V. Gordon Childe - Legacy and Influence

Legacy and Influence

By the time of his death, Childe had already had a significant influence on the world of archaeology, being praised by his colleague Stuart Piggott as "the greatest prehistorian in Britain and probably the world". At the same time, he was also 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. Despite this global influence, his oeuvre was poorly understood in the United States, where his work on European prehistory had never become well known. As a result, he erroneously gained the reputation of being a Near Eastern specialist in the country, where he was also regarded by anthropologists as one of the founders of Neo-evolutionism, alongside the likes of Julian Steward and Leslie White.

Following his death, various articles were published that examined various parts of Childe's work from a historical perspective. In 1980, Bruce Trigger published Gordon Childe: Revolutions in Archaeology, which studied the influences that extended over Childe's archaeological thought. The following year, Trigger's study was followed by the publication of Sally Green's biography of Childe, Prehistorian: A Biography of V. Gordon Childe. She described him as being "the most eminent and influential scholar of European prehistory in the twentieth century".