Career
Childe spent most of his working life in Great Britain. He arrived at Queen's College, Oxford, England, with a scholarship in 1914 to study the classics. From 1919 to 1921 he was back in Australia, where he was private secretary to the premier of New South Wales. In 1925 he returned to London where he wrote his first books on archaeology and held a position as librarian to the Royal Anthropological Institute. In 1927 he moved to Scotland as the first holder of the chair of prehistoric archaeology at Edinburgh University, a position he held until 1946. He then assumed the directorship of the Institute of Archaeology at London University and continued in this post until his retirement in 1957. His long and eminent career was also marked by the excavations which he conducted in the Orkney Islands in 1928-1930, by travels in Greece, the Balkans, Iraq, and India, and by several trips to the United States.
