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CHILDE, MARXISM, AND ARCHAEOLOGY

Nicholas Thomas

The history of an area of knowledge can never be seen as something which is fixed and given in an unproblematic way. These histories have more in common with the genealogies of Hawaiian kings: they are manipulated and re- constructed as orthodoxies and lineages are developed and displaced. Sometimes a body of work will be anxious to stress its connections with earlier texts; at other times it will claim a revolutionary distance from them. Sometimes a particular body of past work is seen to belong to one school, at other times to another. These sentences are not meant to imply a simple rela- tivistic conception of knowledge history, since real issues are involved and some positions are demonstrably more adequate than others. The issues can be quite crucial, since history is used to legitimate present strategies - strategies which are not merely modes of explanation but which can have real social and political con- sequences (as is most evident from debates within the anthropology of development). It is, however, crucial to recognize the extent to

Nicholas Thomas is Assistant Professor in the Department of Prehistory and Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, Australian National University.

which conceptions of the history of a discipline are circumscribed and specified by the prob- lematics which generate those conceptions.

Marxists are familiar with these principles through various theoretical struggles over their own history, but archaeologists are not, and this is not because archaeological anthropology has not been interpreted in ways commensurate with particular orthodoxies but because these interpretations and reinterpretations have been implicit and non-theorised.

Here I am concerned with the place of the work of V. Gordon Childe in archaeology. While Childe ( 1892-1957) has generally been recognised as a major figure, this recognition has involved a restricted view of his work, equating it entirely with the development of the culture-historical framework. Other crucial areas, in particular a socio-historical interpre- tation of prehistory and philosophical work on the place of knowledge in society, have been almost entirely ignored. This neglect has facili- tated an uncritical attitude toward certain facets of contemporary archaeological ortho- doxy, which, as anyone who has dipped into the literature will observe, is overwhelmingly positivist and reductively cultural (not, of

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course, historical) materialist. This orthodoxy validates itself as a discourse partly through reference to the history of the discipline, or rather to a particular construct of that history which makes the current problematic appear as a progressive development of earlier work. But I will show that the orthodox version of archaeological history (at least with respect to Childe) is extremely selective and can be said to misrepresent the development of the discipline. In recent years, particularly in Britain, there has begun to develop a Marxist perspective in archaeological anthropology. This emergence has been marked by theoreti- cal conflict; indeed the history of the discipline is at stake in this debate. Accordingly, I shall indicate some of the lines of conflict that arise when the critique of the environmental determinist orthodoxy is extended into the terrain of the history of the discipline.

I cannot attempt to deal with all areas of Childe's work in a short paper; nor are all as- pects relevant to contemporary developments in archaeology. I am concerned with three areas of Childe's work. The first is the culture- historical system which he developed early in his career and continued to use in a scarcely modified form until his death. The second is his application to prehistory of a social perspec- tive strongly influenced by historical material- ism. This concern is present in his work in a very limited way from 1926 but is much more developed in his last synthetic works of the 1950s. The third area of concern is that of Childe's epistemological work. There is a theory of knowledge implicit in any text, but I am mainly concerned with Childe's explicitly philosophical studies, all of which were published after the second world war.

FROM CULTURE HISTORY TO HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

The basic elements of the culture-historical approach are present in Childe's earliest work,

and are made explicit and elaborated upon in the Preface to The Danube in Prehistory:

We find certain types o f remains - pots, implements , o rnaments , burial rites, house forms - cons tant ly recurring together. Such a complex o f regularly associated traits we shall term a 'cultural group ' or jus t a 'cul ture ' . We assume that such a complex is tile material expression o f what would to-day be called a 'people ' [ 1 ] .

The last sentence is crucial, because it makes a step from an archaeological category to a his- torical unit, the ethnic group. This fitted into a diffusionist framework:

The same complex may be found with relatively negligible d iminu t ions or addi t ions over a wide area. In such cases o f the total and bodily t ransference o f a comple te cul ture f rom one place to ano ther we th ink ourselves just if ied in assuming a ' m o v e m e n t o f people ' [ 2] .

