Background
Childe was born on 14 April 1892 in Sydney, New South Wales. He was the only surviving child of the Reverend Stephen Henry and Harriet Eliza Childe, a middle-class couple of English descent.
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(Man Makes Himself is the classic introduction to the hist...)
Man Makes Himself is the classic introduction to the history of early man. Starting more than 340,000 years ago, when man's ability to make a fire and fashion stone tools helped him to survive among the wild beasts, it traces his development as a food producer, the emergence of cities and states, the rise of foreign trade, and the urban revolution.
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Childe was born on 14 April 1892 in Sydney, New South Wales. He was the only surviving child of the Reverend Stephen Henry and Harriet Eliza Childe, a middle-class couple of English descent.
Childe studied for a degree in Classics at the University of Sydney in 1911; although focusing on the study of written sources, he first came across classical archaeology through the works of archaeologists Heinrich Schliemann and Arthur Evans.
Wishing to continue his education, he gained a £200 Cooper Graduate Scholarship in Classics, allowing him to afford the tuition fees at Queen's College, a part of the University of Oxford, England.
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. What made Childe pre-eminent in his field was his ability to discern and illuminate the main currents of prehistory, an ability fortified by a wide-ranging, exact, and always up-to-date knowledge of the archaeological data. His central aim was to account for the phenomenon of European civilization by examining its earliest sources, and both his first book, The Dawn of European Civilization (1925, many later editions), and his last and posthumously published Prehistory of European Society (1957) were concerned with this theme. In order to equip himself for the task he had set himself Childe found it necessary to master the genesis and early spread of Old World civilization; and this knowledge he distilled in a number of popular works which brought him world-wide renown, notably What Happened in History (1942) and Social Evolution (1951). Childe was killed when he fell off a cliff in New South Wales on October 20, 1957.
He was cited as the most translated Australian author in history, having seen his books published in such languages as Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Sweden and Turkish.
Childe is primarily respected for developing a synthesis of European and Near Eastern prehistory at a time when most archaeologists were focused on regional sites and sequences, gaining the moniker of "the Great Synthesizer".
In April 1956, Childe was awarded the Gold Medal of the Society of Antiquaries for his services to archaeology.
(Man Makes Himself is the classic introduction to the hist...)
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. What made Childe pre-eminent in his field was his ability to discern and illuminate the main currents of prehistory, an ability fortified by a wide-ranging, exact, and always up-to-date knowledge of the archaeological data. His central aim was to account for the phenomenon of European civilization by examining its earliest sources, and both his first book, The Dawn of European Civilization (1925, many later editions), and his last and posthumously published Prehistory of European Society (1957) were concerned with this theme.
Childe believed that the study of the past could offer guidance for how humans should act in the present and future.
He enjoyed interacting and socialising with students, often inviting them to dine with him, despite finding it difficult relating to other humans. He was shy, and often hid his personal feelings. He could speak a number of European languages, having taught himself in early life when he was travelling across much of the continent.
Quotes from others about the person
The archaeologist Randall H. McGuire described him as "probably the best known and most cited archaeologist of the twentieth century".
Barbara McNairn labelled him "one of the most outstanding and influential figures in the discipline".
Biographer Sally Green found no evidence that Childe ever had a serious relationship with anyone; she assumed him to be heterosexual because she found no evidence of same-sex attraction. He had many friends of both sexes, although remained "awkward and uncouth, without any social graces".
