Marxist archeology

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Under Marxist archeology are different archaeological research approaches, hypotheses and theories to understand the scientific issues using Marxist methods or treated within a Marxist framework.

definition

On the one hand, there are researchers who are openly committed to Marxist traditions. On the other hand, women archaeologists use Marxist concepts without calling themselves Marxists.

Five characteristics can be cited that are common to all Marxist archaeological work:

  • Karl Marx is recognized as the founder of a thesis.
  • Social reality is understood dialectically , that is, it consists of contradictions that are always evolving. This also results in a focus on social relationships.
  • A holistic view of society is sought. The boundaries of scientific disciplines are criticized and overcome ( interdisciplinarity ).
  • Science is understood in a social context and not as objective.
  • The capitalism as the controlling system is criticized.

Basics

The most important concepts and methods for Marxist archeology are historical materialism , dialectics , structural Marxism and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. There are also individual works with existentialist and postoperaist concepts, but so far they have no comparable influence.

Vere Gordon Childe built his concept of history on historical materialism. Above all, his concept of the three "revolutions" is known, which have changed the economic conditions and thus the society: the Neolithic Revolution , the Urban Revolution and the Industrial Revolution . Soviet and Chinese archeology made historical materialism the dogma into which the various archaeological cases were classified. Historical materialism has similarities with concepts of cultural evolution , which were also used in New Archeology , and thus parallels the theoretical discussion in the Anglophone world of the 60s and 70s.

In archeology, dialectics is used to understand social change. The general validity for natural and human sciences is rejected, however. In society the contradictions depend on each other, but not in nature. McGuire and Saitta work explicitly dialectically.

Jürgen Habermas wrote in “ Knowledge and Interest ” that scientific work is by no means objective, but is guided by interests. Critical archeology follows this insight. It developed especially in the USA from the conflict between indigenous groups and archaeologists. This led many archaeologists to critically question their own scientific work. The main task of critical archeology is on the one hand the analysis of ideology within the scientific community. On the other hand, she deals with the ideological use of archeology by laypeople as in films, museums and newspapers.

In the English-speaking world, structural Marxist concepts were used for the archaeological reconstruction of past societies. The structural Marxist approach always begins its investigations with production. He never pays attention to the subject, but always to the structure and is ahistorical.

Soviet Union

In 1917 the Imperial Archaeological Commission in Saint Petersburg was transformed into the State Academy of Material Culture . In Moscow, an archaeological department was established in the Russian Association of Social Science Institutes . In 1921 Lenin initiated the New Economic Policy , which lasted until his death in 1924. During this time, scientific freedom was supported and, as the country became industrialized, many archaeological projects were carried out. However, the descriptive archaeological currents of Tsarist Russia continued to dominate without taking on Marxist ideas.

From 1924, under Stalin, the intellectual life of the Soviet Union was brought into line with the Bolshevik Party. In archeology, Wladislaw I. Rawdonikas was supported, who had previously set up a communist cell in the State Academy for Material Culture . He criticized traditional archeology as idealistic and bourgeois and called the new archeology to differentiate it "Soviet archeology". In the course of the restructuring under Stalin, many archaeologists were driven out or imprisoned. The Russian Association of Social Science Institutes was abolished and archeology was thus centralized. Rawdonikas and Artemi W. Arzichowski then began to conceptualize historical materialism as the basis for a Marxist archeology. Under Stalin's rule, criticism of the unilinear model was not possible, but it also rejected racist and diffusionist interpretations that were still common in Western Europe. Above all, the focus on the economy and internal social change were groundbreaking. The focus of archeology shifted from typologizing descriptive work to the reconstruction of social organization and the life of ordinary people.

By 1934, Soviet archeology was institutionally established: the State Academy for Material Culture was divided, true to historical materialism, into the four subdivisions of early communist societies, slave-holding societies, feudal societies and archaeological methodology. In addition, archaeological departments were established at several universities in the Soviet Union. Until 1941, the archaeological work was always encouraged to generate practical economic knowledge, such as the mapping of raw materials or the reconstruction of lost knowledge about irrigation systems. The increasing preoccupation with ethnogenesis led to nationalistic interpretations of archaeological sources. The widespread hypothesis that Russia was a Scandinavian colony in the early Middle Ages was rejected. Unprecedented city center excavations like the one in Novgorod were used as evidence of a long Slavic settlement. The study of various pre-capitalist societies led to the growing realization that the unilinear model of historical materialism did not do justice to the variability of these societies.

