Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2015, Page 75

Gavin Lucas
ANINTERVIEW WITH GORDON CHILDE:
ICELAND, 1956
Introduction
Gordon Vere Childe (b.1892 - d.1957)
needs no introduction, being one of the
most well-known archaeologists of the
twentieth century. The extent of literature
about his life and his contributions to the
discipline (e.g. McNairn 1980; Trigger
1980; Green 1981; Harris 1994; Gathercole
et al. 1995) match his own prolific output
(e.g. see Gathercole & Irving 2009). Childe
was, like many scholars both in his time
and today, well-travelled but his one trip to
Iceland in the summer of 1956 was never-
theless somewhat anomalous. Childe was
a prehistorian and his attendance at the
third Viking Congress held in Reykjavík
that year would seem somewhat outside
of his main research interests. Childe was
certainly well-read and had an unbounded
appetite for history of any period or place,
but as far as I know he never published on
Viking or medieval archaeology and even
his general books tended to retain their
focus on prehistory. Perhaps therefore it is
not surprising that his only real comments
on archaeology in Iceland pertain to pre-
history. As his opening remarks in the in-
terview below indicate, Childe may have
harboured a belief or at least suspicion that
prehistoric archaeology might exist in Ice-
land, it just had yet to be discovered. One
story goes that during a fieldtrip with the
Congress delegates, upon stopping to look
down on the plains south of Hveragerði,
Childe remarked that there had to be pre-
historic settlement on the plain. When
Kristján Eldjárn replied that nothing ear-
lier than Viking occupation had ever been
found in the country, Childe responded,
saying there had to be - it is just that no one
had dug deep enough (Eldjárn 1966, 355).
Of course it is difficult to know how
seriously Childe considered the possibility
of prehistoric remains existing in Iceland;
it is certainly too speculative to suggest his
attendance at the Viking Congress might
have been initiated by such questions. It
may just speak of his ecumenical inter-
est in all things archaeological - or that
Archaeologia Islandica 11 (2015) 73-84