Childe, Marxism, and Knowledge

Abstract

Childe withdrew from revolutionary politics after his post-university years in Australia in favour of a career in prehistoric archaeology in Britain. Though remaining a Marxist, his application of Marxist principles to prehistory developed only slowly as his interpretations became more sophisticated. He became increasingly interested in knowledge about prehistory from studying results of the interactions between material remains and their interpretation (in Marxist terms, the relationships between practice and theory). In his paper ‘Retrospect’, Childe (1958b:73) charted the development in his thinking to where he rejected ‘transcendental laws determining history and mechanical causes … automatically shaping its course’ with an understanding that a prehistoric society's knowledge of itself was ‘known or knowable … with its then existing material and conceptual equipment’. Thus the prehistory of Europe could be seen not as a product of Oriental civilization, but as an independent entity. Childe could then write a prehistory of Europe ‘that should be both historical and scientific’ (1958b:74). This book,The Prehistory of European Society(1958a), also demonstrated his use of the epistemology of knowledge to understand prehistory as a sociological phenomenon.