Marxist archaeology

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Marxist archaeology is an archaeological theory that interprets archaeological information using the framework of dialectical materialism, which is often short-handed as Marxism.

Although neither Karl Marx nor Friedrich Engels specifically analyzed how archaeology supported a materialist conception of history, Marx indicated as much in Capital, where he wrote that "relics of bygone 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"^[1] Engels elaborated further that "it is from the history of nature and human society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted"^[2] which situates archaeology as part of that discovery process. Further, Engels sought to define three essential principles of dialectical materialist theory as "transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa; (...) the interpenetration of opposites; (and) the negation of the negation"^[3]. Thus, Marxist archaeology examines the material record for indicators of the transformation of society and/or nature, and of the oppositional material and social forces that engender change, as frames for interpreting the archaeological record.

Marxian archaeological theory was developed by Soviet archaeologists in the Soviet Union during the early twentieth century. Marxist archaeology quickly became the dominant archaeological theory within the Soviet Union, and subsequently spread and was adopted by archaeologists in other countries. In particular, in the United Kingdom, where the theory was propagated by an 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.^{[citation needed]}

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."^{[clarification needed][4]} 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 Marxist archaeologists believe that it is this polarization 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) are believed to result in a continuous reconstruction of the past by scholars.