In some of the best novels, great landscapes can play an important role in the narrative. I am thinking of the vastness of northern India as the backdrop for the quests unfolded in Rudyard Kipling's Kim, or the forced displacement from the American Midwest to the West in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. In Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the Mississippi river itself practically becomes a central character in the story.

In some ways, Gordon Childe's The Danube in Prehistory also has the feel of an epic, slightly rambling historical novel, played out on a vast spatial scale through the Neolithic and Bronze Age, and richly peopled by a long cast of very varied characters. After a brief first look at the Epipalaeolithic (which we would now call the Mesolithic) in Central Europe (‘Palaeolithic man and his descendants’), the plot starts in earnest in the Middle Danube with the tell of Vinča beside the river just outside Belgrade, and by the end takes us as far west as the Alpine foreland and parts of the Rhineland catchment. Along the way, Neolithic and Bronze Age culture after culture is succinctly but meticulously documented. In exploring the historical significance of the Danube as a corridor and route for the movement of people and cultural transmission, Childe certainly offers a detailed sense of place throughout. He must have travelled extensively across his study area in the first half of the 1920s. Bruce Trigger (Reference Trigger1980: 57) records his moving through former Yugoslavia, Romania, and Hungary in the summer of 1926 in a large American car driven by an émigré Russian general. I would love to know more about these trips, but Covid restrictions in 2021 prevented me from checking all the sources I might have consulted in libraries in normal times (some further hints are given by László, Reference László2009: 38–39). An impressive list of some sixty museums is given as having been visited, from Serbia to the Rhine, and as far north as what is now southern Poland and western Ukraine. Yet the landscape itself goes in and out of focus through the book. There are spectacular successes, such as the prescient linkage of Danubian Ia settlement (later known as the LBK) with the ‘löss plains’ of Central Europe (p. 37), though not a great deal is made of the correlation. By contrast, he explains the apparent restriction of settlement to lake- and marsh-edges in the Alpine foreland by an inability to achieve significant clearance (p. 161), despite another thread running through the book which is devoted to the ‘celt’ or axe—an obvious tool for land clearance. The river as a great waterway for communication and movement, and the valley as an open setting for habitation, initiate the discussion of Vinča (p. 26), but again with little further comment.

The characters of The Danube are nothing like the individuals in Kipling, Steinbeck, or Twain, but are generally more anonymous cultures, which could sharpen into ‘peoples’ or even ‘races’, or blur into relations and influences, as set out famously in the preface (p. vi). On occasions, chiefs and other vaguely defined community leaders come into focus. The vast cultural cast is assembled to try to make sense of the perceived gap between the detailed studies of Great Britain and the Aegean and the ‘Ancient East’. So, from the very first page the ‘object of this book is to bridge part of the gap between the Ancient East and barbarian Britain in so far as their interconnexions are to be found in the valleys of the Danube and the Rhine’ (p. v). We plunge into the detail right from the start, surfacing only for periodic summaries and a final synthetic epilogue. There is less emphasis on progress than evident in The Dawn of European Civilization (Childe, Reference Childe1925), but a sense of this lurks throughout. For example, the inhabitants of the Alpine foreland are dubbed ‘half-civilized’ (p. 161); the outlying graves of Chamblandes type are ascribed to ‘an intrusive and semi-nomadic tribe of very primitive people’ (p. 174).

There have been plenty of review articles and books looking back at Childe's achievement and legacy (among others: McNairn, Reference McNairn1980; Trigger, Reference Trigger1980; Green, Reference Green1981; Tringham, Reference Tringham1983; Sherratt, Reference Sherratt1989; Harris, Reference Harris1994; Lech & Stepniowski Reference Lech and Stepniowski1999; Chapman, Reference Chapman2009). The Danube belongs to an early burst of prolific writing by Childe, sandwiched between The Dawn (Reference Childe1925), The Aryans (Reference Childe1926), The Most Ancient East (Reference Childe1928) and The Bronze Age (Reference Childe1930). In assessments, The Danube tends to be overlooked in favour of The Dawn, with its clearer big argument and even wider geographical scope, and then of the more reflective and generalising works of the 1930s. (It is also for consideration elsewhere how these books work as a linked quintet, staking out a distinctive view of origins and connections amongst contemporary opinion.) In the sources I have been able to consult, only Bruce Trigger gives specific individual attention to The Danube, and then only over four pages (Reference Trigger1980: 56–59). Without exception, all subsequent assessments of Childe agree that his syntheses of the 1920s were in the long run a failure. With the chronology then available, reliant on cross-dating with Troy and the Near East, and with the whole European sequence presented in both The Dawn and The Danube (see the chart facing p. 418) starting only in the third millennium, how could this have been otherwise? The Dawn eventually ran to six editions, but The Danube was never revised. So is it worth taking yet another look at it?

