AUSTRALIA AUTHOR · PREHISTORIC PEOPLES · ARCHAEOLOGY
V. Gordon Childe
Also known as: V. Gordon Childe, Vere Gordon Childe
Vere Gordon Childe (14 April 1892 – 19 October 1957) was an Australian archaeologist who specialised in the study of European prehistory. He spent most of his life in the United Kingdom, working as an academic for the University of Edinburgh and then the Institute of Archaeology, London. He wrote twenty-six books during his career. Initially an early proponent of culture-historical archaeology, he later became the first exponent of Marxist archaeology in the Western world. Born in Sydney to a middle-class English migrant family, Childe studied classics at the University of Sydney before moving to England to study classical archaeology at the University of Oxford.
To the thoughtful mind the outlook at the close of the nineteenth century is profoundly interesting.
— from Social evolution, 1894
Most acclaimed
Man makes himself
V. Gordon Childe was educated in Australia as an archaeologist. He adopted a Marxist approach to the evolution of human cultures, recognizing the interpenetration of cultures as populations came into contact and adopted techniques from one another. He stressed the importance of the development of human creativity and its growing effect on the pace and content of cultural evolution. He also recognized the interplay between biological and cultural evolution as the evolution of primates developed a lineage that culminated in the appearance of H. sapiens. The book was published in 1939.
History
From Book's Preface: Contains summary population totals for the United States, Puerto Rico, and the Island areas and for major race groups and an overview of political, statistical, and technological context in which the census took place. Describes preparations for the census, including lessons learned from the 1990 census, consultations with governmental and other data users, recommendations from the National Academy of Sciences and other advisory groups, and the plans for and results of census tests conducted between 1992 and 1998. Summarizes the history of each question on the short and long forms, the response categories, data uses, and any associated editing, allocation, and coding instructions. Reviews evaluations and recommendations from the 1990 program, the decision to use paid advertising in Census 2000, developing and implementing an integrated marketing strategy, components of the partnership program, and a series of special initiatives. Describes the organization and distribution of regional census centers and local census offices, the hiring and training of temporary field staff, the hardware and software used to track and assess census progress, and the different components of the enumeration process. Summarizes the decision to hire contractors to conduct data capture and manage the data capture centers, the hardware and software used to capture census data, the headquarters tabulation process, identification and deletion of duplicates, editing and imputation, intermediate data files, and the creation of the 100 percent and sample detail files. Covers such topics as data collection and tabulation geography, mapping, creating and updating the census address list, data products and their dissemination, the experimental and evaluation programs, legislation, litigation, the debate over sampling, and the census in Puerto Rico and the Island Areas.