientific manner, even above the material fact of the artifact itself. His own life, at the end, became just another biographical artifact, to be uncovered at least a decade after his final act.

He sought in his early training in Sydney and London to establish early linkages indicating Indo-European origins (Childe, 1958: 69) and he developed early chronological frameworks for central Europe based upon pottery style sequences, later elaborated in the four Danubian periods as published in The Dawn of European Civilization (1925) and later The Danube in Prehistory (1929), which relative periods were later confirmed by clear indications from the Aegean. (Childe, 1958: 69)

He turned north to Jutland and Scotland in his quest for Indo-European origins, following what he described as "rumours" of the Abercromby Chair. (ibid., 70) He became Professor at Edinburgh. He elaborated in The Dawn information and ideas that were at the time unfamiliar for English prehistorians, such knowledge coming from classical studies, the typology of flints, and the influence of Abercromby and Bryce that was confined to Scotland. He borrowed the German notion of culture that was "defined but not constituted by distinct pottery and representing a people." He introduced to the British the importance of the loess for Neolithic settlement and the idea of post-glacial climatic changes. He sought in this work to "distill" the preliterate substitute for conventional political-military history with culture and migration. "The sole unifying theme was the irradiation of European barbarism by Oriental civilization."

The rise of new scientific information relating to European prehistoric chronology formed the pretext for The Most Ancient East: The Oriental prelude to European prehistory (1928). This archaeological data provided Childe with the foundation for further synthetic development and he sought to give the three labels of cultural development, the Three Ages of savagery, barbarism and civilizations a distinctively informative value by adopting food-production as the differentia of the Neolithic. The idea of the neolithic transition he further elaborated in The Bronze Age (1930) with food-production as the basis for the rise of civilization and the base for a chronology of European prehistory. He expounded bronze metallurgy as the basis for specialization of labor, implying social stratification, and the rise of regular trading networks, and provided an economic significance to the archaeological information presented. By thus redefining the Bronze Age he had recommitted himself to an economic interpretation of archaeological data, and he came to revise his earlier work The Most Ancient East, recognizing the rise of literacy and an early urban revolution in the three great river valleys of Mesopotamia, Mohenjo-Daro and Harapa, the rise in population that related to food-production and craft-specialization. Thus in New Light on the Most Ancient East (1934) he presented the Neolithic revolution as a "truly historical pageant of economic development." (ibid. 71)

In 1934 he also visited Russia and studied Russian works in prehistory, and he realized the fit in internal explanation by Marxist theory the development of prehistoric cultures without reference to "undocumented external factors."

He contributed to a collective work upon a Marxist history of science, claiming that early craftsmen and their technological inventions were as much contributors to this history as were the literati and their invention of writing. "Means of production" and "social relations" became significant concepts in archaeological interpretation, being given a determining role among behavior patterns that have been fossilized. He apparently recognized in oriental despotism a Hegelian rationality of political and religious totalitarianism. These concepts were articulated in Man makes Himself (1936) which works won Childe popular readership in Great Britain. In this work he intrepreted the archaeological record as documenting a "directional process wherein men by application of science steadily increased their control over non-human nature so that their species might multiply and incidentally secrete laws and political institutions, religions and art. Though it falls short of a thoroughly Marxist perspective in not defining an entirely economic basis to history, it achieves as a history a synthesis based upon unified documents. In his revision of The Dawn (1939) he paid lip-service to 'Marxism' in the interpretation of culture and archaeological prehistory. He took from Marxism the notion of the economy as the integrating force in society, "but I was just as much influenced by Malinowski's functionalism and tried to stick the archaeological bits together by reference to their possible role in a world organism." Still he suggested conjunctions of environmental changes, internal economic development and external stimuli. At this juncture, prehistoric humanity was seen as a significant factor in inducing environmental change, and thus geographical determinism was abandoned subsequent to his next work What Happened in History, (1942) a book designed for general readership to demonstrate the role that archaeology can play in historical synthesis, combining both archaeological and textual documents. He sought to demonstrate that there was no deep chasm dividing prehistory from history "and so validates archaeology's claim to provide unwritten historical documents as informative and reliable as written texts." It proved to be his best selling book.

