Ebook: Marx's Ghost: Conversations with Archaeologists

How did our present society come into being, and how does it relate to its predecessors? These key questions have transfixed archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians for decades. Yet scant attention has been paid to the thinkers and traditions that have shaped their debates.

This pioneering book explores the profound influence of one such thinker—Karl Marx—on twentieth-century archaeology. Patterson analyzes the links between Marxism and archaeology, paying specific attention to recent years. How did the debates in the 1990s pave the way for historical archaeologists to investigate the interconnections of class, gender, ethnicity, and race? In what ways did archaeologists make use of Marxist concepts such as contradiction and exploitation? How did varying theoretical groups critique one another and how did they overturn or build upon past generational ideas? Marx's Ghost: Conversations with Archaeologists provides an accessible guide to the arguments that have influenced Anglophone archaeology from the 1930s to the present day.