Talk:Marxist archaeology

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Socialism

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WP:Fringe[edit]

This should be treated according to WP:FRINGE as it is a smaller school of archaeology whose theories are mostly discounted. Don't have a source on me atm though. =/ Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie Say Shalom! 23:34, 18 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I really must oppose this idea of yours Mr Petrie; I might not be a Marxist myself, but Marxist thought remains a major current within archaeological theory across the globe, and if you were familiar with the subject then you would recognise that. Furthermore, to claim that Marxist theories are discounted is a gross innacuracy; disputed yes, discounted certainly not. Midnightblueowl (talk) 16:33, 21 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What's specifically disproven are Leninism and Marxism-Leninism, aka Stalinism. But Marxists ever since Rosa Luxemburg as well as Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness have been saying that Lenin and the Soviet Union were wrong.

Anyways, the article is kinda weird. On the one hand, it acts as if Marxist archaeology pretty much only existed in the Soviet Union under Stalin plus Childe (who is kinda treated like a singular fringe whacko) in the West, on the other hand it says already in the intro that Marxist tendencies would also show in today's post-processrual aka interpretative archaeology since the 1980s that would have been opposed to processural aka New Archaeology. Finally, further down it says in the article that New Archaeology developing in the West in the 1950s and the 1960s itself was already pervaded by Marxist notions.

In other words, the entire article seems to have a problem to name *ANY* 20th century archaeology that is not Marxist. It kinda reads as if only 19th century archaeology was non-Marxist. --2003:DA:CF4C:7500:352E:684:3B03:54E3 (talk) 19:52, 8 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Marx and Engels[edit]

While Marx and Engels do not prescribe a methodology as to how specifically Marxist archaeologists should work, they do deal with ancient and protohistory and even with the stone age (the latter especially in relation to Urkommunismus and how it ended), and their theses on historical materialism and dialectical materialism do contain scientific methodologies on how all science should be practiced, also as to how history should be studied and researched. And if I read Dialectic of Enlightenment and especially Marcuse's Eros and Civilization correctly, based upon 19th century scholars such as Theodor Benfey, Victor Hehn, and Otto Schrader (philologist), Marx and Engels even dealt with the Pontic Steppes theory (which we know as the Kurgan hypothesis today) as the reason for the end of Urkommunismus and as part of their genesis of the Capitalist West.

As such, you don't specifically require Lenin, Marxism-Leninism, and the Soviet Union to follow Marxist methodologies and practices in the sciences, including the study and research of history. --2003:DA:CF4C:7500:352E:684:3B03:54E3 (talk) 19:52, 8 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]