Childe took advantage of the British alliance with the Soviet Union during World War II in order to reacquaint himself with Russian prehistorians, and he developed in Scotland before the Scots (1946) what had been a Marrist "perversion" of Marxism, which he held as giving a more faithful historical accounting of Scotland's prehistoric development than his early migrationist hypothesis in The Prehistory of Scotland (1936). A Marrist version sought explanation by supposedly universal laws of cultural evolution. And yet he could not fully explain the prehistory of Scotland by means of internal development by universal laws without invoking external continental factors of migration and diffusion.

His later works, Prehistoric Migrations to Europe (1950) and a chapter in The European Inheritance (1954) proved to be fallacious and misplaced in locating the cradle of Indo-European civilization and in attributing too much to the role of the Orient in the shaping of Europe. At this late point in his career, he found a sociological approach to epistemology and the discovery of Durkheim that led to a reinterpretation of Marxism--"Now at last I rid my mind of transcendental laws determining history and mechanical causes, whether economic or environmental, automatically shaping its course. Incidentally I realized that the environment that affected a prehistoric society was not that reconstructed by geologists and palaeobotanists but that known or knowable by the society with its then existing material and conceptual equipment. (Neither arable land nor ores figure in the historical environment of a Palaeolithic horde.) A society's scientific knowledge in turn is limited by its economic and social organization." (ibid. 73) Thus he arrived at what he considered to be the basis for a genuinely scientific history of Europe.

He undertook rewriting New Light on the Most Ancient East (1954) and The Dawn of European Civilization (1956), when he realized that Hawkes had been correct in asserting that by the Bronze age European society had acquired a distinctive culture pattern, and he understood the reasons why this was so. "I invoke no agencies external to the observed data, no eternal laws transcending process as empirically given, but historical conjectures of well-established environmental circumstances and equally well-known patterns of human behaviour legitimately informed from their archaeological results." (ibid. 74). The archaeological data is interpreted as "the fossilized remnants of behaviour patterns repeatedly illustrated in ethnography and written records." (ibid., 74) When analyzed in context of environmental features they provide evidence of more general known processes. "So the specific events are explained as individual and perhaps unique conjunctures of know universal factors. Such explanation is scientific as well as historical."(ibid., 74)

In this, his last phase of his own life, Vere Gordon Childe was reaching for what was scientifically universal in human prehistory, as evidenced through archaeological data and its association to other forms of information. He saw the laws governing human history as not as probable in their consequences or causal determination as laws of chemistry or physics, but as being essentially no different in their character or form. Childe ends his retrospective, his last work written, in reference to his final book The Prehistory of European Society (published posthumously) which claims a unique history of Europe that had its own internal coherence of development outside the influence of Egypt, Mesopotamia or Palestine, and, in his own final words, exemplifies better than anything else how history can be extracted from the archaeological record, the significance of establishing a reliable chronology, and confirming the status of archaeological research in historical scholarship as providing the basis for a scientific history.

V. Gordon Childe has been the subject of a significant amount of subsequent biographical research and expression of opinion, in spite of the fact that little of his own personal documents remained intact subsequent to his sudden demise. I believe this continuing interest in this distinctive archaeological personage and its subsequent elaboration reflects somewhat, similar to the Van Gogh industry, a genuine innovator of his time who created texts and concepts that have continued to have a shaping influence on the direction of archaeological thought. I believe, from my own anthropological research experience, that we must give a privileged place to V. Gordon Childe's own autobiographical review of his works and their contribution to archaeological thought over what others may have written about him or in his place. He clearly and honestly recognized his own shortcomings and the weaknesses of his own arguments, and yet he pressed them forward as significant points of view not to be taken lightly or otherwise dismissed. He did not embrace Marxism whole-heartedly or unreservedly as a true believer, but sought to adapt its materialist logic to the requirements of real historical explanation. He could therefore see its true value through the rhetoric and hypostatization of Homo economicus.

