Cirrus@Austlit

'Vere Gordon Childe remains, after a century, Australia’s greatest archaeological expatriate. During the interwar period and into the 1960s he played a seminal role in crafting a coherent pan-European narrative of prehistoric cultural change from what had largely been several centuries of localised antiquarian object collecting. He not only connected local manifestations of archaeological evidence into cultural units that extended beyond national boundaries but was able to arrange them in time, providing a structure in which cultural successions and ethnic change could be examined as forming the evolving human map of Europe and the Middle East that emerged with the earliest historical records.'  (Introduction)