archaeology and director of the Institute of Archaeology at the University of London from 1946 until he retired in 1956. Throughout these years he carried out numerous archaeological excavations and surveys in Scotland and also visited many excavations in Europe and the Middle East.

Although Childe was primarily a European prehistorian, for the rest of his life he sought a better understanding of cultural change. Beginning with The Most Ancient East (1928), he sought to delineate the revolutionary impacts that the development of agriculture and bronze working had on various parts of the Middle East and Europe. Instead of treating technological innovation as an independent variable that brought about cultural change, he sought to trace the reciprocal relations between it and specific environments, economies, and political systems. He saw changes occurring in a multilinear, not a unilinear, fashion.

In 1935, Childe visited the Soviet Union. Although he disapproved of the dogmatism imposed on Soviet archaeologists, he was impressed by the attention being paid to how ordinary people lived in prehistoric times and by Marxist interpretations of cultural evolution. In Man Makes Himself (1936) and What Happened in History (1942), Childe examined, from an evolutionary perspective, how elites and inflexible belief systems could halt economic and social progress but only at the cost of undermining a society’s ability to compete with more progressive neighbors.

After World War II, disillusionment with the declining quality of Soviet archaeology led Childe to acquire a more profound understanding of Marxism as an analytical tool and to try to apply it to the interpretation of archaeological data. He attempted to reconcile the observation that all human behavior is culturally mediated with a materialist view of causality. In Prehistory of European Society (1958), he stressed that social and political organization provided the framework within which all archaeological data could most productively be understood.

Troubled by failing health and fearing that incipient senility was preventing him from devising new procedures for inferring social organization from archaeological data, Childe, jumped to his death from a cliff in the Blue Mountains of Australia on 19 October 1957.

Bruce G. Trigger

References

For references, seeEncyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 1, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 398–399.

Chile

Prescientific Period (1400–1830)

Pre-Columbian society described the past as a series of mythical epochs, and this idea was documented at the time of European contact by the first chroniclers of the sixteenth century. Even today, some ethnic minorities can retell the ancient epic stories about their origins. There are descriptions dating from the sixteenth century of “excavations” of Indian tombs in search of buried treasure or motivated by curiosity abut the rituals of Indian “paganism.” Of great importance for the study of pre-Columbian society are the numerous ethnohistoric documents generated by the Spanish administration during the period of Indian resistance. In fact, from the examination of these records, architectonic, ritual, and material culture traits have been explained and are of prime importance in the reconstitution of archaeological events.

During the sixteenth century, the Spanish encountered colossal ruins in the middle of a living Inca society that were evidence of a distant past. The invaders’ medieval worldview, along with their creationist dogmas and limited biblical chronology, did not stimulate the need to systematically record such ruins. However, some chroniclers proposed that ancient hunters must have carried out the first peopling of the Americas. Others, such as Father Lozano, writing in the early seventeenth century, devoted himself to the study of the origin of the Indians of the New World and West Indies (Orígen de los indios del Nuevo Mundo e Indias Occidentales).

Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, various European travelers and scientists on neocolonial and scientific explorations visited the New World, and their accounts provide