ABSTRACT
One of the great strengths of Marxism as a critical doctrine has been its claim to expose purportedly complete explanations as in fact partial and ideologically biased. As Lukács put it, ‘it is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between marxism and bourgeois thought but the point of view of totality’ (Lukács 1968:27). In the mid-twentieth century, the dominant theory of development in the core countries of the capitalist world economy had added little to nineteenth-century theories of social change. Societies changed due to the logic of their internal historical development and either because of historical accident or indigenous advantages, some were simply more advanced than others. In other words, the framework was historicist and fixed firmly in categories of thought that anticipated all societies moving through objectively similar stages of growth and development. Moreover, each society was moved along in this process by a constant examination of its own origins and an assessment of its rate of progress. This subjective evaluation of an objective past formed the ontological basis on which future growth was deemed to depend. It is more than a coincidence that physical excavation of past fragments and their being brought into order through interpretation and publication should also have developed as the dominant archaeological method by which this process of self-identification would be achieved.
