In volume III of ‘The Cambridge Journal’ (1949, 131–47) the present Editor of ‘Antiquity’ wrote an article entitled ‘A defence of prehistory’ in which he referred to ‘the environmentalist school of Fleure and Fox, the hyperdiffusionist school of Elliot Smith, Parry, and Raglan, or the Marxist school of Childe’. Professor Childe wrote a rejoinder which Michael Oakshott, the Editor of ‘The Cambridge Journal’, could not find room to publish. Childe did not publish it elsewhere; there is now a great and continuing interest in his method and theory, and it seemed worth while publishing it at last, 30 years after it was written. Childe died in 1957; ‘The Cambridge Journal’ was short-lived: begun in 1947, it died in 1953.

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. So it is the genesis and development of these to which this autobiographical note is devoted.

Like Gustav Kossinna I came to prehistory from comparative philology; I began the study of European archaeology in the hope of finding the cradle of the Indo-Europeans and of identifying their primitive culture. Reading my Homer and my Veda with the guidance of Schrader and Jevons, Zimmer and Wilamowitz-Moellendorf I was thrilled by the discoveries of Evans in Prehellenic Crete and of Wace and Thompson in Prehistoric Thessaly. Indeed I hoped to find archaeological links between the latter area and some tract north of the Balkans whence similar links might lead also to Iran and India.

With the general acceptance of the doctrine of organic evolution continuity between human history and natural history was also accepted. The latter became just the latest chapters in a single historical record with archaeology bridging the gap between the record of the rocks and the written record. The content of these latest chapters may be termed social evolution, and the Darwinian mechanisms of variation, adaptation, selection and survival may be invoked to elucidate the history of man as well as that of other organisms. But while the use of these terms may emphasize the continuity of history, it may also cause confusions and, in fact, misled some early anthropologists and archaeologists when they tried uncritically to apply Darwinian formulae to human societies or artifacts.

Intimate Connections Between Anatolia and Thrace had been suspected ever since Kazarov published his finds from Kyrillovo. Despite the peculiarities in their handles, the vases and bronzes look so distinctively Anatolian that Thrace seemed just a provincial extension of the Early Troadic Bronze Age culture as known in 1914. Since 1945 new finds from Mikhalits, taken in conjunction with Mikov's discoveries at Karanovo and those of Hamit Zubeyr Koşay, at Büyük Güllücek have put these relations in an entirely new light. Mikhalits, near Svilingrad where a depas amphikypellon had been found in 1941, lies so close to the present frontier that fuller excavation since 1945 has been impracticable. But the observations made in that year alone are sufficiently illuminating. The site is not a tell, but occupies the crest of a natural ridge, and was defended by a stone wall enclosing an area of 80–90 m. in diameter.