There were various other concepts of synchro- nicity, association, influence, and so on. In Childe's early work this system was not simply a means of classifying sites and assemblages but provided the whole system of interpretation: the first editions of The Dawn of European Civilization (1925) and The Aryans (1926) consist essentially of descriptions of various cultures and attributions of the relationships between them.

Childe's definition of a culture remained al- most the same throughout his work [3], but the structures of the interpretations into which it was incorporated changed very significantly. This change was gradual; there was no sharply defined theoretical break, but rather a definite tendency toward greater and deeper considera- tion of the role of internal social forces. The diffusionist element became less and less signi- ficant at the level of interpretation and ex- planation as Childe attempted in a more and more serious way to use the concepts of histo- rical materialism in prehistory.

There is, of course, some interest in social relations and social structure in texts as early as The Aryans and The Danube in Prehistory: in the latter we find, for instance, inferences

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of a chieftainship from mortuary practices [4]. In The Bronze Age (1930) there is some interest in trade as a socioeconomic phenomenon as opposed to merely a mechanism of diffusion [5]. In Prehistoric communities o f the British Isles there is considerable discussion of the evidence for chiefdoms at various stages, again based mainly on burial structures but also involving a consideration of settlement pattern evidence [6]. There are also in this book references to the role of surplus wealth and its manifestations in the archaeological record, a theme that figures prominently in Childe's later work.

In Scotland Before the Scots (1946), Childe explicitly applied the version of Marxism then current in archaeology and anthropology in the Soviet Union, which he had visited in the early thirties. This model (later labelled Marrism after its major theoretician, N.Y. Marr) was economi- cally and technologically reductionist and also strongly anti-diffusionist. While the book em- phasized technological developments, Childe did not altogether negate the influence of ex- ternal factors such as migrations and trade. Scotland before the Scots is essentially an over- view of Scottish prehistory focussing on the trend towards greater technological sophistica- tion and the social consequences of this devel- opment. Childe traced the emergence of chief- doms from 'primitive communism' and the gradual development of greater stratification and greater specialization in the division of labour.

Childe detached himself from the rigidities of the Soviet approach and went on to develop these concerns more fully and with wider refer- ence to the prehistory of Europe and the Near East in various texts: Social Evolution, the sixth edition of The Dawn of European Civil- ization, The Prehistory of European Society, and various others.

It is not necessary to go into the details of the interpretations Childe constructed in these works in order to make the point I wish to draw - namely, that Childe opened up pre- history as an area in which the concepts of

historical materialism could be applied. The societies represented archaeologically had divi- sions of labour, social hierarchies, constraints imposed by technological factors, and in- equalities - in short, the elements and pro- cesses of which Marxism has so far provided the most profound and dynamic analysis. Childe indicated the possibility of extending this analysis into prehistory and made initial at tempts which were however inhibited by various limitations of his mode of analysis and also frustrated by the undeveloped nature of archaeological technology. Some of the prob- lems, particularly those associated with dating, have been largely transcended.

The point that there can be a social, anthro- pologically-oriented, Marxist-informed pre- history would be banal if it were not for the near total failure of archaeologists since Childe to concern themselves with the social. To emphasize that Childe opened up this area would be similarly banal were it not for the misrepresentations of Childe's work and the misconstruction of his place in the history of the discipline.

This misreading consists essentially in neglect- ing or rejecting the social, Marxist perspective in Childe's work and seeing his contribution entirely in terms of the development of the culture-historical framework [7].

In a review of the last edition of The Dawn of European Civilization, Piggot noted, in passing, Childe's concern with social and eco- nomic relations [8], but in his influential obituary equated Childe's achievement with his earlier, essentially pre-Marxist work:

It was he who l'trst demons t ra ted to us what are now familiar concepts in the interpretat ion o f prehis tory - cultures, associations, synchronisms, and chronologies. We owe more than we realize to four pages in the preface to The Danube in Prehistory, where in 1929 he set ou t the basic principles on which we have all worked since

[9l.

Glyn Daniel, in his history of prehistory, One Hundred and Fifty Years of Archaeology, re-

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fers to Childe quite frequently in culture- historical contexts, but only once refers to other aspects of his work, and only then to describe Scotland Before the Scots as "a piece of anti-establishment whimsey" [ 10]. The only inference to be drawn here is that Daniel - and more significantly the world- view of traditional British archaeology within which he was working - had no real understand- ing of what Childe was attempting to accom- plish. It may well be the case that Childe pro- duced the book partially in a spirit of radical mischief, but this is quite irrelevant to any evaluation of its theoretical significance.

