Known as "the Great Synthesizer", Childe is primarily respected for developing a synthesis of European and Near Eastern prehistory at a time when most archaeologists focused on regional sites and sequences. Since his death, this framework has been heavily revised following the discovery of radiocarbon dating, his interpretations have been "largely rejected", and many of his conclusions about Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe have been found to be incorrect. Childe himself believed his primary contribution to archaeology was in his interpretative frameworks, an analysis supported by Alison Ravetz and Peter Gathercole. According to Sherratt: "What is of lasting value in his interpretations is the more detailed level of writing, concerned with the recognition of patterns in the material he described. It is these patterns which survive as classic problems of European prehistory, even when his explanations of them are recognised as inappropriate". Childe's theoretical work had been largely ignored in his lifetime, and remained forgotten in the decades after his death, although it would see a resurgence in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It remained best known in Latin America, where Marxism remained a core theoretical current among archaeologists throughout the latter 20th century.
Known as "the Great Synthesizer", Childe is primarily respected for developing a synthesis of European and Near Eastern prehistory at a time when most archaeologists focused on regional sites and sequences Since his death, this framework has been heavily revised following the discovery of radiocarbon dating, his interpretations have been "largely rejected", and many of his conclusions about Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe have been found to be incorrect. Childe himself believed his primary contribution to archaeology was in his interpretative frameworks, an analysis supported by Alison Ravetz and Peter Gathercole. According to Sherratt: "What is of lasting value in his interpretations is the more detailed level of writing, concerned with the recognition of patterns in the material he described. It is these patterns which survive as classic problems of European prehistory, even when his explanations of them are recognised as inappropriate". Childe's theoretical work had been largely ignored in his lifetime, and remained forgotten in the decades after his death, although it would see a resurgence in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It remained best known in Latin America, where Marxism remained a core theoretical current among archaeologists throughout the latter 20th century.