V. Gordon Childe, an Australian archaeologist working in the
first half of the 20th century, came at the tail end of a period in
the development of archaeology referred to by Bruce Trigger in A History of Archaeological Thought as
antiquarianism. Now possessing pejorative connotations, this term describes the
classical and eventually prehistoric archaeological excavations from the
Renaissance through the beginning of the 20th century. While some of
these antiquarians produced adequate documentation of their excavations and
paid attention to stratigraphic levels, their process was largely deductive,
and many were primarily concerned with obtaining decorative items for their
private collections.
In
his essay “Prehistory and Marxism” (1979), published posthumously in Antiquity, Childe derogatorily refers to
his predecessors as “relicologists because they are generally so preoccupied
with the forms of relics that they forget that the relics were made by men to
satisfy some human need” (95). He goes on to distinguish himself from “a
certain Nazi who devoted many pages to the classification of ‘axes’ by shape
and section without ever asking himself what they were used for” (95). In my
opinion, this distinction is one of Childe’s most important contributions to
archaeological theory: rather than the antiquarian focus on stylistic
differences (form), he attempts to infer the underlying function of
archaeological artifacts.
Initially,
Childe subscribed to the purely culture-historical approach espoused by, among
others, German archaeologist and linguist Gustaf Kossinna. Childe utilized
Kossinna’s concept of culture, which delimited groups of people according to
material culture typologies. The nomenclature used by these theorists belies a
preferencing of the artifacts themselves over the peoples who created them. For
instance, another 19th century German archaeologist, Friedrich
Klopfleisch, named a European Neolithic group the Linearbandkeramik after a decorative technique of incising pottery
with linear bands. Rather than using material culture as a lens through which
to learn about past lifeways and ideologies, the proponents of
cultural-historical archaeology viewed the artifacts as ends in of themselves.
Like board game pieces, these stylized ceramics and stone tools were seen not
as objects with a social history but as unambiguous proxies for demarcating the
migration of, for example, the “Linear Band Ceramic Culture” across temporal
and spatial scales.
However,
with his exposure to Soviet archaeology and growing appreciation of Marxist
theory, Childe grew critical of this purely correlative approach. As espoused
in the above diatribe against so-called “relicologists,” he began to
investigate not only how artifacts appear to us now, but also how they could
have appeared to their creators. He calls the Marxist approach to archaeology
“dialectical materialism,” which acknowledges the interplay between economy,
environment, social organization, technology and ideology in shaping “culture”
(Childe 1979). This interpretation of the term “culture” is dramatically
different from his own definition, expressed in “Peoples and Cultures in
Prehistoric Europe” two decades prior: “groups of distinctive traits, mostly
peculiarities in material culture…[that] tend to hang together and be
associated in a given continuous region at a given time” (1933).
Childe’s
increasingly functionalist perspective is directly tied to his newfound
characterization of “culture.” When culture was solely material, one could be
an archaeologist and understand cultures simply by observing artifacts and
their distributions. As culture became an increasingly complex product of both
material and immaterial forces,
however, acknowledging the function of artifacts became vital. After all, the
immaterial factors at play (e.g. ideology, social hierarchy, political system,
and even economy) cannot be excavated. Instead, through a series of inferences
based on material objects in context it is possible to reconstruct some of the
various components that interacted dialectically to comprise a particular
culture. While structural functionalism is criticized for its determinism and
lack of opportunity for individual agency, it was an innovative steppingstone,
championed by Childe in his later writings, which transformed archaeology from
an antiquarian treasure hunt to a methodological pursuit of knowledge.
References:
Childe, V.G. 1933. "Races, Peoples and Cultures in Prehistoric Europe." History 71(18):193-203.
Childe, V. G. 1979. "Prehistory and Marxim." Antiquity 53(208):93-95.
Trigger, B. 1996. A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
