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in the early 1920s were. He had read classics and philology at the University of Sydney, where he had also developed a deep and abiding attachment to communism, a passion that blinded him to the excesses of Joseph Stalin but colored his archaeology in interesting and surprisingly productive ways. In 1914, he came to the University of Oxford as a graduate student, and there he began the reading and thinking that led to his becoming the foremost authority of his day on the lives and movements of early peoples. In 1927, the University of Edinburgh appointed him to the brand-new post of Abercrombie Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology. This made him the only academic archaeologist in Scotland, so when something like Skara Brae needed investigating the call went out to him. Thus it was in the summer of 1927 that Childe traveled north by train and boat to Orkney.

Vere Gordon Childe at Skara Brae, 1930 (photo credit 2.1)

Nearly every written description of Childe dwells almost lovingly on his oddness of manner and peculiar looks. His colleague Max Mallowan (now best remembered, when remembered at all, as the second husband of Agatha Christie) said he had a face “so ugly that it was painful to look at.” Another colleague recalled Childe as “tall, ungainly and ugly, eccentric in dress and often abrupt in manner [with a] curious and often alarming persona.” The few surviving photographs of Childe certainly confirm that he was no beauty—he was skinny and chinless, with squinting eyes behind owlish spectacles, and a mustache that looked as if it might at any moment stir to life and crawl away—but whatever unkind things people might say about the outside of his head, the inside was a place of golden splendor. Childe had a magnificent, retentive mind and an exceptional facility for languages. He could read at least a dozen, living and dead, which allowed him to scour texts both ancient and modern on any subject that interested him, and there was hardly a subject that didn’t. The combination of weird looks, mumbling diffidence, physical awkwardness, and intensely overpowering intellect was more than many people could take. One student recalled how in a single ostensibly sociable evening Childe had addressed those present in half a dozen languages, demonstrated how to do long division in Roman numerals, expounded critically upon the chemical basis of Bronze Age datings, and quoted lengthily from memory from a range of literary classics. Most people simply found him exhausting.

He wasn’t a born excavator, to put it mildly. A colleague, Stuart Piggott, noted almost with awe Childe’s “inability to appreciate the nature of archaeological evidence in the field, and the processes involved in its recovery, recognition and interpretation.” Nearly all his many books were based on reading rather than personal experience. Even his command of languages was only partial: although he could read them flawlessly, he used his own made-up pronunciations, which no one who spoke the languages could actually understand. In Norway, hoping to impress colleagues, he once tried to order a dish of raspberries and was brought twelve beers.

Whatever his shortcomings of appearance and manner, he was unquestionably a force for good in archaeology. Over the course of three and a half decades he produced six hundred articles and books, popular as well as academic, including the best sellers Man Makes Himself (1936) and What Happened in History (1942), which many later archaeologists said inspired them to take up the profession. Above all he was an original thinker, and at just the time that he was excavating at Skara Brae he had what was perhaps the single biggest and most original idea of twentieth-century archaeology.

The human past is traditionally divided into three very unequal epochs—the Paleolithic (or Old Stone Age), which ran from 2.5 million years ago to about 10,000 years ago; the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), covering the period of transition from hunter-gathering lifestyles to the widespread emergence of agriculture, from 10,000 to 6,000 years ago;