Marxist archaeology is an archaeological theory that interprets archaeological information
within the framework of Marxism.
Although neither Karl Marx nor Friedrich Engels described how archaeology could be understood
in a Marxist conception of history, it was developed by archaeologists in the Soviet
Union during the early twentieth century.
Becoming the dominant archaeological theory in that country, it was subsequently adopted
by archaeologists in other nations, particularly the United Kingdom, where it was propagated
by influential archaeologist V. Gordon Childe.
With the rise of post-processual archaeology in the 1980s and 1990s, forms of Marxist archaeology
were once more popularised amongst the archaeological community.
Marxist archaeology has been characterised as having "generally adopted a materialist
base and a processual approach whilst emphasising the historical-developmental context of archaeological
data."
The theory argues that past societies should be examined through Marxist analysis, thereby
having a materialistic basis.
It holds that societal change comes about through class struggle, and while it may have
once held that human societies progress through a series of stages, from primitive communism
through slavery, feudalism and then capitalism, it is typically critical of such evolutionary
typology today.
Marxist archaeologists in general believe that the bipolarism that exists between the
processual and post-processual debates is an opposition inherent within knowledge production
and is in accord with a dialectical understanding of the world.
Many Marxists archaeologists believe that it is this polarism within the anthropological
discipline (and all academic disciplines) that fuels the questions that spur progress
in archaeological theory and knowledge.
This constant interfacing and conflict between the extremes of the two heuristic playing
grounds (subjective vs. objective) is believed to result in a continuous reconstruction of
the past by scholars (McGuire 1992, 2008).
== Theory ==
=== Social evolution === The Marxist conception of history - which
originated within Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)
- holds that society has evolved through a series of progressive stages.
The first of these was primitive communism, which Marxist theorists believed was held
by classless, hunter-gatherer societies.
According to Marxist doctrine, most of these, however, evolved into slave-based societies,
then to feudal societies, and then to capitalist societies, which Marxists note is the dominant
form today.
However, Marxists believe that there are in fact two more social stages for human society
to progress through: socialism and then communism.
Marxist archaeologists often interpret the archaeological record as displaying this progression
through forms of society.
This approach was particularly popular in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, and
as archaeologist Bruce Trigger later related:
The dogmatism with which Soviet social scientists adhered to this scheme contrasts sharply with
the views expressed by Marx and Engels, who were prepared to consider multilinear models
of social evolution, especially with regard to earlier and less well understood periods
of human development.
=== Other === Marxist archaeology places an emphasis on
learning how people lived and worked in the past.
In attempting to do this, Marxist archaeologists working in the Soviet Union during the 1920s
and following decades denounced what they saw as "artifactology", the simple categorising
of artefacts in typologies, because they believed that it took archaeological focus away from
the human beings who created and used them.
== History ==
=== Precedents === When they were formulating Marxism in the
mid nineteenth century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote many books on the subject of
history, but wrote little about archaeology, or how it could be understood within a Marxist
framework.
According to the archaeologist Bruce Trigger, the most relevant passage that Marx made about
the subject was found in his epic study of political economy, Das Kapital, in which he
had written that: Relics of by-gone instruments of labour possess
the same importance for the investigation of extinct economic forms of society, as do
fossil bones for the determination of extinct species of animals.
It is not the articles made, but how they are made, and by what instruments, that enables
us to distinguish different economic epochs.
Instruments of labour not only supply a standard of the degree of development to which human
labour has attained, but they are also indicators of the social conditions under which labour
is carried on.
=== In the Soviet Union === Marxist archaeology was first pioneered in
the Soviet Union, a state run by a Marxist government, during the 1920s.
Upon taking power in the Russian Empire and reforming it as a socialist republic following
the 1917 revolution, the Communist Party – as a part of their general support for scientific
advancement – encouraged archaeological study, founding the Russian Academy for the
History of Material Culture in 1919.
Soon renamed the State Academy for the History of Material Culture (GAIMK) following the
re-designation of the Empire as the Soviet Union, it was centred in Leningrad (now St.
Petersburg), and initially followed pre-existing archaeological theories, namely culture-historical
archaeology.Following the ascent to power of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union in 1924,
there was an increased focus on academics bringing their findings in line with Marxist
theories.
As a part of this, the government prevented Soviet archaeologists from contact with their
foreign counterparts, and archaeologists were encouraged to understand their information
within the framework of history developed by Marx and Engels.
In 1929, a young archaeologist named Vladislav I. Ravdonikas (1894–1976) published a report
entitled For a Soviet History of Material Culture in which he outlined a framework for
Marxist archaeology.
Within this work, the very discipline of archaeology was criticised as being inherently bourgeois
and therefore anti-Marxist, and following its publication there was a trend to denounce
those archaeological ideas and work that had gone before, exemplified at the Pan-Russian
Conference for Archaeology and Ethnography held in 1930.Soon, Ravdonikas and other young
Marxist archaeologists rose to significant positions in the archaeological community
of the Soviet Union, with notable Marxist archaeologists of this period including Yevgeni
Krichevsky, A.P. Kruglow, G.P.
Podgayetsky and P.N.
Tret'yakov.
According to later archaeologist Bruce Trigger, these young archaeologists "were enthusiastic,
but not very experienced in Marxism or in archaeology."
In the 1930s, the term "Soviet archaeology" was adopted in the country to differentiate
Marxist archaeology as understood by Soviet archaeologists from the "bourgeois archaeology"
of other, non-Marxist nations.
Allying it firmly with the academic discipline of history, this decade saw the publication
of many more archaeological books in the Union, as well as the start of what would become
the country's primary archaeological journal, Sovetskaya Arkheologiya, and the opening up
of many more archaeological units in universities.
=== In Latin America ===
In Latin America, a form of Marxist archaeological thought known as "social archaeology" developed
during the 1970s, based primarily in Peru and Venezuela but with some influence in Ecuador.
Pioneered by Luis Lumbreras in Peru and by Mario Sanoja and Iraida Vargas in Venezuela.
=== In the western world === In 1935, the influential Australian archaeologist
Vere Gordon Childe visited the Soviet Union.
Prior to this he had already begun looking at societies from the perspective that they
developed primarily through economic means, having begun to reject culture-historical
archaeology in the late 1920s.According to archaeologists Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn,
"Following the upsurge in theoretical discussion that followed the initial impact of the New
Archaeology, there has been a reawakening of interest in applying to archaeology some
of the implications of the earlier work of Karl Marx, many of which had been re-examined
by French anthropologists in the 1960s and 1970s."
== References ==
== Bibliography ==