Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2015, Page 79

An Interview With Gordon Childe: Iceland, 1956
Interview with Björn Þorsteinsson
for the leít-wing newspaper Þjóðvilijnn, 26th July 1956
Thefollowing translation was made by Gavin Lucas, with assistance from Þórir Jónsson Hraundal
and Orri Vésteinsson. Allfootnotes are by Gavin Lucas and are merely intended to elucidate state-
ments that might be obscure to the general reader with little knowledge of Childe or Iceland. I am
grateful to Professor Tim Murrayfor reading over a draft of this text and hisfeedback and to Helgi
Skúli Kjartansson for help with Icelandic union history.
Iceland is the only country in the world
which has still not revealed any humans
or human-made remains from prehistoric
times. “You have to find something Celtic”,
said Gordon Childe, professor in European
archaeology and director of the Institute of
Archaeology at London University, when
he came out of the National Museum last
Friday. There seemed to me to be a little
distrust in his voice; perhaps we are not
sufficiently assiduous searchers of such ar-
tefacts, but let us see what happens.
Professor Childe is one of the most fa-
mous scholars to visit this country and a
prolific author. He is well known to many
Icelanders for his books What Happened
in History, Man Makes Himself and His-
tory'. These books have been published in
cheap editions for the public and the first
two very often but his other major works
are How Labour Governs 1923; The Dawn
of European Civilization , ‘29, ‘39, ‘49; The
Most Ancient East ‘28; The Danube in Pre-
history, ‘29; The Bronze Age, ‘30; SkaraBrae,
‘31; New Light on the Most Ancient East, ‘34,
‘52; The Prehistory of Scotland 1935; Prehis-
toric Communities in the British Isles 1940;
Scotland before the Scots 1946; and this year
he has already published three books The
Theory of Interpreting Archaeology1 2, A Short
Introduction to Archaeology, and Knowl-
edge and Society.
Not everything is mentioned here
which Childe has written in his time, but
he is now 64 years old. His research has
long since made him world famous and
he has been awarded many honours; uni-
versities west and east of the Atlantic have
vied to bestow honorary titles on him and
academic societies compete to grant him
honorary membership. He has the rare giff
among scholars to be able to maintain the
strictest academic standards yet have popu-
lar appeal at the same time. He also has the
courage and manliness to always be honest
in his work, unafraid to point out the social
implications of the facts of his discipline.
1 These books were first published in 1942, 1936 and 1947 respectively, the first two running through several
editions.
2 The book referred to here was actually published as Piecing Together the Past. The Interpretation of
Archaeological Data.
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