What Happened in History

Classic account of “the neolithic revolution”: the transition from hunter gatherers to agricultural settlement and the birth of civilisation.

First published in 1942, this is a classic account of early human history. Archaeologist and historian Gordon Childe charts the momentous shift from hunter-gathering to settled agriculture, the development of the first towns and cities in Mesopotamia and the spectacular rise and fall of Graeco-Roman civilisation. Childe was one of the first scholars to deploy Marxist ideas to early human history, searching in the Bronze Age for the origins of social and economic principles he believed set Europe on a distinct course. What Happened in History develops his ideas about the ‘neolithic revolution’ and ‘urban revolution’, two famous terms he coined. It explores the invention of iron, the alphabet and coined money and the development of new sciences.

With a new Introduction by David Wengrow, Professor of Comparative Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London and coauthor of The Dawn of Everything. | Gordon Childe (1892-1957) was born in Sydney and moved to England to study classical archaeology at Oxford. He taught at the University of Edinburgh and led the excavation of the famous 5,000-year-old Neolithic village at Skara Brae in Orkney. In 1946, he was appointed director and professor of European prehistory at the Institute of Archaeology in London, where he remained until his retirement in 1956. A prolific author, his other books include The Dawn of European Civilisation, The Danube in Prehistory and Man Makes Himself.