Corroded but Enduring: on the Perpetuation of a Scholarly Iron Curtain in Western Archaeological Thought and Practice

Summary

Archaeological schools of thought vary between countries, with the discipline growing along disparate theoretical trajectories dependent on the historical particulars of a nation’s academic traditions. Often distance between such diverging theoretical trajectories is mitigated by communication and collaboration across borders between scholars. However, the Cold War that divided Western and Soviet nations geographically, politically, and culturally also applied to archaeological research, as the flow of information and people across borders was stifled. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the mostly normalized relations that developed afterwards, a scholarly Iron Curtain has remained, diminished but enduring. Though certainly not as rigid as decades past, such a divide is visible in the limited number of American scholars conducting research in modern Russian, and in the exclusion of Russian research from our narratives about the prehistoric and ancient past. This paper examines the legacy of the Cold War in American archaeology, specifically in relation to the marginalization of Russian archaeological phenomena in our popular narratives. Ultimately, the peripheralization of these phenomena and regions does not result from anything that existed in pre- or ancient history, but in the modern political and cultural context’s shaping of archaeological thought and practice.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21090