Introduction

When Philip Kohl and I sought to organize a session on “Marxist approaches to archaeological research” for the 1974 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, we faced the problem of identifying American archaeologists who were Marxists. Numbers of anthropological archaeologists had done work which might be related to Marxist approaches, but this research did not in any explicit way acknowledge its debt to a theoretical perspective emphasizing the primary significance of the relations of production to the dynamics of social change. Indeed, more than one of those whom we invited to participate in the session responded that they were unfamiliar with Marxist theory and its possible relation to their work. As Spriggs (1984: 7) has commented:

The marginal position of Marxism in American archaeology even now is well expressed in the somewhat apologetic title of Spriggs's article (“Another way of telling …”). This marginality derives from various circumstances.