"The archaeologist who was most influential in this century on the ques­tion of Aryan origins was V. Gordon Childe, author o f The Aryans: a Study of Indo-European Origins, published in 1926. Childe was influenced by linguistic data in his effort to establish a homeland of the ancient people whose Indo-Euro­ pean languages formed a philological bond between his British countrymen and their colonial subjects in India. He was influenced, too, by the “Four Empires” concept which lent a mystical quality to the shift of civilisation from the Near East to northwestern Europe. Gustav Klemm's idea of creative and passive races appealed to Childe, the people of the Orient being characterised as stagnant and degenerate while Europeans were held to be superior in the qualities o f energy, inventiveness and independence. In his biography of Childe Bruce Trigger (1980) observes that national character rather than history and geography were held by Childe to be the causes o f these ethnic differences, prehistoric peoples being asc­ribed the same qualities as their living descendants. Thus racial identity could be discovered from a philological approach, and these data could be employed by the archaeologists to identify the races o f the people whose sites were excavated. Even while admitting that the early developments of agriculture, metallurgy and the sciences came from the speakers of the Semitic languages o f the N ear East, Childe held that when these inventions were adopted by Indo-European popula­tions they were brought to their highest development and into the realm of true civilisation. The Indo-European speakers achieved this not because o f superior intelligence or culture, but because o f the higher qualities of their language which was the hallmark of a more competent mentality."