The scientific heritage of V.G. Child in Ethnology and History of primitive society

Abstract

The article considers the issue of rethinking the scientific legacy of Vere Gordon Child through the affiliation/non-affiliation of the researcher’s ideas and concepts to the “Morganian and Marxist” theories of evolution. The relevance of the study is due to the lack of domestic research on this topic.

The article uses a retrospective method and a method of comparisons. The reception of the perception of the conclusions and generalizations of the British prehistorian changed depending on the attitude to materialistic ideas during the periods of the “Cold War” and the collapse of the socialist system. The comparison makes it possible to establish similarities and differences in the perception of hypotheses and generalizations of V.G. Child by researchers of various schools during the specified period.

Foreign historians saw him as a socialist who “interpreted archaeological data from the perspective of dialectical materialism”. Both Western and Soviet scholars criticized his stadial development, pointing to the terms “Neolithic Revolution” and “urban revolution” as unsuccessful or as suitable only for the Middle East.

Soviet readers became acquainted with Gordon Child's works only in 1949 in the book “Progress and Archaeology”, so even today it is believed that the term “Neolithic Revolution” appeared in this year, although in fact this concept was substantiated in 1934. Foreign authors noted that in his recent works, V.G. Child moved away from such a direction in ethnology as migrationism, but his new concept of “culture” was not recognized as universal, so applying it to general ethnology is problematic. In turn, the Soviet Union pointed out that he “adhered to diffusionism throughout his life”, and that his concepts of stages of development lacked a class component. Although V.G. Child's works were published outside the USSR, interest in his ideas and concepts, especially staged development, significantly decreased due to the spread of radiocarbon dating.

In the 1980s, new methods of dating prehistoric objects proved to be not universal, so a trend emerged among prehistorians in Western countries – “let-us-know-Childe-better”. On the territory of the former Soviet Union, there is a new interest in the concepts of W.G. Child's appeared only after 1991 among Russian researchers. These concepts, although partially perceived, did not cause a surge of further research into his scientific output. On the contrary, among American, and especially British historians, at the beginning of the 21st century, there was a growing interest in models of social and economic evolution, the theoretical issues of which were precisely addressed during the life of the British prehistorian V.G. Child.