The Danube in Prehistory

Abstract

A BOOK of this kind has been long needed. As Prof. Childe notes in his preface, British archaeologists, in addition to their own local antiquities, have found in the first cultures of the Mediterranean and the Near East happy hunting-grounds and rich rewards. There are historical reasons for that, and also for the comparative neglect of Central and even of Northen Europe. Yet readers of Schliemann's works must have been impressed with the great mass of detailed work which had been done in these regions fifty years ago, however little they may have been convinced by his comparisons of this material with his own finds at Troy. It must be admitted, however, that until recently the very abundance and perplexing variety of the data retarded the appearance of any such compendious handbook as Peet's “Stone and Bronze Ages in Italy”. Even Hoernes' “Urgeschichte der bildenden Kunst in Europa”, before its recent transformation by his pupil Menghin, was essentially a history of art (and particularly of iconic art), not of civilisation. Latterly, the marked growth of popular interest in ‘origins’, as well as the necessity for some clue to such a labyrinth, even for specialists, has elicited summaries like Schuchhardt's “Alt-Europa”, Tyler's “New Stone Age in Europe”, and Prof. Childe's own “Dawn of European Civilisation”. But in so far as these attempted to cover the ground of Europe, and not stray far beyond it, they necessarily lacked scientific and historical, as well as literary unity. What “The Danube in Prehistory” gives us is a series of intimate studies of a family, instead of a snapshot at a crowd. The great valley now is no longer a corridor but a portrait gallery.

The Danube in Prehistory.

By Prof V Gordon Childe. Pp. xx + 479 + 57 plates. (Oxford: Clarendon Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1929.) 42s. net.