The Archaeology of V. Gordon Childe: Contemporary Perspectives.

Gosden, Chris

It is said that everyone who reads Marx feels the need to write a book on the experience. A similar response is developing in the case of Childe. Fortunately in both cases, arguments with the respective ghosts have produced a superior secondary literature which adds to and supersedes the positions of the originary authors. This book continues the high level of debate surrounding Childe's work and adds a few fascinating insights into his character.

As many have done with Marx, this book seeks to assess the living and the dead sections in the thought of Childe, bringing out what Childe's ideas could mean to the archaeology of the 1990s. Not surprisingly, the contributors differ in their assessments, either because they want Childe as an intellectual ancestor or because they want to deny him the status of an ancestor to rival positions. Trigger takes the most ecumenical position, seeing Childe as a contributor to culture-historical, processual and post-processual approaches, the three main archaeological movements of this century. Trigger also sees the way forward for archaeology as a synthesis of these three modes. If such a synthesis was contained in Childe's work (albeit in embryonic form) then the future must hold a more definite return to Childe's work than we have seen before, which seems a little unlikely when stated so baldly.

At the other and of the book, Renfrew wrote a summing-up, which limited Childe's influence to that of a partial pioneer of processual archaeology, explicitly arguing against Trigger's claim that post-processualism is a crucial element of archaeology at the end of the century [p. 122). For Renfrew one of the paradoxes of Childe's life and works is that he was a particularist, attempting to understand the uniqueness of Europe, and this caused him not to follow through a broad comparative programme looking at the Neolithic and Urban Revolutions throughout the world. Thus for Renfrew, Childe is not really an ancestor of processualism as worldwide generalization was not an aim, but also was not a pre-post-processualist as this movement is not important enough to claim such an intellectual figure as an ancestor. On the one hand we have Trigger, who sees Childe as universal ancestor; on the other is Renfrew's view that Childe fathered no obvious progeny of his own, essentially because his own work was so mixed.

One of the strengths of this book is the combination of biographical insights and intellectual history, which mutually reinforce the notion that Childe not only was a contradictory and paradoxical figure, but that he cultivated a complicated public image partly as a defence mechanism. He was a man of strong moral commitment, which gave direction and purpose to much of his life, but who changed his views constantly and who was difficult to place during his life and is still impossible to pigeon-hole 36 years after his death. The complexities of his life are brought out by Mulvaney's discussion of his early relationship with the Australian Labor Party and his attack on the careerism in the ALP in How Labour governs. The early disappointments an idealistic Childe must have felt at his treatment by the authorities, leading to his dismissal from a Government post, clearly fed through into his determination to succeed in the academic world, but also manifest themselves in his relationship to another political structure, that of the Soviet Union. Klein, in an unusual piece of writing, outlines the uneasy relationship Childe had with a repressive, but Marxist, state and, the reciprocal of the same equation, the uncertainty Soviet archaeologists had in dealing with an almost unique figure: a western Marxist. Klejn puts forward the idea that it was Childe's disillusionment with the standards of Soviet archaeology that led to his decision to commit suicide, which happened at the same time that the Soviets were feeling easier towards Childe in the post-Stalinist period.

The intellectual highlight of this volume is supplied by Rowlands in a paper which contains a reassessment of the notion of culture and Childe's views on cultures and their history. For Rowlands, cultures are not natural entities with clear origins and easily charted histories, but are instead unstable hybrids, mixtures of different influences held together by local and regional structures of power. Rowlands draws greatly on recent work on language, particularly that of Muhlhausler on the life cycles of pidgins and creoles, both of which have hybrid origins but which can stabilize into natural languages. Rowlands feels that Childe championed these notions, seeing cultures as always in the process of becoming and that Childe also saw moral imperatives working themselves through in historical processes. What Rowlands deals with less well is how far a notion of instability and becoming can be squared with Childe's belief in progress in both a technical and a moral sense. If Europe demonstrates a current peak in both these senses, how did its hybrid nature bring this about, how far was this inevitable and where does this leave the rest of the world?

This brings me to a minor criticism of an excellent volume: that there were no pieces which were openly critical of Childe's work. If we are to understand Childe's relevance today we don't just need those who accept that relevance, but those who do not. Many now see large narrative and the structures underpinning it (the progressive movements of history, the relations between production and social superstructure etc.) as questionable: no such view is found in this book. Flannery raised notes of doubt, but these were more to do with the applicability of the details of the Neolithic and Urban Revolutions to the Americas and not whether ideas of these types ought to be perpetuated. Lack of consistent criticism is understandable in a volume which was partly a celebration of Childe and his achievements. Indeed, the warmth still attached to his memory came through in the personal memoirs at the end of the book. The unexpected, frightening or funny elements of Childe's behaviour whilst still alive, are also to be found in his writings and the fact that no one can come to final or easy conclusions about either the person or the works will mean both will be debated for years to come.

CHRIS GOSDEN Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford