Editing Three-age system (section)

=== Vere Gordon Childe's revolution for the masses ===
In 1936 a champion came forward who would advance the Neolithic Revolution into the mainstream view: [[Vere Gordon Childe]]. After giving the Neolithic Revolution scant mention in his first notable work, the 1928 edition of ''New Light on the Most Ancient East'', Childe made a major presentation in the first edition of ''Man Makes Himself'' in 1936 developing Wallace's and Lubbock's theme of the human revolution against the supremacy of nature and supplying detail on two revolutions, the Paleolithic–Neolithic and the Neolithic–Bronze Age, which he called the Second or Urban revolution.

Lubbock had been as much of an [[ethnologist]] as an archaeologist. The founders of [[cultural anthropology]], such as [[Edward Burnett Tylor|Tylor]] and [[Lewis Henry Morgan|Morgan]], were to follow his lead on that. Lubbock created such concepts as savages and barbarians based on the customs of then modern tribesmen and made the presumption that the terms can be applied without serious inaccuracy to the men of the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. Childe broke with this view:<ref>{{harvnb|Childe|1951|p=44}}</ref>
<blockquote>The assumption that any savage tribe today is primitive, in the sense that its culture faithfully reflects that of much more ancient men is gratuitous.</blockquote>

Childe concentrated on the inferences to be made from the artifacts:<ref>{{harvnb|Childe|1951|pp=34–35}}</ref>
<blockquote>But when the tools ... are considered ... in their totality, they may reveal much more. They disclose not only the level of technical skill ... but also their economy .... The archaeologists's ages correspond roughly to economic stages. Each new "age" is ushered in by an economic revolution ....</blockquote>

The archaeological periods were indications of economic ones:<ref>{{harvnb|Childe|1951|p=14}}</ref>
<blockquote>Archaeologists can define a period when it was apparently the sole economy, the sole organization of production ruling anywhere on the earth's surface.</blockquote>
These periods could be used to supplement historical ones where history was not available. He reaffirmed Lubbock's view that the Paleolithic was an age of food gathering and the Neolithic an age of food production. He took a stand on the question of the Mesolithic identifying it with the Epipaleolithic. The [[Mesolithic]] was to him "a mere continuance of the Old Stone Age mode of life" between the end of the [[Pleistocene]] and the start of the Neolithic.<ref>{{harvnb|Childe|1951|p=42}}</ref> Lubbock's terms "savagery" and "barbarism" do not much appear in ''Man Makes Himself'' but the sequel, ''What Happened in History'' (1942), reuses them (attributing them to Morgan, who got them from Lubbock) with an economic significance: savagery for food-gathering and barbarism for Neolithic food production. Civilization begins with the urban revolution of the Bronze Age.<ref>Childe, who was writing for the masses, did not make use of critical apparatus and offered no attributions in his texts. This practice led to the erroneous attribution of the entire three-age system to him. Very little of it originated with him. His synthesis and expansion of its detail is however attributable to his presentations.</ref>