To more broadly interpret Vere Gordon Childe's contribution to archaeology, his work and thought must be understood in the context of the time and the world in which it was situated, not only in the deep prehistoric past of Europe, but in the modern history of Europe as well, especially marked as this was by the rise of communist and anti-communist ideologies and the future identity of European peoples in relation to their collective identity. It is clear that Europe has enjoyed a much more intimate connection between prehistory (as represented by archaeology) and history than in the New World, or anywhere else, for obvious reasons. There are two interrelated sets of themes I wish to focus upon in this regard. The first is Vere Gordon Childe's role as an archaeologist and in influencing archaeological inquiry and the second is his expressed attitudes in relation to Marxist theory and its influence upon his own inquiry. Obviously, these are interrelated themes that had an influence upon subsequent development of thought in a number of areas. One great influence of Childe was as a writer whose works attracted general attention to archaeology and helped to legitimate the role and purpose of archaeology as an academic discipline. He provided broad and general synthesis to archaeological research within a European and historical context that the readership could identify with and relate to upon basic levels. His books attracted the attention of European scholars to Great Britain and the attention of British scholars to a wider European scholarly community. His books were "indispensable to students, not least at Cambridge." (Clark: 13)

To address the latter issue of his Marxist perspective, I have utilized mainly his own central statement on Marxism that he had written in response to an attack of his views, and that was also published posthumously as "Prehistory and Marxism" by the late V. Gordon Childe.

Childe begins by explaining that theoretical Marxism, as dialectical materialism, is deterministic but not mechanistic. The determinism is rooted in the assumption that historical patterning is regulated by underlying principles of order and is therefore nonrandom process. But these underlying deterministic relations are not to be conceived of as mechanistic in their cause and effect. The process is not "repetitive or predetermined" as would be the functioning of a machine. He recognizes a degree of complexity in the resulting pattern with "various combinations" which it is the business of historical science to discover and explain. Marxism regards history from a scientific standpoint, or at least as potentially scientific.(Childe, 1979: 93) Scientific knowledge is practical and therefore should furnish principles that serve as rules for action, including the acquisition of new knowledge. From this standpoint, Childe asserts that archaeological research has legitimacy as an historical science. The reconstruction of Indo-European culture history, he held, was sufficiently reliable to allow the predetermination and prediction of what kinds of artifacts will be found in relation to what historical provenience in relation to what periods and places. (ibid., 93)

The scientific basis for Marxist history is its materialism, which Childe interprets as the empirical foundations for understanding pattern "underlying an apparent chaos of superficially unrelated events." People must eat to live, and so a society must somehow obtain food for its own social production and reproduction. No institution or belief system could interfere with this material basis for social production without resulting in the collapse of the system. Thus the way people get their food determines in the final analysis the ultimate constraints to their beliefs and institution, and the way people go about their food-getting activities is determined in turn by the environment and available scientific technology and knowledge that a society has at its disposal. Food-getting activities are necessarily social, and belief systems and institutions thus serve to reinforce the sociality of these basic, biologically based functions. From a Marxist perspective, one form of social institution is more fit for one form of resource utilization than another. The society must therefore be adjusted to the environment for survival of its members, not the individuals of the society. This form of adjustment is known anthropologically as "culture." No human can exist or survive well apart from the appurtenances and dependencies upon society. Culture has as its primary function the exploitation of the environment. The development of technology and knowledge lead invariably to an influence and change upon the environment. A system is developed such that changes in the environment lead to subsequent modification of social systems in response to the challenges of adapting to changed environments. The resulting intrasocial relations of organization are dialectical as in the form of complementary feedback processes, and thus they tend to become complicated with time.