The most revealing of the discussions of Childe's work is that by Grahame Clark. He explicitly states that Childe's contribution is to be seen entirely in terms of the culture- historical approach. Like Piggot, Clark re- ferred to the Preface to The Danube in Pre- history in which Childe elaborated the culture- historical perspective and stated that "this was his essential contribution to prehistoric archaeology" [ 11 ], and further that "He had achieved what he was going to achieve in this genre essentially by 1930" [ 12]. This is a dismissive statement, since about ninety per- cent of Childe's work appeared after that date. But the later work was spoilt for Clark by the influence of "the antiquated folk-lore of Karl Marx" [ 13 ]. The overall tone of Clark's article is worth indicating in a longer quote:

Marxism exerted a seriously inhibiting effect on his middle years. It helps to explain why after 1930 or so Childe's creative period was essentially over and why at the end of his life he realised that his prophet had played him false. Whereas in 1946 he could still argue (1946b: 251) that there was a 'prospect of reaching general laws indicative of the direction of historic progress' in his 'Valediction' he had to admit that while Marxism had once seemed to make intelligible the development of each culture it 'completely failed to explain the differences between one culture and another and indeed obliterated or dismissed the differences observed' (1958:6) [ 14].

As Matthew Spriggs has pointed out, Clark here was simply misquoting Childe, who was

referring to Marrism (the mechanistic Soviet doctrine) and not to Marxism:

there is little evidence contained in Clark's article of any concrete understanding either o f Childe or the Marxist theories he was a t tempting to test archaeologically [ 15].

Clark also attempted to put down Childe's work by observing that he was "the most bour- geois person in the world" [ 16] while Piggot suggested that there was a relationship between Childe's interest in Marxism and the alleged fact that

He was very ugly, and he was an Australian. These two factors, coupled with the resultant awkwardness and shy- ness among all but a very few friends and for very short intervals, seem to have decisively affected his intellectual standpoint. He was an Outsider, with a familiar love-hate relationship to his position, resenting and disliking it, but at the same time exaggerating his oddness by such means as wearing eccentric broad-brimmed hats and deliberately making himself an intellectual solitary [ 17 t .

Further:

He may well, as a shy, idealistic, awkward young man, have seen in his version o f Communism a structure of society in which honoured recognition for the intellectual engaged in socially justified work would be more possible than in the England o f the 1920's: the Outsider would be more easily admit ted to privilege in such a hypothet ical society [ 18].

This crude psychological reductionism is hard to take seriously, but it did have consequences for the development of the discipline, most ex- plicitly stated in Clark's article.

Having dismissed what Childe did after 1930, Clark goes on to discuss prehistory since Childe. He shows that the logical step from Childe's culture-historical system is the ecological ap- proach, influenced by functionalist anthro- pology, involving "the concept of human so- cieties operating as systems, in which every component contributed to the functioning of the whole" [ 19]. Clark claimed that the "eco- logical approach was not only free from, but was a denial of the dreary determinism of some

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of the earlier geographical approaches to archae- ology. The relationships between the several dimensions of human life and different facets of the natural environment were seen not as one-way but as two-way" [20]. But despite lip-service being paid to some kind of facile causal interactionism, the 'ecological approach' as it has developed has been, in both British and American archaeology, increasingly re- ductive and determinist.

Both the 'palaeoeconomy' school and American cultural materialism have treated social relations as essentially epiphenomenal to the ecosystem or more generally to environ- mental constraints. Social factors have always been made secondary to the inexorable ratio- nality of 'adaptations' and the teleology of the homeostatic system. Vulgar materialism as an approach has always been extremely vulnerable to criticism from non-reductive approaches, and has almost always been argued for, not as a conceptually more vigourous alternative to some kind of social archaeology, but simply through juxtaposition to previous archaeology, which is represented as having been purely descriptive and purely classificatory. In "Archaeological Perspectives," a central text for the cultural materialist "New Archaeology," Binford counterposed a process-oriented eco- systemic approach to the diffusionist, tradi- tional culture-historical approach [21 ]. The environmental determinist approach does pro- vide concepts and explanations of a crude functionalist sort, and can thus be represented as a progressive move forward from a classifi- catory framework which offers no explana- tions at all, but only if the potential alternative - the social perspective opened up by Childe - has been erased. This closure is essentially the function Clark, Piggot and Daniel performed in rejecting Childe's later work as unserious and unimportant. This dismissal made it easy for many questions of the ecological approach to remain unasked.

