V. G. Childe’s archaeological theory

Why is so much modern archaeological theory so dull? What set me thinking about this was reading Terry Irving’s The Fatal Lure of Politics: the life and thought of Vere Gordon Childe. Though not so much an archaeological text as an analysis of how Childe’s lifelong political activism shaped his academic work, I can still strongly recommend it to CWA readers who want to get a handle on Childe as a seminal thinker. The standard treatment – in most archaeological discourse – is to discount Childe’s politics. Wearing red ties, walking around with a copy of the Daily Worker in his pocket, mixing with a set of bohemian North London lefties: this gets written off as so much eccentri