Vere Gordon Childe - Scotland before the Scots : being the Rhind Lectures for 1944

Volume 6

SCOTLAND BEFORE THE SCOTS

First published in 1946 by Methuen

This edition first published in 2022

by Routledge

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1946 V. Gordon Childe

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-03-206184-9 (Set)

ISBN: 978-1-00-321338-3 (Set) (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-03-207028-5 (Volume 6) (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-03-207034-6 (Volume 6) (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-00-320504-3 (Volume 6) (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003205043

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

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being
The Rhind Lectures for 1944

by

V. GORDON DHILDE

PROFESSOR OF PREHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

THIS BOOK IS PRODUCED IN COMPLETE CONFORMITY WITH THE AUTHORIZED ECONOMY STANDARDS

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY

JARROLD AND SONS, LTD., NORWICH

THIS book embodies the substance of six Rhind Lectures delivered to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland under the title, The Development of Tribal Society in Scotland in pre-Roman Times. They were an attempt to present a slice of prehistory in a way quite novel to English readers. The prehistory of the British Isles was undoubtedly punctuated by a series of invasions. Accounts of it are liable to be so engrossed with tracing the successive invading groups to their Continental cradles and defining what contribution each introduced that they have little space left to relate what the several societies did when they got here. Our Soviet colleagues have criticized perhaps a little too harshly this idiosyncrasy of British prehistorians, but for their part have shown how the internal development of societies themselves can explain a wide range of archaeological facts. Their applications of Marxism to prehistory have produced narratives that seem more historical than a succession of invasions and are yet just as objective and solidly based on observed data. Accordingly when invited by the Society of Antiquaries to deliver the Rhind Lectures in Archaeology for 1944 on a subject relating to Scottish prehistory, I resolved to apply to it the method so successfully used by the late E. Krichevskiy, Kruglov, Podgayetskiy, Tretiakov, and other Marxists in Russian prehistory. Luckily the technical evidence has for the most part been already marshalled and digested so that its statement and analysis can be relegated to footnotes and appendices, leaving the text free for strictly historical action. The reader must judge whether the drama discharged be lively and convincing.

For the author it remains to acknowledge his indebtedness on the one hand to his Russian colleagues whose mastery both of archaeology and Marxism has been his inspiration and on the other to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland not only for electing him Rhind Lecturer, but also for permitting him to illustrate this printed version of the course with reproductions of figures originally published in their Proceedings and other publications. is reproduced by permission of the Ministry of Works. My colleague, Mr. James Drummond, and Mr. Stuart Cruden have been kind enough to read the proofs.

EDINBURGH, November 1945

FOR reconstructing the life of forgotten, illiterate societies, archaeology offers the prehistorian an undigested mass of broken articles and ruined buildingsrelics and monuments. Of this mass, bequeathed to us by the savage or barbarous past, part unfortunately still resists classification; no one knows, for instance, what the standing stones on the naked wine-dark moor were for, nor yet when they were set up. Here all objects of this sort, objects of speculation but not yet of knowledge, albeit regrettably numerous, will be simply ignored. All the rest are scientifically significant, but their value varies.