The eminent prehistorian Gordon Childe was born on 14 April 1892 in Sydney. In 1914 he travelled to Britain with a scholarship to Queen's College, Oxford. On graduating with a BLitt and a first in Greats he returned to Australia and was for two years private secretary to the Premier of New South Wales, a period he later described as his ‘flirtation with politics.’
In 1922 he began his life's work with a period of travel and study in central and eastern Europe, which led to his earliest books The Dawn of European Civilization (1925) and The Aryans (1926). Though The Dawnwas to become one of the most widely read scholarly books on prehistory, Childe first attracted public attention when in the 1920s he supervised the excavation of a prehistoric village at Skara Brae on Orkney Mainland. In 1927, on the strength of his early achievements, he was appointed Abercrombie Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, where he founded a tradition of prehistoric studies...
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Bibliography
Childe, V. G., 1925 (6th rev. edn 1958). The Dawn of European Civilization. New York: Knopf, 367 pp.
Childe, V. G., 1928 (rev. edn 1952). New Light on the Most Ancient East. New York: Praeger, 255 pp.
Childe, V. G., 1929 (reprint 1976). The Danube in Prehistory. New York: AMS Press, 479 pp.
Childe, V. G., 1936 (4th edn 1965). Man Makes Himself. London: Watts, 244 pp.
Childe, V. G., 1942 (rev. edn 1954, reprinted 1964). What Happened in History. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 300 pp.
Childe, V. G., 1944 (reprinted 1971). Progress and Archaeology. Westport, Conn., Greenwood Press, 119 pp.
Harris, D. R. (ed.), 1994. The Archaeology of V. Gordon Childe: Contemporary Perspectives. Centennial Conference, 1992, Institute of Archaeology, University College London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 148 pp.
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Alexander, D.E. (1999). Childe, vere gordon (1892–1957). In: Environmental Geology. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4494-1_54
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