According to Childe, therefore, archaeology in its objective material focus and method, is particularly adapted to this kind of analysis and synthesis in the scientific interpretation of evidence and the construction of historical explanation. He goes on to accord a modified Three Stage development, upon which Marxist historical explanation was based, in Morgan's phases of "savagery, barbarism and civilization" by means of a temporal succession by means of classification according to the ways that societies obtained their living from their environments. He distinguishes the Old Stone age from a New Stone age, leading to a neolithic revolution with domestication and specialization of labor and resulting stratification of society. He recognizes the need for a Marxist interpretation of history to pay close attention to the environmental variables associated with the interpretation of evidence and in the blanket application of extant ethnographic examples to fossilized records. He therefore calls for more detailed understanding of the economies of prehistoric communities in order to yield more reliable results. "A Marxist prehistorian will aim at deducing from the assemblage he calls a culture a detailed picture of a working economic organization that can be compared point for point with existing preliterate societies."(ibid., 95) At the same time, neither would they ignore the impressions of soft "symbolic" culture in the artifact assemblages, and it is precisely this that distinguishes non-Marxist prehistorians exclusively preoccupied with artifacts rather than the prehistory they represent. Neither would Marxist prehistorians ignore the role of diffusion and migration in influencing historical change, which is the principle object of prehistoric interpretation. Because all cultural transmission is a diffusion of ideas, Marxist history may not be any less than a history of thought.

To understand this defense of Marxist theory in prehistory, that comes 2/3rds of the way into his career when he is obviously rethinking many of his earlier theoretical constructs, it is important to understand the changing status that Marxism had in the world, in relation on one hand to the defeat of Hitler, and on the other, to the rise of the Soviet bloc and the cold war. The Marxist approach to British archaeology was in fact strong and multi-dimensional. Archaeology itself had other models and lines of inquiry other than Childe's watered down version of Marxist materialism. Klejn's article "Archaeology in Britain: a Marxist View" outlines three streams of scientific-interpretive thought in the discipline, including ecology, a form of skepticism, and Childe's Marxism. Child's approach was one of a modified diffusionism mixed with adulterated evolutionism that was clearly under a Marxist umbrella. This view died, apparently, with Childe, but remained vital in later archaeological work, especially in practical approaches to research. To contrast a skeptical approach to prehistoric interpretation, there are some aspects about prehistoric society and institutional forms that cannot be determined by the empirical record remaining. On the other hand, from a Marxist perspective, it is possible to infer the institutional superstructure of a society if we understand the economic modes of production underlying these structural patterns, and if we can extrapolate backward in time from extant cultures bearing similar modes of production and social institutional forms. This statement begs the question of whether or not we can reliably or validly determine the following: 1. Ethnographic parallels in archaeological evidence; 2. Deriving superstructure from modes of production; 3. Recognizing superstructure from archaeological evidence. (Klejn, 297) How we answer these three related questions determines whether we believe we can employ a Marxist perspective in a successful and scientific manner. From this line of reasoning, Marxism in a diluted form has some empirical foundation, but this is not unlimited in its potential as a science of history. Even Engels and Marx recognized and acknowledged inherent limitations in the approach, and it is these limits that must help to define the limits of archaeological method and theory.

Environmental or geographic determinism is to be also contrasted with Marxism, that argues for a dynamic relationship between humankind and its environment, mediated by society and the modes of production it utilizes, and in which humankind shapes the environment as much as they are shaped by the environment. Diffusionism, as this was espoused especially in the early work of V. Gordon Childe, (The Dawn) is also distinguished from Marxism, which could not reconcile the influence of Eastern Mediterranean civilization with the independent development of European cultures. Thus it is evident that Childe was not without fault in the eyes of Soviet Archaeologists who at least officially denied the possibility of diffusion in the introduction of new traits within a culture, though the processes of diffusion themselves were studied as historically interesting and significant phenomena. From this discussion it is evident therefore that Marxist thought on one hand was not necessarily a unified body of theory with only one sense of direction and purpose, and, on the other, it lacked the degree of impact and influence upon theory that its purists would like to believe it had. As written by Dr. Michael Thompson in reply to Klejn's article:

