Session title: EUROPEAN ARCHAEOLOGY AND MARXISM: PAST AND FUTURE

In the last decades a number of archaeologists have stressed the politically laden nature of creating archaeological knowledge. If this is the case, then in the modern “globalized” Europe any attempt to resurrect the ghost of Marx in any field of scholarship may appear at a first sight unnecessary if not offensive or harmful. Yet, almost twenty years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the time appears to be ripe for a reappraisal of the role Marxism played, and to a more limited extent still plays, in the dialectic of archaeological discourse in European countries. The aim of this session is to address this topic. Naturally any revaluation of this influential stream of scholarship in archaeology cannot avoid taking into consideration the different historical contingencies as well as the different modalities and conditions in which the various Marxist archaeologies operated. As a result, a first segment of the session will be more historically oriented, devoted to a reconsideration of how and to what extent Marxist approaches in archaeology managed to cope with these different conditions. The second half of the session will be dedicated to an overview of current trends and possible future developments of Marxist archaeology and, more broadly, of any archaeology inspired by Marxist perspectives either from a theoretical or methodological point of view.