In volume III of ‘The Cambridge Journal’ (1949, 131–47) the present Editor of ‘Antiquity’ wrote an article entitled ‘A defence of prehistory’ in which he referred to ‘the environmentalist school of Fleure and Fox, the hyperdiffusionist school of Elliot Smith, Parry, and Raglan, or the Marxist school of Childe’. Professor Childe wrote a rejoinder which Michael Oakshott, the Editor of ‘The Cambridge Journal’, could not find room to publish. Childe did not publish it elsewhere; there is now a great and continuing interest in his method and theory, and it seemed worth while publishing it at last, 30 years after it was written. Childe died in 1957; ‘The Cambridge Journal’ was short-lived: begun in 1947, it died in 1953.