Editing V. Gordon Childe (section)

===Influence on processual and post-processual archaeology===

Through his work, Childe contributed to two of the major theoretical movements in Anglo-American archaeology that developed in the decades after his death, [[Processual archaeology|processualism]] and [[post-processualism]]. The former emerged in the late 1950s, emphasised the idea that archaeology should be a branch of anthropology, sought the discovery of universal laws about society, and believed that archaeology could ascertain objective information about the past. The latter emerged as a reaction to processualism in the late 1970s, rejecting the idea that archaeology had access to objective information about the past and emphasising the subjectivity of all interpretation.{{sfn|Trigger|1994|p=24}}

The processual archaeologist Colin Renfrew described Childe as "one of the fathers of processual thought" due to his "development of economic and social themes in prehistory",{{sfn|Renfrew|1994|p=123}} an idea echoed by Faulkner.{{sfn|Faulkner|2007|p=100}} Trigger argued that Childe's work foreshadowed processual thought in two ways: by emphasising the role of change in societal development, and by adhering to a strictly materialist view of the past. Both of these arose from Childe's Marxism.{{sfn|Trigger|1980|p=181}} Despite this connection, most American processualists ignored Childe's work, seeing him as a [[Historical particularism|particularist]] who was irrelevant to their search for generalised laws of societal behaviour.{{sfn|Tringham|1983|p=93}} In keeping with Marxist thought, Childe did not agree that such generalised laws exist, believing behaviour is not universal but conditioned by socio-economic factors.{{sfn|Tringham|1983|p=94}} [[Peter Ucko]], one of Childe's successors as director of the Institute of Archaeology, highlighted that Childe accepted the [[subjectivity]] of archaeological interpretation, something in stark contrast to the processualists' insistence that archaeological interpretation could be objective.{{sfn|Ucko|1990|p=xiii}} As a result, Trigger thought Childe to be a "prototypical post-processual archaeologist".{{sfn|Trigger|1994|p=24}}