Probing Praxis in Archaeology: The Last Eighty Years

For decades, archaeologists have "ponied up" to the Marxist buffet, picking and choosing from a vast array of appealing tidbits that are incorporated in various aspects of their research. We believe that praxis is one of the key issues separating Marxism from other theoretical approaches. For Marxist archaeologists, praxis comes from knowledge and critique; they generate knowledge about the past, use this knowledge to engage in a critique of our own world, and come to action based on the realization that there is real oppression in the world that must be challenged. In this paper, we present examples spanning the last eighty years—including V. Gordon Childe, the New Archaeology, La Arqueología Social, the so-called Annapolis school, and the postprocessual approach—to evaluate how praxis has been defined and how such views have changed over time.