Most of the women archaeologists fell victim to the Second World War and after Stalin's death in 1953, research became freer again. On the one hand, the role of technology in the incarnation established itself as a new area of ​​interest. On the other hand, the human-environment relationship was given more consideration. Above all, the unilinear evolutionary interpretation of historical materialism was increasingly rejected and the historical peculiarities of the individual cultures were emphasized. The basis of historical materialism, however, was not in doubt; Human behavior continued to be ultimately determined by the economic basis. This led to a criticism of the imperialist concept of so-called “historically less peoples”, which still persisted in English-language science. According to the new conception, man was understood as a fundamentally historical being. But it also led to a rejection of many interpretive patterns of New Archeology , which was criticized as anti-humanistic with its systemic approach. Despite all the criticism, Soviet archeology is quite similar to New Archeology in its studies. A representative of this era is Mark Osipovič Kosven. In addition to the theoretical development in Soviet archeology, there was also a methodological advance. In the course of a discussion about the informative value of archaeological sources, Rawdonikas rehabilitated methods of seriation and typology , which were previously criticized as bourgeois, in order to be able to date better. The technology that resulted in a number of works in the years that followed was rated as a reliable interpretation approach for the reconstruction of a culture.

China

The Marxist interpretation of the history of China goes back to Guo Moruo , who interpreted it according to the model of historical materialism. During the time of the Chinese Republic , he also carried out archaeological studies in exile in Japan and interpreted the Shang and Zhou dynasties as slave-holding societies. In 1937 he returned to China with the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War .

With the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, archeology was centralized and understood as an important instrument for political education, because Mao Zedong understood the past to serve the present. In 1950, Guo Moruo became president of the Chinese Academy of Science and in archeology, unilinear development based on the example of historical materialism became the unquestionable model for all interpretations. The brisk construction activity during the industrialization of the People's Republic of China resulted in large amounts of archaeological data that were incorporated into this model. Chinese archeology, however, also retained a strictly nationalistic note, which wanted to historically prove the unity and superiority of the Chinese people.

Latin America

Early Marxist archaeologists can be found in the indigenism movement. Marxist archeology was only able to develop after a wave of revolutions created a number of socialist countries in the 1960s. Most of these countries had fallen victim to right-wing coups as early as the 1970s, and many left intellectuals fled to Mexico, including Marxist archaeologists.

They did not seek a connection to New Archeology in the USA because they wanted to be explicitly political, but New Archeology claimed to be apolitical. In the course of the Camelot project , American archaeologists also spied on various Latin American countries. Thus Latin American archeology moved more and more away from Anglophone archeology.

In 1983 the Grupo Oaxtepe was founded . Their goal was to build a new Marxist theory for archeology. They mainly referred to the writings of Marx and Friedrich Engels . In the Anglophone world, this group has been largely ignored.

English speaking area

The first archaeologist in English-speaking countries to incorporate Marxist concepts into archeology was Vere Gordon Childe . He was strongly influenced by Soviet archeology and had to endure hostility for these connections. After the Second World War he distanced himself from Soviet archeology, but remained true to his Marxist roots.

In the 1950s, Marxist tendencies were heavily suppressed, especially in the US, and Marxist archeology took place covertly through theorists who were not explicitly Marxist. In the 1960s, New Archeology emerged , which was not Marxist, but used Marxist concepts. Scientists who disagreed with the paradigms of New Archeology found an alternative in Marxism. In the 1970s, for example, there were a handful of Marxist archaeologists in the USA who mainly dealt with questions of political economy. This tradition grew and critical archeology developed in the United States, influenced by the writings of the Frankfurt School and heavily criticized New Archeology in the 1980s.

In Great Britain, Marxist archeology took a slightly different route. Here, too, criticism of New Archeology was raised in the 1980s. The best known are probably the reviews of Ian Hodder , who is considered the founder of post-processualism. From this time on she openly used Marxist ideas to interpret the past.

