Justin Mathew

21.08.2019
Reading Gordon Childe: The ideas of cultural evolution and progress:
Some aspects to be considered:
Prehistorians have traditionally classified the archaeological cultures they recover into ages or
stages, conceived, since the nineteenth century beginnings of the disciple, as an evolutionary
sequence of progressive phases through which man has passed in his “ascent to civilization.”
Childe followed this practice, incorporating in different works earlier schemes taken from the
nineteenth century evolutionists.
1) For Gordon Childe, the documentation of technological development (Stone, Bronze or Iron
ages) is not important if it cannot demonstrate the complexity of human condition. He was critical
of the nineteenth century technological determinism and tendency to hierarchically arrange
cultures.
For instance:
Upper Palaeolithic socieites had further elaborated that spiritual equipment already
vaguely attested among Neanderthalers and earlier. Dead Grimaldians and
CroMagnons were interred with even greater ceremony than Neanderthalers. Their
graves were furnished with food, implements, and ornaments. Often the bones are
found reddened with ochre. The mourning relaives had sprinkled the corpse with the
red powder, surely in the pathetic hope that by restoring to the pallid skin the colour
that symbolized life they would also restore the missing life itself. Such a confusion
of the symbol with the thing symbolized lies at the root of ‘sympathetic magic’. It is
symptomatic of the tenacity of tradition that the practice of sprinkling the dead with
ochre persisted for 20,000 years, long after experience should have convinced
everyone of its futility.
Magic rites to ensure the food-supply, to promote the multiplication of the hunted
game, and secure success in the chase, were also devised. The Gravettians used to
carve little figures of women out of stones or mammoth ivory, or model them in clay
and ash. Archaeologists term these Venus figures. But they are generally hideous; most
have no faces, but the sexual characters are always emphasized. They were surely used
in some sort of fertility ritual to ensure the multiplication of game (Childe, What
Happened in History, p. 47)
2) Childe had a supreme commitment to an economic interpretation of his evidence.
3) Childe adopted L. H. Morgan’s terms ‘savagery’, ‘barbarism’ and ‘civilization’. He equated
savagery with the earlier part of the Stone Age (Palaeolithic and Mesolithic), barbarism with the
Neolithic, and Civilization with the Bronze Age.

1
Lewis H. Morgan’s Ancient Society tells the story of humanity’s development from the rudest
savagery to civilization—Morgan examined “how savages, advancing by slow, almost
imperceptible steps, attained the higher condition of barbarians; how barbarians, by similar
progressive advancement, finally attained to civilizations; and why other tribes and nations have
been left behind in the race of progress.”
Influenced by Morgan, Karl Marx observed: “The archaic or primary formations of our earth
consist themselves of a series of layers of different age, superimposed upon one another. Similarly,
the archaic structures of society reveal a series of different social types corresponding to
progressive epochs.” And: “Primitive communities are not all cut to a single pattern. On the
contrary, taken together they form a series of social groupings, differing both in type and age, and
marking successive phases of development.” (Marx and Engels, The Russian Menace to Europe,
223 and Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, 144)
Morgan argued that the “three distinct conditions” of savagery, barbarism, and civilization “are
connected with each other in natural as well as necessary sequence of progress.”
Childe considered that in the first stage of ‘savagery’ food is gathered in a consistent manner but
man is dependent upon the external environment in much the same way as other animals, having
only fire and crude weapons. Every member of the community is concerned with gathering food,
and consumption tends to equal production.
The theory of prehistoric progress was well described in Man Makes Himself, a book published in
1936—Childe argued that “the cultural advances forming the basis of archaeological classification
have had the same sort of biological effect as mutations in organic evolution.” (Childe, Man Makes
Himself, 36)
However, the archaeological classification of the past has the danger of considering all cultures as
single unit.