Although neither Karl Marx nor Friedrich Engels specifically analyzed how archaeology supported a materialist conception of history, Marx indicated as much in Capital, where he wrote that "relics of bygone instruments of labour possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economic forms of society, as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct species of animals"[1] Engels elaborated further that "it is from the history of nature and human society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted"[2] which situates archaeology as part of that discovery process.
It holds that societal change comes about through class struggle, and while it may have once held that human societies progress through a series of stages, from primitive communism through slavery, feudalism and then capitalism, it is typically critical of such evolutionary typology today.
Marxist archaeologists in general believe that the bipolarism that exists between the processual and post-processual debates is an opposition inherent within knowledge production and is in accord with a dialectical understanding of the world.
This constant interfacing and conflict between the extremes of the two heuristic playing grounds (subjective vs. objective) are believed to result in a continuous reconstruction of the past by scholars.
This approach was particularly popular in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, and as archaeologist Bruce Trigger later wrote: The dogmatism with which Soviet social scientists adhered to this scheme contrasts sharply with the views expressed by Marx and Engels, who were prepared to consider multilinear models of social evolution, especially with regard to earlier and less well understood periods of human development.
In attempting to do this, Marxist archaeologists working in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and following decades denounced what they saw as "artifactology", the simple categorization of artifacts in typologies, because they believed that it took archaeological focus away from the human beings who created and used them.
[10][11][5] Following the ascent to power of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union in 1924, there was an increased focus on academics bringing their findings in line with Marxist theories.
In 1929, a young archaeologist named Vladislav I. Ravdonikas (1894–1976) published a report entitled For a Soviet History of Material Culture in which he outlined a framework for Marxist archaeology.