Childe, v. Gordon

V. Gordon Childe (1892–1957) was the most influential archaeologist of the twentieth century. His model of “the urban revolution” was a major contribution to scholarly understanding of the earliest cities. Childe's career began with excavations and publications on European prehistory in the 1920s. In the 1930s he turned to synthesis on a larger scale. Until this time, the conceptual approach of archaeologists was focused rather narrowly on chronology and technology. Childe was the first to apply explicit and theoretically grounded social interpretations to archaeological data, producing novel (and influential) syntheses of prehistory. Using a Marxist approach, Childe identified two fundamental social transformations in the human past: the neolithic revolution and the urban revolution. The first signaled the initial adoption of agriculture and a sedentary lifestyle, and the second the appearance of the earliest class-structured state societies. These two transitions occurred independently in several parts of the world, but Childe's publications emphasized the Near East, the scene of their earliest manifestations.

Childe initially described the neolithic and urban revolutions in his 1936 book, Man Makes Himself. He went on to discuss the two models in other books for the public and in technical archaeological articles. They were quickly adopted, debated, and expanded by other archaeologists, and they formed the basis for most subsequent archaeological thinking on these transformations. Although contemporary models are quite different from Childe's original formulations, there is general agreement that he correctly identified the most far-reaching social transformations prior to the Industrial Revolution, as well as some of the major processes involved in those changes.

V. Gordon Childe's model of the urban revolution was presented in its clearest form as a 10-point scheme in an influential article in Town Planning Review in 1950. It is important to note that “urban revolution” was a label for the broad transformation or evolution of nonhierarchical societies into state-level societies. The appearance of cities was an important part of the model, but this was not a model of urban origins narrowly conceived. Childe's presentation of the urban revolution model in the 1950 paper took the form of a list of 10 characteristics that set the earliest states apart from their earlier ancestors. They can be paraphrased as follows:

• 1.
  Large population and large settlements (cities)
• 2.
  Full-time specialization and advanced division of labor
• 3.
  Production of an agricultural surplus to fund government and a differentiated society
[Page 131]
• 4.
  Monumental public architecture
• 5.
  A ruling class
• 6.
  Writing
• 7.
  Exact and predictive sciences (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, calendars)
• 8.
  Sophisticated art styles
• 9.
  Long-distance trade
• 10.
  The state

Some writers have called this is a simple checklist that lacks consideration of social and historical processes. Most archaeologists, however, see the dynamic and functional aspects of the model as implicit in Childe's discussion, and they are treated more fully in his other works. In fact, Childe's model forms the basis for virtually all subsequent theorizing of the rise of the earliest states and cities. In today's complex systems models of state origins, Childe's factor numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, and 10 are still regarded as crucial processes involved in the urban revolution.

...