It is evident that Marrist theory at this time remained clearly ambivalent and controversial in its influence in Archaeological thought. According to Dark, "modern archaeologists do not all conform to a single Marxist ideology." (Dark, ? ; 28)

We can better understand Childe's theoretical approach to Prehistory by his correspondence in the journal of Man entitled "The Framework of Prehistory," (May, 1951: 70-17) in which he also responds to Daniel's critique as in his "Prehistory and Marxism" and states forthrightly that a scientific framework of prehistory is a prerequisite for even the questions of social anthropologists. Archaeologists develop archaeological periods as representative of cultural types and sequences that are abstracted from the vertical dimensions of stratigraphy and the distribution of serigraphy to the fourth dimension in terms of temporal succession. He distinguishes between abstract time, as measured physically by the clock and the calendar, and the artifacts and periods of the archaeologist that is held to represent time in terms of names of ages and successions. For archaeologists, no two sections contained observed sequences that are identical, though the terms used are "homotaxial" (i.e., applying to the same positions in all series" and "systadial" (occupying the same position in a stratigraphic hierarchy). Descriptive names of ages and divisions do not denote independent divisions of abstract time, though they are useful nonetheless in the organization of data.

Type fossils in designating these divisions are not universal or evenly distributed, but are determined within social traditions that changes with time and with the history of the society that produced them. These type fossils were historically unique to the society that created them, though they are used in the definition of broader cultures and periods with which they are associated. The interchange of these type-fossils make the correlation of these societies in time and space possible, which he distinguishes as the general distribution of the culture province, which may or may not be synchronous or simultaneous in distribution. Stadial designations applied to names of periods are appropriate for the most advanced society of the province as long as the geographic boundaries are determined as well as the term "age" or "period." "Archaeological divisions are by their very nature essentially both cultural and local." (ibid. 71)

For comparison outside of a culture province, non-archaeological terminologies should be used--"cultures define only divisions of a local sequence. They should not therefore be used for divisions of any wider frame."(ibid. 71) Diffusion and imitation between proximate provinces allows for correlation between them allowing for local sequences to be put into a wider frame of reference within the archaeological fourth dimension, though still limited in geographical extent. The super-provincial frames of reference require a nomenclature that is generally available to concise interpretation and should "not blind the student of archaeology to the fact that one of his main problems is the correlation of the terms between the established local sequences and the extension of such correlation over an ever wider area, an extension which will ideally lead to an absolute chronology based upon the historical records of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Greece and Rome." (ibid., 71)

To summarize Childe's views in relation to Archaeology, I have summarize his piece "Valediction" (1958) that was also published posthumously. In this work he summarizes the challenges remaining for archaeology, that are in order of presentation, and presumably importance:

1. The requirement for an absolute, global chronology, which can only be arrived at by regional cross-correlation of interchange of type-fossils--"that alone can establish synchronisms; typological homotaxy or stadial equivalence must never be mistaken for contemporaneity." (reprinted as Appendix I in Green Prehistorian: A Biography of V. Gordon Childe, 1981: 166) To this end he emphasizes his fundamental research question, the origins of Indo-European civilization and notes "The economic, sociological and ultimately historical interpretation of archaeological data has, I believe, now become a main task that can contribute enormously to human history and should enhance the status of archaeology."(ibid., 168)

2. a. The requirement follows from the first and calls for deeper analysis and ecological description of known cultures with the aim of learning the functional integration of surviving constituents and reconstituting economic and social linkages, demanding a cross-disciplinary approach to the establishment of cultural sequences. In this he notes the value of archaeological research not only for prehistoric periods but for fully historic eras as well.

