Attainments and problems of Soviet archaeology

Abstract

Soviet archaeology developed in the context of the Russian revolution as what remained of the archaeology of Tsarist Russia came into contact with Marxism. In its early stages, Soviet archaeology sought to reconstruct social relations and other superstructural phenomena directly from archaeological remains. Beginning in the late 1930s there was increasing interest in ethnogenesis. In recent years, Soviet archaeology has become more complex and diversified. This paper examines seven trends in current Soviet archaeology. Three are old and well‐established: archaeological history, which views archaeology as merely another source of historical data; archaeological ethnogenetics, which traces the prehistory of national groups; and archaeological sociology which studies the evolution of social systems. Four trends are newer and somewhat more controversial: descriptive archaeology, which stresses the formal description of archaeological material; archaeotechnology, which studies how artifacts were made and used; ecological archaeology; and theoretical archaeology, which seeks to clarify the research tasks, aims and methods that are uniquely suited for the study of archaeological data. By stressing specifically archaeological problems, these new approaches seek to make archaeology a more effective instrument of Marxist analysis.