Piecing Together the Past by V. Gordon Childe

Author:V. Gordon Childe [Childe, V. Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Archaeology
ISBN: 9781317606543
Google: YhYcBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-10-24T05:01:34+00:00

1 Menghin, Weltgeschichte der Steinzeit.

1 ‘Historischer Ablauf und urgeschichtliche Terminologie’, Anzeiger d. phil.-hist. Kl. d. Österreich. Ökad. d. Wissens., 1950, No. 5, pp. 57–70.

1 The Three Ages, Cambridge, 1941.

1 Their methods have been so admirably explained by F. E. Zeuner in Dating the Past, London, 1951, that any full description here is superfluous.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Who did it?

THE excavator of a prehistoric site is repeatedly asked: ‘Who made that?’ ‘Who were the people who built that house?’ As an archæologist he can only reply in the same sort of terms, and often with the identical words used in answering the other stock question, ‘How old is it?’ He must say ‘Moustierians’ or ‘the Rinyo folk’, or something like that. To an archæologist such terms mean just as much as ‘Picts’ or ‘Celts’ or any similar name taken from a book. To a prehistorian a people are just what they did. Their culture is their behaviour, fossilized, and that is what the culture name connotes. (It is just too bad that language, popularly regarded as the behaviour pattern most distinctive of human groups, does not fossilize so that linguistic names are not applicable to prehistoric peoples.)

Similar assemblages of archæological types are found repeatedly associated together because they were made, used or performed by the same people at the same time. Different assemblages of associated types occur at the same time because they were made by different peoples. Cultures are assemblages of types that are associated because they are made by the same people. They must be classified chronologically and not themselves used to constitute divisions of archæological time. Several cultures must have existed and did exist in one and the same ‘period’. One and the same culture may live through several archæological periods. For cultures are the units of the chorological, as contrasted with the chronological, classification (page 15). Having seen in the last two chapters how the chronological divisions are defined and seriated, the diagnosis, delimitation and description of the chorological divisions of the archæological record must occupy the next.

Types are found repeatedly associated together just because they result from the behaviour pattern standardized within one and the same society. This recurrent assemblage of associated types is of course a ‘culture’ in the archæologists’ partitive sense, the unit of chorological classification. The prehistorian’s business is to reconstruct the behaviour pattern that guarantees their association. Thereby this assemblage of archæological data will come to life, and the culture-name applied to it will acquire an historical connotation. A precise definition of the culture in archæological terms and an exhaustive enumeration of its contents are of course necessary preliminaries to the induction of the pattern that integrates its bits. And since so much of human behaviour fails to fossilize (page 10), only disjointed fragments of that pattern survive and may appear superficially as a random aggregate of unconnected traits. At best some traits can be seen by inspection to be organically connected; the links with the rest have to be discovered. This task is rendered harder by the nature of the traits, necessarily selected for defining a culture.

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