In the 1990s, feminist archeology also began to gain influence. She criticized Marxist archeology for its ignorance of gender inequalities. This criticism changed the focus of Marxist archeology one more time.

criticism

Ian Hodder is particularly critical of the Marxist concept of ideology and its application in archeology from a post-structuralist point of view. From the point of view of Marxism, ideology has the function of disguising real social conditions. Hodder makes four criticisms:

  1. It is assumed that all members of a society have the same ideology
  2. There are no “real” social conditions, as inequality is itself an ideological term
  3. The universal applicability of the concept of ideology disregards the historical context of the ideology
  4. The genesis of ideology is almost never dealt with.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ McGuire: A Marxist Archeology. 2002, pp. 83-84.
    Spriggs: Another way of Telling: Marxist Perspectives in archeology. In: Marxist Perspectives in Archeology. 1984, p. 2.
  2. ↑ SM Kus: The spirit and its burden: archeology and symbolic activity. In: Marxist Perspectives in Archeology. 1984.
  3. ^ Bernbeck, Multitudes before Sovereignty: Theoretical Reflections and Late Neolithic Case. In: Beyond Elites. Alternatives to Hierarchical Systems in Modeling Social Formations. . 2012.
  4. ↑ Childe: What happend in History. 1952
  5. ↑ Childe: Man Makes Himself. 2003.
  6. ^ Johnson: Archaeological Theory. An Introduction. 1999, p. 139
  7. ↑ McGuire: A Marxist Archeology. 2002, pp. 91-116.
  8. ^ McGuire, Saitta: Although They Have Petty Captains, They Obey Them Badly: The Dialectics of Prehispanic Western Pueblo Social Organization In: American Antiquity. vol. 61 No. 2. 1996.
  9. ↑ McGuire: A Marxist Archeology. 2002, pp. 213-245.
  10. ↑ Bernbeck: Theorien in der Archäologie 1997, pp. 314-319.
  11. ↑ Bernbeck: Theorien in der Archäologie 1997, pp. 297-301.
  12. ↑ Trigger: A History Of Archaeological Thought , 1988 pp. 212-216.
  13. ^ McGuire: A Marxist , 56-59.
    Trigger: A History Of Archaeological Thought , 1988 pp. 216-227
  14. ↑ Trigger: A History Of Archaeological Thought , 1988 pp. 227-233
  15. ↑ McGuire: A Marxist Archeology. 2002, pp. 59-62.
  16. ^ A b Trigger: A History Of Archaeological Thought , 1988 pp. 233-242
  17. ↑ Mark Osipovic Kosven: outline of the history and culture of primitive society. Berlin 1957.
  18. ^ Trigger: A History of Archaeological Thought 1988, p. 175.
  19. ↑ Trigger: A History of Archaeological Thought 1988, pp. 176-177.
  20. ↑ McGuire: A Marxist Archeology. 2002, pp. 62-64.
  21. ^ A b McGuire: A Marxist Archeology. 2002, pp. 65-67.
  22. ↑ McGuire: A Marxist Archeology. 2002, pp. 67-68.
  23. ↑ McGuire: A Marxist Archeology. 2002, pp. 69-71.
  24. ↑ McGuire: A Marxist Archeology. 2002, pp. 71-83.
  25. ↑ McGuire: A Marxist Archeology. 2002, pp. 68-83.
  26. ↑ McGuire: A Marxist Archeology. 2002, pp. 81-83.
  27. ↑ Hodder, Hutson: Reading the Past - Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archeology. 2003, pp. 79-88.

literature

  • Reinhard Bernbeck : Theories in Archeology. A. Franke, Tübingen 1997, ISBN 3-7720-2254-5 .
  • Reinhard Bernbeck: Multitudes before Sovereignty: Theoretical Reflections and Late Neolithic Case. In: Beyond Elites. Alternatives to Hierarchical Systems in Modeling Social Formations. Habelt, Bonn 2012, pp. 147–167.
  • Vere Gordon Childe: Man Makes Himself. Spokesman, Nottingham 2003, ISBN 0-85124-649-4 (original published 1936).
  • Vere Gordon Childe: What Happend in History. A Study of Rise and Decline of Cultural and Moral Values ​​in the Old World up to the Fall of the Roman Empire. Penguin Books, 1952 (Originally published in 1943).
  • Ian Hodder, Scott Hutson: Reading the Past - Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003, ISBN 0-521-52884-4 (original published 1986).
  • Matthew Johnson: Archaeological Therory. An Introduction. Blackwell Publishing, 1999, ISBN 0-631-20295-1 .
  • Randall H. McGuire : A Marxist Archeology. Percheron Press 2002, ISBN 0-9712427-4-7 (original published 1992).
  • Randall H. McGuire, Dean J. Saitta: Although They Have Petty Captains, They Obey Them Badly: The Dialectics of Prehispanic Western Pueblo Social Organization In: American Antiquity. vol. 61 No. 2. Society for American Antiquity Press 1996, pp. 197-216.
  • Matthew Spriggs: Marxist Perspectives in Archeology. Cambridge University Press 1984, ISBN 0-521-10927-2 . (Anthology with articles on Marxist theory and reconstruction)