ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Clash of Communist and Culture-Historical Archaeologists' History of Humans

• In Event: Histories of Archaeology 2

English Abstract

On January 21, 1964 in Communist Romania, a six-hour meeting took place at that Institute of Archaeology in the Romanian Academy. Tensions were high among the archaeologists and the meeting was set to diffuse those tensions. On the one hand, the leading archaeologists for the Romanian Academy and the Institute belonged to the Communist Party and adhered to Marxist-Leninist interpretations of human history in the region of Southeast Europe and the Black Sea. On the other hand, many of the archaeologists in the room with substantial power in the Institute were writing and arguing for a history of humans that aligned with culture-historical archaeology, a theory that fit better with their western archaeologist colleagues. While in the west, we might assume that the Communist leaders in the room would simply threaten the culture-historical archaeologists until they adopted a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint and interpretation, that is not what happened. Instead, the Communist leaders presiding over the meeting concluded that the two factions needed to get along better, to collaborate, and to come to the best scientific conclusions based on the archaeological evidence provided. This demonstrates that Communist Romania was an intellectual space where eastern and western interpretations of the history of humans relied more on archaeological evidence than political propaganda. It was also a space where Marxist-Leninist archaeology could develop through helpful criticism of the theory without being completely dismissed as propaganda.

Author

• Kate Mower, University of Utah