More recently, the narrow environmentally determinist approach has been extensively

criticised [22], and archaeological work has appeared which has taken into consideration social relations in a more serious way [23]. Childe's work has too many flaws to be de- ployed as a point of reference or as a signifi- cant stimulus for this current work. Many of the Marxist notions he used, such as the Morgan schema of social evolution and the 'false consciousness' view of ideology, no longer seem as heuristic, or at least no longer seem tenable in an unmodified form. Yet Childe's work remains exemplary in two im- portant respects. First, Childe consistently at tempted to present his insights in a form accessible and interesting both to those out- side his discipline and to those outside aca- demic institutions. At present, when academic knowledge is increasingly being professional- ized, specialized and marginalized, this task is more urgent than ever. Intellectuals with a critical consciousness in academic institutions should not merely produce critically rigorous discourse: it is vital that they also attack the production and reproduction of present divi- sions of knowledge, which frustrate real under- standing and fetishize disciplinary boundaries. Secondly, Childe did not neglect the epistemo- logical foundations and implications of what he was doing. It is to the significance of his philosophical work and philosophy in contem- porary archaeology that I now turn.

EMPIRICISM AND IDEOLOGY IN ARCHAEOLOGY

The current archaeological or thodoxy still involves a crude positivism [ 24]. This, along with traditional empiricist epistemology in general, has two basic deficiencies. First, it fails to appreciate the significance of theory in the knowledge-process, and secondly it is de- void of any notion of ideology.

Childe wrote little relating to the first prob- lem from the point of view of archaeological epistemology, but he clearly recognized that knowledge was a construct, constituted of concepts and theory [25]. If adequate explana-

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tions involving social considerations are to be generated, we must break away from the limited positivist notion that ' theory building' is simply something which precedes testing. Kristiansen has made the point well:

One crucial problem is concerned with the relationship between observed regularities in the archaeological record and their underlying structural properties. Here most ex- planations fail to transcend a purely empirical level, which reflects a widely held positivistic belief that there exists a testable one-to-one relationship between empirical observa- tions and the structural properties of prehistoric societies. However, a mode of production, or an economic system, is not constituted by the structure of the empirical evi- dence alone. It has to be reconstructed through an intel- lectual process, using the formal system of theory as a helping tool [ 26 I.

Childe's main concern was with the social nature of knowledge. He adopted the Kantian notion of categories but incorporated it into a Marxist perspective by emphasizing their social origin:

Space as a category is not that in which things are per- ceived, but that in which members of a society co-operate and act together on things [27]. It is owing to their social nature that categories appear a priori, necessary and eternal. In this sense they are in truth anterior to private experience. They are neither dis- covered nor invented by individuals, but imposed by society [28].

Childe extended this conception of knowledge into various areas. For instance, he discussed the role of science, knowledge and religion in the development of society [29]. I am con- cerned only with the way in which this perspec- tive informed some comments Childe made on the place of archaeology in society. Childe recognised that history, as a form of knowledge, was an ideological construction. The historian's selection of events

is determined to a very small extent by his personal idio- syncracies, but on the whole by tradition and social inter- ests. Indeed... the standard of the memorable is a social one, dictated by interests shared by the whole community, or more precisely by the ruling class in each community.

Again, in so far as an historian imports judgements

into his narrative, the standard of value will be determined socially. It is just no good demanding that history shall be unbiased. The writer cannot help being influenced by the interests and prejudices of the society to which he belongs - his class, his nation, his church [30].

