Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2015, Page 77

An Interview With Gordon Childe: Iceland, 1956
archaeology with Nazism under Kossinna,
and his disappointment with Soviet archae-
ology due to its dogmatic allegiance to a
Marx-Engels model of prehistory.
Childes career began in Australian left-
wing politics, as is well known, and it even
seems from the interview that Childe was
more interested in contemporary political
events in Iceland than with its archaeology.
Childe may have even come away with a
favourable impression of the political cli-
mate in Iceland, as in a letter to the Eng-
lish archaeologist O.G.S. Crawford in 1957,
he compares value standards in Iceland to
those in the Soviet Union, as those of an
“educated proletariat”, clearly meant in a
positive sense (Childe to O. G. S. Craw-
ford, 26/8/57; Crawford Papers, Bodleian
Library, Oxford, box 67, fl40; published
in Irving 1995, 46). It is likely such an
impression came largely through Björn
Þorsteinsson who interviewed Childe;
however Icelandic politics was particularly
complex at this time due to disagreements
about the role of Iceland in the cold war.
NATO membership in 1949, followed by
the establishment of a military airbase in
Keflavík in 1951, created great political ten-
sion between the left and right in Iceland.
But even within the left-wing, there were
disagreements about allegiance to the So-
viet Union, a rift played out in many west
European countries during the 1950s. The
interview was taken a month after general
elections in Iceland where a new election
pact, the People’s Alliance - a merger of the
Socialist party and a splinter from the So-
cial Democrats - made gains and ushered
in a new left-leaning coalition which had
taken office two days before the interview
was published.
Reading the interview now, nearly 60
years later, there is certainly nothing new
here one learns about Childe. The language
it was written in feels somewhat archaic
to a modern Icelander (but this has not
been captured well in translation) and of
course some of the issues raised such as
the interviewer’s characterization of hu-
man progress or Childe’s misogynous re-
marks about women do not sit well with a
modern reader. On the other hand, Childe
is much more explicit about his Marxist
foundations and his favouring of histori-
cal materialism than he generally was in his
own, published work. His only ever explicit
text which links Marxism to prehistory
was never published in his lifetime (Childe
1979) and this interview is a rare glimpse
of Childe talking freely about such matters.
This is in large part, probably due to both
the interviewer and the paper in which the
interview was to be published.
Childe lived through a period where
Marxism, Socialism and Communism were
increasingly regarded as socially unaccep-
table political positions; Childe himself was
even put on a blacklist of undesirables by
none other than the writer George Orwell
for the Information Research Department
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