A short introduction to archaeology

by Vere Gordon Childe

"The public, I suspect, still thinks of monuments as ivy-clad ruins and isolated blocks of stone, carved or inscribed. To many, relics are single coins or flint implement, turned up in ploughing or ditching, if not personal mementoes--a button from Prince Charlie's vest, the joint of a martyr's toe, a tooth of Buddha. None of these, least of all the last group, are likely to be significant archaeological date" (from Chapter 1, Archaeology and History). What then is "significant archaeological data"? The men we see in magazine and newspaper photographs digging in remote corners of the world are after--what? How do they work How do they interpret what they find? One of the very best of these scholar-explorers, the late V. Gordon CHilde, as fine a writer as he was a scholar, introduces us to the range and breadth of a science which points back further into time than almost any other. He tells us, first of all, what archaeology is. He describes the rigorous methods of classification of the data that are found among the ruins--the houses, burial sites, weapons, tools, and the rest of the marks let by men who lived, worked, fought, and died ages ago. And, most important, he gives us the keys to understanding what we find. At the time of his death in 1957, Dr. childe was the director of the Institute of Archaeology, University of London. He was the author of more than a dozen widely read books on history and prehistory, and had been elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1940. Well known in the United States, he taught at one time at the University of California and held honorary degrees from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.

127 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

Vere Gordon Childe, better known as V. Gordon Childe, was an Australian archaeologist and philologist who specialised in the study of European prehistory. A vocal socialist, Childe accepted the socio-economic theory of Marxism and was an early, though unorthodox, proponent of Marxist archaeology. Childe worked for most of his life as an academic in the United Kingdom, initially at the University of Edinburgh, and later at the Institute of Archaeology, London. He also wrote a number of groundbreaking books on the subject of archaeology and prehistory, most notably Man Makes Himself (1936) and What Happened in History (1942).

Reviews

[Li, Yuanyuan · Rating 4 out of 5]

挺不错的