With the benefit of hindsight, the defects and limitations of The Danube are plain to see. Childe himself was candid from the outset about the constraints of research in the mid-1920s. Among other lacunae, he notes particularly Serbia, Slavonia, Croatia, Carniola, Styria, and south-western Hungary; ‘the Hungarian plain is another dark region’, with museums ‘crammed with wonderful material’ but too little information available about stratigraphy or associations (p. 26). While he dutifully lists key features of the economy when they were to hand, region by region, he notes that for the early Danubians, for example, ‘no reports on cereal or animal remains are as yet available’ (p. 31). Though aware of rectangular house models, and of some rectangular post-built structures, his account for the most part of what came to be known as the LBK has people living in pit dwellings (e.g. pp. 42–43); it is hardly fair to blame Childe alone, since it took the excavations in the 1930s of Bersu's pupils Buttler and Haberey at Köln-Lindenthal to recognize the prevalence of timber-framed longhouses, and the further insight of Oscar Paret as late as the 1940s (preceded by Gero von Merhart: Theune Reference Theune and Steuer2001: 156) that these, not pit complexes, were the actual dwellings.

Pre-Vinča settlement is barely conceived of, with one passing mention of Starčevo (pp. 104–05). Later on, perhaps surprisingly to us now, he notes the lack of chronological control on settlement sequences in the Alpine foreland, despite renowned investigations going back to the mid-nineteenth century (pp. 162–63). As a result of the compressed chronology, there are many misalignments in the Neolithic coverage. For example, Corded Ware is given far too early a start (chart facing p. 418), and synchronism between Michelsberg and late Corded Ware is mooted (p. 183). The Bronze Age system probably holds up better, stiffened by venerable bronze typologies.

Although Childe did not always look over his shoulder, so to speak, to the east (see further below), his overriding interest, not to say obsession, is with cultural and ethnic connections. The attendant processes, despite, or perhaps because of, the framework set out in the preface, can become opaque. Vinča settlement is ascribed to a movement of people (p. 34; ‘fishers sailing upstream’), and Danubian Ia or LBK is seen as a migration by ‘a race of Danubian peasants’, fuelled by extravagant land-use and population increase (p. 63); Childe was prescient in rejecting a derivation of Danubian Ia from populations to the north, one of the contemporary contenders (pp. 63–64). Migration remained a favourite motif, driving his interpretation of both Corded Ware and Bell Beaker cultures (Chs 8 and 10). At other times, however, Childe appears to resort to vaguer notions of ‘influence’ and cultural ‘intrusion’, as in his account of ‘Vinča II’ (p. 68). With the renewed emphasis on the movement of people given by the welter of recent aDNA analyses, the moral here for us of The Danube — and the value of its continuing to be read — is the enduringly central importance of guiding assumptions. We tend to find what we are looking for; the interpretation in some aDNA papers can appear to be unreconstructed Childe of the 1920s.

It is also instructive to reflect on what did not seem to excite Childe in this book, given his urge to track connections and origins. He generally has rather little to say about social formation (one passing comparison between a large building at Aichbühl and Melanesian ‘assembly-houses’: p. 161) and shows no detailed interest in farming, beyond listing crops and animals where possible, or in settlement diversity (Chapman Reference Chapman2009 draws mainly on later writing by Childe). The great tell of Vinča itself, with its metres of deposit (fig. 9), is more or less taken for granted (p. 27; even admitting the incomplete nature of the excavations at that date).

The Danube nevertheless has a wonderful scope, sustained engagement with the detail, and a willingness to try to make sense of the growing mass of information available by the 1920s. The sources given show very wide and up-to-date reading; we should probably give more recognition to other pioneers of the 1920s—to wit the impressive rollcall set out in the Bibliography. Childe managed a generally judicious navigation among the many competing hypotheses of the time (when it suited him, however, he was adept with the stiletto, as the following footnote (p. 68) shows: ‘Prof Vassits [Vasić] excavated this site before he attained that skill which he displayed at Vinča, and failed, at least in his report, to distinguish the stratification’). Contemporary reviewers who knew the subject well were more than impressed (Myres, Reference Myres1930; Heurtley, Reference Heurtley1931). As his cited sources make clear, Childe was by no means the first to offer a broad synthesis, but he certainly helped to cement its importance. That tradition happily continues (witness Shennan, Reference Shennan2018; Chapman, Reference Chapman2020) but I wonder why it has remained since largely the preserve of outsiders, and I wish, as I read the current burgeoning literature on relational ontologies, for example, that more colleagues would engage in Childean depth with sustained and complex case studies. I think that Childe's writing style is under-rated; his sentences have no flab, and his clarity and economy enable the vast coverage to be carried off successfully.

I also see Childe in this work, despite the dominating big concept, as refreshingly open to ideas and complex possibilities. His Europe was a diverse cultural landscape, with many perceived traditions and cross-currents, some of his connections working in opposite directions to the intrusions and impulses coming from the east. As already noted, he held out for the Danubian Ia or LBK culture coming from points south-east, and he rejected some contemporary opinion on Corded Ware origins to argue for derivation from the east. In his day, there was still an enormous amount to do to get everything in the right order and connection. Childe made significant and lasting contributions towards this, but re-reading The Danube also increases my admiration for the many scholars of the 1930s and 1950s who continued that effort (for the Hungarian Plain alone, Tompa, Banner, Bognár-Kutzián, Patay, Trogmayer, Kalicz, and Makkay, among others). I am not enough of a Childe specialist to know whether The Danube never had a second edition because of the ever-growing volume of information from the 1930s onwards. Presumably successive editions of The Dawn would have kept anybody busy enough, or perhaps Childe's interests shifted towards generalization and wider processes. Whatever the case, The Danube deserves to remain on library shelves for a long time to come, as it still has important lessons for us.