20th Century Archaeology. Nationalism, Marxism and Feminism
Nationalism and Archaeology. In the last years of 20th century one issue of world’s politics was the concept of nationalism, in other words, the development of the nationalist ideologies. As a result, Archaeology confronted with this issue as well and along the years there have been noticed a series of nationalist concepts. Kühnl claims that no historical presentation or thesis can be purely scientific. He argues that all discourses, speeches, concepts imply a certain political orientation, so the archaeological analysis may not be the exception as it cannot avoid the orientation towards a particular political concept. The relation between archaeology and nationalism has become more evident in the first half of the 20th century in particularly after the WWI gradually loosing its importance in Western Europe after WW II.
The Marxism and its Influence on Historical Research. Our purpose is to identify and analyse the influences of Marxist doctrine in history and archaeological researches. In the classical Marxism the change is explained through the interaction between the production and exchange forces. Nowadays, this idea may be rejected by the followers of the so-called post Marxism both in Europe and America. They consider that the Marxism is a valuable concept only in relation with the new social and anthropological theories of Structuralism or Relativism. Some historiographers consider that the archaeologists Roskams and Saunders were significantly influenced by the Marxist-Leninist ideas. In Dark’s opinion, Ian Hodder (1986, 1992) or even G. Childe (1949) may be included in the category of archaeologists influenced by post-Marxist ideas; in their researches, the classic theory is associated with the Relativism and Structuralism offering plausible explanations for the cultural changes in the world. The Annals School historiography has several common ideas with Marxism. Guy Bois analysed and identified at least three common aspects:
a) the indirect and confusing influence of Marxism on the new history by means of economic aspects, a method specific to Ernest Labrousse;
b) the influence of the new history on the Marxist historians generating several themes of research such as the history of sensitivity and mass lines of thoughts;
c) the Marxist historians who assimilated the methods of research. In the archaeology of the ex-communist countries Marxism has had two main influences:
a) the ideological one: by focusing on the social and economic aspects in the archaeological research; the “barbarian” one by forcing the historians to refer to works of the Marxist classics in their collections of history studies.
Feminism and Archaeological Research. There are many aspects of feminism in archaeology that are worth to be discussed. In ‘60s and ‘70s of the last century, the feminism brought in archaeology a new method of perceiving the reality through the artefacts that have been discovered, thus the areas of a settlement could have been divided into areas with male or female features. While doing an archaeological analysis of a settlement dating from the Iron Age at Glastonbury, David Clarke made a distinction between the large and small houses, he assumed that the former ones belonged to more male activities and the latter ones to feminine activities as they were mostly domestic objects. Statistics show that at global level there is a percent of 25-30 % women archaeologists and according to Gilchrist’s the situation is the following: in USA approx. 20%, in England and Australia approx 35% and in Norway 49%.
Keywords: Archaeology, Nationalism, Marxism, Feminism, 20th Century, România
