ABSTRACT
Albania was formally defined as a country at the Treaty of London in 1913. Its inter-war history was marked by desperate poverty and eventual invasion by Italy in 1939. In 1944, Albanian partisans, led by the Marxist Enver Hoxha, succeeded in expelling the occupying German forces and, initially in collaboration with the Yugoslavians, set out to build a new country. In 1947, as tensions with neighbouring Yugoslavia developed, Hoxha boldly instigated a nationalist archaeological programme, run by a branch of the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Geography. A series of excavations began and promising young students were despatched to study in the Soviet Union, adding to a small, older generation of scholars who had been trained in the classical tradition in pre-war Western Europe with its emphasis upon monuments and art history. The 1960s, marked by Albania’s switch from an affiliation to the Soviet Union to one with the Chinese, was a period of intense activity for its small band of archaeologists, which culminated in the establishment of the Institute of Archaeology as a branch of the Academy of Sciences in 1970.
