V. Gordon Childe

V. Gordon Childe.
V. Gordon Childe (1892–1957) was an Australian archaeologist who specialised in the study of European prehistory. He spent most of his life in the United Kingdom, working as an academic for the University of Edinburgh and then the Institute of Archaeology, London, and wrote twenty-six books during his career. Initially an early proponent of culture-historical archaeology, he later became the first exponent of Marxist archaeology in the Western world. Childe studied classics at the University of Sydney before moving to England to study classical archaeology at the University of Oxford. In 1921 he became librarian of the Royal Anthropological Institute and journeyed across Europe to pursue his research into the continent's prehistory. He co-founded The Prehistoric Society in 1934 and was its first president. In a 1935 presidential address he argued that a Neolithic Revolution initiated the Neolithic era, and that other revolutions marked the start of the Bronze and Iron Ages.