Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2015, Page 78

Gavin Lucas
of the British Foreign Office who were
engaged in anti-communist propaganda
(Pitts 2003). He was similarly declared per-
sona non grata by the U.S. state department
in the 1940s because of his associations
with communism (Rouse 1958). Although
it has been debated how legitimate Childe’s
Marxism was (e.g. Faulkner 2007), this per-
haps misses the point; Marxism in general
can hardly be captured in such dogmatic
terms and indeed Childe himself modi-
fied his views on Marxism over his career
(see Ravetz 1959 for one of the earliest
statements on this; also Gathercole 1995;
Gathercole 2008 for more recent assess-
ments of Childe and Marxism). Perhaps
most importantly, for Childe the insepara-
bility of politics and knowledge only made
archaeology better - contrary to what many
of his contemporaries saw as the need to
separate science from society. In short,
his left-wing politics and the influence of
Marx-Engels’ historical materialism on his
archaeology are unequivocal. In the end,
we are offered in this interview a glimpse of
Childe at a moment in time; a short period
in the summer of 1956 when he came to
Iceland at the peak - and end of his career.
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