b. From this basis, it is worthwhile to attempt sociological inferences, based upon a Marxist theory of the relations of production that constitute an integral moment in the economy. Archaeological data can be used to determine for instance social stratification.

c. He notes an inherent constraint and limit in archaeological inference "I believe foredoomed to failure any attempt to recapture the subjective motives or emotions that inspired the overt acts the results of which alone survive in the archaeological record."(ibid., 170) In this sense, archaeological interpretation is strictly limited to the utilitarian aspects of the data.

d. "Archaeology can offer authentic documents for the history of science provided it be admitted that Science is just systematized social experience that can be applied--i.e., that works. In reconstituting the techniques used for producing fire, locating minerals, firing pots, smelting ores, laying out a rectangle or subdividing a circle's circumference we are reconstituting the genuine science of the age." (ibid., 171) Ideology may have motivated early construction projects, but geometry defined these projects in a precise manner.

e. Archaeological data may reveal only one aspect of ideology and ritual intent, and this is if the decorative patterning of prehistoric art had any magical function in a utilitarian mode, though they are more functionally related to the expression of the ideals of the artist and the society in which they were created.

3. Prehistorians cannot describe culture as finished or static. Culture is dynamic and the observed changes must be described and explained. Though it is easy to appeal to foreign sources as factors of change, migration or acculturation, it is more parsimonious only to invoke external influences where there is clear evidence of such influence. As much as possible change should be explained in terms of internal development including changes in the non-human environment. Universal laws describing such internal changes are unknown and few and far between, even in Marxism, but it is a principal goal of prehistory to test such laws and to establish universal laws governing cultural evolutionary development.

4. Progressive societies demonstrate clear tendencies in terms of more efficient weapons and production economies. Such changes should be attributed to internal independent inventions, though the possibility for diffusion can never be entirely ruled out. "It is arguable that all progress, indeed all change, is due to the stimulus of contact with other societies, the cross-fertilization of divergent traditions." (ibid., 172-3) A condition for establishing reliable chronological frameworks is the testing and cross-correlation between rates of change and intensity of intercourse between societies. Cases of diffusion or acculturation must be clearly established by evidence in the archaeological record.

5. Like History, Prehistory aims not just to describe but explain--historical description is explanatory and historical phenomena should be described in terms of explanatory frameworks according to general principles. In the sciences these principles correspond to the laws of nature. Ethnographic evidence and explanation can help in establishing cross-correlational patterns of similarity and identity of structural relations between different prehistoric cultures.

6. Historians must deal with historical particularism, of the unique individual and event, that explanation in terms of uniformities cannot accomplish. Differences between people, events and cultures cannot be explained within such explanatory frameworks, and this makes prehistory "unhistorical" in its failure to deal with the unique patterning. To restore "historicity" to prehistory the individual and unique must be made intelligible by presentation "as an historical conjuncture of general and familiar processes and patterns." (ibid., 174) Without historical documents, archaeology can offer historical explanation that, though possibly incomplete or incorrect, is historical.

7. Archaeology must achieve legitimate status as a university discipline Noting the contribution and organization of the Institute of Archaeology to these ends, he finally states that the future of archaeology lies with the historical rather than the natural disciplines. In this regard, Archaeology must be devotedly materialistic:

