Characteristic Methods in the Current Critique of Marxism in Archeology

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Abstract
Throughout the history of Marxist archeology there has been no lack of attacks upon it by Western scholars. In the last few years, however, this activity has intensified noticeably and has taken on distinctive characteristics. The reasons for this intensification, and these characteristics, are to be found chiefly in two sets of circumstances. First, the signs of a sort of intellectual crisis have become especially noticeable, during recent decades, in West European and American archeology. Marxist and non-Marxist scholars see the symptoms and causes of this crisis in different phenomena, but both agree that the crisis exists. In the second place, the tremendous postwar rise in the authority of Marxism as a political force and as a triumphant social theory has naturally caused its stock as a scientific methodology to rise. It was precisely in the postwar years that so outstanding a figure in British scholarship as Gordon Childe openly declared his conviction that the Marxist method was fruitful in archeology, and began to master this method and to apply to archeological data, particularly those of Scotland. (1)

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