 Through his work, Gordon Childe contributed to two of the major theoretical movements in Anglo-American archaeology, processualism and post-processualism. Prominent processual archaeologist Colin Renfrew described him as "one of the fathers of processual thought" due to his "development of economic and social themes in prehistory", an idea echoed by Marxist archaeologist Neil Faulkner. Trigger argued that Childe's work foreshadowed processual thought in two clear ways; first by emphasising the role of change in societal development, and second by adhering to a strictly materialist view of the past. Both of these arose from Childe's Marxist beliefs. However, most American processualists ignored Childe's work, seeing him as particularist and irrelevant in their search for generalised laws of societal behaviour. In keeping with Marxist thought, Childe did not agree that such generalised laws existed, believing that behaviour was conditioned by socio-economic factors and was not universal.