The general point also related to archaeology, and Childe was particularly concerned by the use of racial diffusionist theories of the Aryans in Nazi ideology:

In 1933 it can hardly be alleged that Prehistory is a useless study, wholely remote from and irrelevant to practical life... No one who has read Mein Kampf, or even the extracts therefrom in The Tinzes, can fail to appreciate the profound effect which theories of tile racial superiority of 'Aryans' have exercised on contemporary Germany [31 ].

Archaeological theories can function in more or less the same way as sociobiology has demon- strably done in legitimating racial and other forms of oppression. Archaeologists have at present no notion of ideology, which means that the discipline cannot be critically self- conscious, it cannot be aware of the ways in which theories and structures of interpretation can function in ways unintended and unseen by their producers. Some forms o f contempo- rary cultural materialist interpretation have a great deal in common with sociobiology and provide extra support for its premises.

Archaeology now is increasingly articulated into wider social activities through the devel- opment of so-called 'public archaeology' and through the institutionalization of various archaeological practices in government depart- ments and affiliated organizations. Work in this area entails many problems comparable to those which have arisen in 'applied' anthro- pology: what is the significance of key terms drawn not from theoretical work but from various other discourses such as 'national heritage' and 'cultural resources'? Archaeologi- cal salvage work may become merely palliative, functioning essentially to legitimate develop- ment and the destruction of sites (with which an indigenous group may identify). The cur- rent framework for the consideration of these

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issues is entirely inadequate; they are con- ceived as individualistic 'ethical' choices rather than as political questions with practical conse- quences.

Hence, a paper in one of the major collec- tions on "culture resource management" urged archaeologists to sell the discipline to the public and to government, while presenting detailed, evaluated strategies for efficient marketing [32]. Is this really the kind of rhetoric that archae- ologists should participate in or endorse?

Archaeologists have often taken partisan positions regarding conservation issues [33 ]. Here we see the central error of the ecological approach in prehistory and anthropology re- produced in the contemporary political con- text. The most crucial inadequacy of the various ecological approaches ties in the failure to appreciate the role of social relations in dominating, indeed creating, patterns of re- source exploitation and subsistence strategies. As Enzenberger has argued in a detailed cri- tique of the ecological movement in contem- porary politics [34], environmental issues can- not be isolated from social relations and eco- nomic systems. Where archaeologists are in- volved in questions of public policy, they must recognize the dominance of certain inter- ests, and the constraints this dominance im- poses upon the possibility of informed deci- sion making. If archaeologists are to act in an adequately subversive but constructive way in the public sphere, confronting developers, then their practice must be informed by a critical social theory which situates developers and public archaeologists, capital, and the state relative to each other, putting archae- ological knowledge where it belongs - in the service of indigenous peoples. A new coherence is necessary between a thoroughgoing social archaeology and a critical social perspective on the role of archaeology as a form of knowledge with specific institutional contexts, causes and consequences in policy and politics.

Childe's work opened up the territories of social archaeology and the social location of

archaeology. His positions have been obscured, dismissed and misread, but from within the perspective of these territories as they have developed, we can recognize not only his pioneering role, but also the logic of its dis- missal and misreading.

NOTES

1 V. Gordon Childe, The Danube in Prehistory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929), pp. v-vi. The approach is implicit in various earlier works: "On the date and origin of Minyan ware," Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 35 (1915), pp. 196-207; the first edition of The Dawn of European Civilization (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1925); TheAryans (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1926).

2 The Danube in Prehistory, p. vi. 3 Definitions similar to that quoted appear in: The Bronze

Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), pp. 41-42; "Changing methods and aims in Prehistory," Pro- ceedings of the Prehistoric Society, vol. 1 (1935), p. 3; Scotland Before the Scots (London: Methuen, 1946), p. 2; Prehistoric Migrations in Europe (Osto: Aschehoug and Co., 1950), pp. 2-3 ; A Short Introduction to Archaeology, (New York: Collier, 1956), pp. 15-16;Piecing Together the Past (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), p. 16; The Prehistory of European Society (London: Cassell, 1958), p. 10.

4 The Aryans, p. 81 ; The Danube in Prehistory, p. 297, p. 348.

5 The Bronze Age, pp. 128--30, p. 199. 6 Prehistoric Communities of the British Isles (London:

Chambers and Co., 1940), p. 99, p. 128. 7 T. Murray has developed a similar argument, although

from a rather different point of view. See T. Murray, Patterns in Prehistory: Gordon Childe Reconsidered (University of Sydney, BA (Honours) thesis, 1978).

8 S. Piggot, "The Dawn: and an Epilogue," Antiquity, vol. 32 (1958), p. 77.

9 S. Piggot, "Vere Gordon Childe: 1892-1957," Proceed- ings of the British Academy, vol. 44 (1958), p. 312. This text was described by Clark as 'a key source' on Childe. G. Clark, "Prehistory since Childe," Institute of Archae- ology Bulletin, vol. 13 (1976), p. 2.

10 Glyn Daniel, One Hundred and Fifty Years of Archaeology, (London: Duckworth, 1975), p. 375.

11 Clark, op. cit., 1976, p. 5. 12 ibid., p. 4. 13 Ibid., p. 18. 14 Ibid., p. 3. 15 M. Spriggs, "Introduction," in M. Spriggs (ed.)Archaeology

and Anthropology: Areas of Mutual lnterest (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1977), p. 5.

16 Clark, op. cit., 1976, p. 3. 17 Piggot, "Vere Gordon Childe," op. cit., 1958, p. 310.

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18 Ibid., p. 311. 19 Clark, op. cit., 1976, p. 7. 20 Ibid., p. 9. 21 L. Binford, "Archaeological Perspectives," In S.R. Binford

and L.R. Binford (eds.), New Perspectives in Archaeology (Chicago: Aldine, 1968).

22 For example, J. Friedman, "Marxism, structuralism and vulgar materialism," Man, vol. 9 (1974), pp. 444-469; P. Burnham, "The explanatory value of the concept of adaptation in studies of culture change," in C. Renfrew (ed.), The Explanation of Culture Change, (London: Duck- worth, 1973).

23 For example, P. Kohl, "The Archaeology of Trade," DialecticalAnthropology, vol. 1 (1975), pp. 43-50; M. Rowlands and J. Friedman (eds.), The Evolution of Social Systems (London: Duckworth, 1978); M. Rowlands, "Kinship, alliance and exchange in the European Bronze Age," in J. Barrett and R. Bradley (eds.), Settlement and Society in the British later Bronze Age (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1980). It has also been possible for more perceptive work on Childe to be carried out: B. Trigger, Gordon Childe: Revolutions in Archaeology (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980); B. McNairn, The Method and Theory of V. Gordon Childe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1980). The former in particular, however, retains many of the misconceptions of earlier work on Childe.

24 A. Spaulding, "Explanation in Archaeology," in S.R. Binford and L.R. Binford (eds.), New Perspectives in Archaeology (Chicago: Aldine, 1968). This position was recently restated

by L. Binford in the "Introduction," in L.R. Binford (ed.), For Theory Building in Archaeology (New York: Academic Press, 1977).

25 Childe, Society and Knowledge (London: Allen and Unwin, t 956).

26 K. Kristiansen, "Economic models for Bronze Age Scandi- navia," in A. Sheridan and G. Barley (eds.), Economic Archae- ology: Towards an Integration of Ecological and Social Ap- proaches (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1981).

27 Society and Knowledge, p. 74. 28 Ibid., p. 83. 29 Piecing Together the Past, p. 171-172;Magic, Craftsman-

ship and Science (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1940).

30 Childe, History, (London: Cobbet, 1947), p. 22. 31 "Is prehistory practical?",Antiquity, vol. 7 (1933), pp.

410-418. Childe repeated this position in History, pp. 52-54. He was probably rather embarrassed by his own use of the Aryan theory before it became a political issue. Cf. TheAryans, especially pp. 207-212.

32 D.G. Macleod, "Peddle or perish: Archaeological market- ing from concept to product delivery," in M.B. Schiffer and G.J. Gumerman (eds.), Conservation Archaeology: A Guide for Culture Resource Management Studies (New York: Academic Press, 1977).

33 See, for example, the "Introduction" to Schiffer and Gumerman, op. cir.

34 H.M. Enzenberger, "A critique of political ecology: in Raids and Reconstructions: Essays in Politics, Crime and Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1976).

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