Changing trains

In 1934 the archaeologist Gordon Childe made a short trip to the Soviet Union. For twelve days he visited colleagues in museums and archaeological institutes in Leningrad and Moscow. He saw the country from the train and he returned laden with books and information about the origins of the Indo-Europeans. He also learned first-hand about theoretical upheaval. The Soviet archaeology he encountered was a fully fledged state instrument charged with the investigation of pre-capitalist societies and the history of material culture. Indeed, the word archaeology was prohibited and the names of the major institutes had been changed accordingly (Trigger 1980:93). By coincidence the leading archaeologist prior to the Russian revolution of 1917, N. Y. Marr, died in the year of Childe's visit. Marr's brand of Marxism as applied to prehistory stressed that social development was a staged process that took place independently, and therefore in parallel, in different geographical areas. There was little room for diffusion and migration as explanations for change until Marr was denounced by Stalin in 1950 (McNairn 1980:154, 165).

The movement of peoples was Childe's preferred mechanism for the archaeological variety he had already seen first-hand in museums across Europe. In this device at least he shared common ground with another of his contemporaries that he outlived, the ultra-German nationalist Gustav Kossinna who had died in 1931.