Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-04T16:55:33.107Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

“Yours (unusually) cheerfully, Gordon”: Vere Gordon Childe's letters to R.B.K. Stevenson

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2011

Alice Stevenson*
Affiliation:
Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, UK (Email: alice.stevenson@prm.ox.ac.uk)

Extract

In early 1988 my grandfather, Robert Barron Kerr Stevenson (1913—1992), former Keeper of the National Antiquities of Scotland, was asked about his recollections of his former teacher and colleague Vere Gordon Childe. “There is”, he wrote in reply, “very little that I can say of use to you”. The reason for such a statement seems to be that my grandfather felt that his contacts with Childe had never been concerned with the broad historical and philosophical concepts that scholars were so interested in, believing rather that his own academic perspectives were more from the “worm's eye than the bird's eye view”. Yet what my grandfather knew was a more personal side to Childe that does not come across in his published works.

Type
Research article
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Catalogue 1892. Catalogue of the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland (new and enlarged edition). Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.Google Scholar
Childe, V.G. 1939. The dawn of European civilisation (third edition). London: Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Childe, V.G. 1940. Prehistoric communities of the British Isles. London: Chambers.Google Scholar
Childe, V.G. 1944-1945. An unusual cinerary urn from Droughdool, near Dunragit, Wigtownshire. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 79: 168–70.Google Scholar
Childe, V.G. 1947. The dawn of European civilisation (fourth edition). London: Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Childe, V.G. & Grant, W.G.. 1947. A Stone Age settlement at the Braes of Rinyo, Rousay, Orkney. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquities of Scotland 81: 1642.Google Scholar
Clarke, G. with Oakley, K.P. & Piggott, S.. 1955. Contributions to prehistoric archaeology offered to Professor V. Gordon Childe in honour of his sixty-fifth birthday. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society New Series 21.Google Scholar
Coppi, F. 1871-1876. Monografia ed iconografia della terracimiteriale o terramara di Gorzano, ossia monumenti di pura archeologia. Modena: Capelli.Google Scholar
Desiterre, M., 1991. The circumstances of the first prehistoric science in Italy. Antiquity 65: 567–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diaz-Andreu, M. 2009. Introduction. European Journal of Archaeology 12: 79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, S. 1981. Prehistorian: a biography of V. Gordon Childe. Bradford-upon-Avon: Moonraker Press.Google Scholar
Ralston, I. 2009. Gordon Childe and Scottish archaeology. Journal of European Archaeology 12: 4790.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sandars, N.K. 1955. The antiquity of the one-edged bronze knife in the Aegean, in Clarke, G. with Oakley, K.P. & Piggott, S. (ed.) Contributions to prehistoric archaeology offered to Professor V. Gordon Childe in honour of his sixty-fifth birthday. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society New Series 21: 174–97.Google Scholar
Stevenson, R.B.K. 1943-1944. Some relics from Kildalton, Islay. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquities of Scotland 78: 120–25.Google Scholar
Stevenson, R.B.K. 1947. The Neolithic cultures of south-east Italy. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 13: 85100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stevenson, R.B.K. 1955. Pins and the chronology of brochs, in Clarke, G. with Oakley, K.P. & Piggott, S. (ed.) Contributions to prehistoric archaeology offered to Professor V. Gordon Childe in honour of his sixty-fifth birthday. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society New Series 21: 282304.Google Scholar
Stevenson, R.B.K. 1981. The museum, its beginnings and its development, in Bell, A.S. (ed.) The Scottish Antiquarian tradition: essays to mark the bicentenary of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 1780–1980. Edinburgh: John Donald.Google Scholar
Szombathy, J. 1929. Prähistorische Flachgräber bei Gemeinlebarn in Niederösterreich (Römisch-Germanische Forschungen 3). Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Trigger, B. 1980. Gordon Childe: revolutions in archaeology. London: Thames & Hudson.Google Scholar
Wace, A.J.B. 1953. Mycenae 1939–1952, preliminary report on the excavations of 1952. Annual of the British School at Athens 48: 318.Google Scholar