Marxism and Knowledge about the Past

Marxist archaeologists have creatively applied many aspects of Marx’s general concepts and ideas to our understandings of life in the past. One obvious area has been questions of state formation and the origins of complexity, with its accompanying relations of class and hierarchy. The application of a Marxist model to this, one of the burning questions in archaeology, dates from the work of V. Gordon Childe, undoubtedly the most prolific Western archaeologist of the twentieth century and the first to explicitly use Marxist theory in his work. Childe presented a theory of historical development punctuated by revolutions (Neolithic, Urban, and Industrial) based on changes in relations of production. This focused attention on questions of labor, appropriation of surplus production, exploitation, and class struggle. While many of Childe’s specific arguments have been discredited by new empirical data, the Marxist emphasis continues in the contemporary research on state formation by Thomas Patterson, Elizabeth Brumfiel, Antonio Gilman, Philip Kohl, and Allen Zagarell.

Other scholars have fruitfully extended a similar historical materialist framework to pre-state or non-stratified societies, recognizing that questions about the relations and mode of production, labor, inequality, and exploitation are not limited to the modern world. Examples would include Jon Muller’s and Charles Cobb’s study of the Mississippian period in the southeastern United States and Dean Saitta’s analysis of power and labor relations in both Cahokia and Chaco Canyon.

A slightly different tack was taken by Marxist archaeologists who adopted a world-systems approach. World-systems theory was developed by Immanuel Wallerstein to account for the formation and growth of capitalism on the global stage. Wallerstein’s appeal lay in theorizing spatial parameters for inequality, conflict, and contradiction in terms of regional core and periphery relations. Archaeologists have critically and creatively applied these ideas to unequal geographic development in the Near East, the Mediterranean world, and the American Northwest/Southwest. World-systems theory continues to be widely used, although typically alienated from its Marxist roots.

Other Marxist archaeologists have focused more specifically on class relations in various social contexts. Class can be defined as social groups that occupy different productive relations and entails differential control over labor and surplus production. Real classes exist only in concrete historical circumstances where the relations are inherently conflictual and contradictory. Archaeologists have seldom adopted an explicit class approach, but the Marxist-derived terminology of ‘dominance and resistance’, power, and struggle has become mainstream.