Emigrating to London in 1921, he became librarian of the Royal Anthropological Institute and journeyed across Europe to pursue his research into the continent's prehistory, publishing his findings in academic papers and books.

One of the best-known and most widely cited archaeologists of the twentieth century, Childe became known as the "great synthesizer" for his work integrating regional research with a broader picture of Near Eastern and European prehistory.

[5] Gordon Childe was raised alongside five half-siblings at his father's palatial country house, the Chalet Fontenelle, in the township of Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.

At school he studied ancient history, French, Greek, Latin, geometry, algebra, and trigonometry, achieving good marks in all subjects, but he was bullied because of his physical appearance and unathletic physique.

[9] Childe's relationship with his father was strained, particularly following his mother's death, and they disagreed on religion and politics: the Reverend was a devout Christian and conservative while his son was an atheist and socialist.

Wishing to continue his education, he gained a £200 Cooper Graduate Scholarship in Classics, allowing him to pay the tuition fees at Queen's College, part of the University of Oxford, England.

In Easter 1918 he spoke at the Third Inter-State Peace Conference, an event organised by the Australian Union of Democratic Control for the Avoidance of War, a group opposed to Prime Minister Billy Hughes's plans to introduce conscription.

[25] Staff members secured him work as a tutor in ancient history in the Department of Tutorial Classes, but the university chancellor William Cullen feared that he would promote socialism to students and fired him.

[31] Unable to find an academic job in Australia, Childe remained in Britain, renting a room in Bloomsbury, Central London, and spending much time studying at the British Museum and the Royal Anthropological Institute library.

In 1922 he travelled to Vienna to examine unpublished material about the painted Neolithic pottery from Schipenitz, Bukovina, held in the Prehistoric Department of the Natural History Museum; he published his findings in the 1923 volume of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

[45] Childe later said the book "aimed at distilling from archaeological remains a preliterate substitute for the conventional politico-military history with cultures, instead of statesmen, as actors, and migrations in place of battles".

[55] An early proponent of experimental archaeology, he involved his students in his experiments; in 1937 he used this method to investigate the vitrification process evident at several Iron Age forts in northern Britain.

[61] His socialist convictions led to an early denunciation of European fascism, and he was outraged by the Nazi co-option of prehistoric archaeology to glorify their own conceptions of an Aryan racial heritage.

[68] Unlike many contemporaries, he was scrupulous with writing up and publishing his findings, producing almost annual reports for the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and, unusually, ensuring that he acknowledged the help of every digger.

[74] Childe continued writing and publishing books on archaeology, beginning with a series of works following on from The Dawn of European Civilisation and The Aryans by compiling and synthesising data from across Europe.

Although Oxford University Press offered to publish the work, he released it through Penguin Books because they could sell it at a cheaper price, something he believed pivotal in providing knowledge for those he called "the masses".

[86] Located in St John's Lodge in the Inner Circle of Regent's Park, the IOA was founded in 1937, largely by the archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, but until 1946 relied primarily on volunteer lecturers.

[95] He retained a love of the Soviet Union, having visiting on multiple occasions; he was also involved with a CPGB satellite body, the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR, and served as president of its National History and Archaeology Section from the early 1950s until his death.

[102] To commemorate his achievements, the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society published a Festschrift edition on the last day of his directorship containing contributions from friends and colleagues all over the world, something that touched Childe deeply.

[115] Following his death, an "unprecedented" level of tributes and memorials were issued by the archaeological community,[116] all, according to Ruth Tringham, testifying to his status as Europe's "greatest prehistorian and a wonderful human being".

To the average communist and anti-communist alike ... Marxism means a set of dogmas—the words of the master from which as among mediaeval schoolmen, one must deduce truths which the scientist hopes to infer from experiment and observation."

[157] As a moderate diffusionist, Childe was heavily critical of the "Marrist" trend in Soviet archaeology, based on the theories of the Georgian philologist Nicholas Marr, which rejected diffusionism in favour of unilinear evolutionism.

[181] 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.

On one occasion he played a joke on the delegates at a Prehistoric Society conference by lecturing them on a theory that the Neolithic monument of Woodhenge had been constructed as an imitation of Stonehenge by a nouveau riche chieftain.

[207] Known for his battered, tatty attire, Childe always wore his wide-brimmed black hat—purchased from a hatter in Jermyn Street, central London—as well as a tie, which was usually red, a colour chosen to symbolise his socialist beliefs.

[58] By 1956, he was cited as the most translated Australian author in history, having seen his books published in such languages as Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Sweden and Turkish.

[212] "The most original and useful contributions that I may have made to prehistory are certainly not novel data rescued by brilliant excavation from the soil or by patient research from dusty museum cases, nor yet well founded chronological schemes nor freshly defined cultures, but rather interpretative concepts and methods of explanation."

[213] Since his death, this framework has been heavily revised following the discovery of radiocarbon dating,[214] his interpretations have been "largely rejected",[215] and many of his conclusions about Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe have been found to be incorrect.

[222] As a result, in the United States he erroneously gained the reputation of being a Near Eastern specialist and a founder of neo-evolutionism, alongside Julian Steward and Leslie White,[223] despite the fact that his approach was "more subtle and nuanced" than theirs.

Harris said the book sought to "demonstrate the dynamic qualities of Childe's thought, the breadth and depth of his scholarship, and the continuing relevance of his work to contemporary issues in archaeology".