Nevertheless, Archaeologists must also and finally acknowledge the limits of materialism and see that all artifacts are expressions and symbols of human thought and volition, as ideational social constructs that transcend even the individual and therefore are ultimately immaterial. In looking for the material V. Gordon Childe, in the end we end up with the immaterial, or Geist of Childe. To this final end, I turn to another one of Childe's last work, and the final chapter of his final book entitled "My Beliefs" in which he contrasts materialist and idealist notions, especially as these were elaborated by Hegel and Marx. He contrasts "two patterns" of the conceptual representation of reality, with all its errors, and the natural patterns of material reality. Error is inherent to reality and hence is "incorrigible." Pattern of reality is four dimensional, while the pattern of knowledge, or "reality as reproduced" is two dimensional, and reproduced reality is always dependent on the reality that is represented. Knowledge is by definition historical, occurring after the fact of its relation to reality. For absolute knowledge, we must assume that the entire pattern of reality is knowable "if not yet known." Such pattern is therefore outside of and above time, transcending its expression in material forms that are comprehensible by perception. These are based upon metaphysical propositions that are beyond operational tests and are therefore the nature of belief. Childe himself admits to his own beliefs couched in metaphysical terms. He notes that the distinction between philosophical systems as either materialist or idealist in answer to the question "What is Reality made of?" is "just silly." It makes no difference whether this question is answered as "Matter" or "Spirit" as long as "spirit" is the stuff of which matter is made. The significant question for Childe was "How is reality constructed?" or, alternatively, "How does it function?" (Childe, 1956: 120-121)

A materialist model of reality is mechanistic and therefore cyclical in its functioning. In this repetitive functioning he notes the relativity of time as a measure of this function. An idealist model of reality is that of "mind" and history represents an unfolding of the logical dialectic inherent to ideas or reason. An idealist definition of model transcends material reality, and has no operational test.

The pattern of Reality does not transcend its history. Its creative patterning is as once free and determined, continuous and flexible. Reality is therefore, for Childe, a creative activity of (social) process. Knowledge functions to guide action in a practical manner. There is enough middle ground in our knowledge between the real and the ideal, between the material and the representation of reality, between the before and the present, that knowledge becomes sufficient and possible of apprehension and generalization of metaphysical propositions and patterns. Knowledge is not to be contemplated but to guide action. He states that as an archaeologist and a philosopher he is interested only in the knowable. "The unknowable is as irrelevant to the active quest for knowledge, the collection , classification and interpretation of messages received through sense perception as to more practical kinds of action. Knowledge must still be a guide to action, if only to the acquisition of fresh knowledge." (ibid., 128)

In his last lines of the last chapter of his last book, he makes statements that, in light of his unusual life and even more unusual death, reveal a direction of this thought and life. Society is the repository of all values and is therefore an unrealized ideal. The creative process of reality is completely self-contained and self-sufficient, beyond which there is nothing, neither material or ideal. Apart from the process there are no individuals, but each individual contributes through their actions to the process. There is no person outside society and no society without people. "In creating ideas that are thus accepted, any mortal member of Society attains immortality….Personally I desire no more." (ibid. 130)

Piggott, in his "The Dawn: and an Epilogue" that was published in accompaniment to Childe's "Retrospective," reviews and highlights the main contributions of V. Gordon Childe's work. Childe worked with the models suggested by C. Hawkes in four stages of inference in archaeological interpretation of a society based upon increasing difficulty: 1. Inferences based upon techniques and technology; 2. Subsistence economy; 3. Socio-political institutions; 4. Religious institutions and spiritual life. Childe worked toward these kinds of interpretations in his life, but his enduring contribution to archaeology will be in his synthesis and organization of knowledge, the pattern of prehistoric cultures in time and space, and the development of probable chronologies in relation to Europe.

Childe was "sure the interpreter of a vast and complex mass of archaeological material in comprehensible form, and one of the most profound students of the problems of European prehistoric chronology within his chosen period. To the general public, on the other hand, he is known as the author of Man Makes Himself, What Happened in History, and now The Prehistory of European Society. In a word, his contribution here would appear to be that which he himself valued the most." ( Piggott, 1958: 78)

In closing, I believe that Vere Gordon chose to die in the same manner that he had chosen to live, by means of his own sense of rational control. He must have come to a realization in his retirement that his productive life was at an end, and his sense of meaning in history and society, which he valued most as a professional, was also over.

I believe he devoted so much to his profession, that, in the final analysis, he had nothing left over for himself except his sense of geist, his indomitable sense of belief in what was rational.