ABSTRACT
Karl Marx was a full-time revolutionary who was more concerned with changing society than with interpreting it. He was not an archaeologist, an historian, or a social scientist. Nevertheless his legacy to archaeologists, historians, and social scientists is enormous. The distinctive method is analogous to peeling an onion layer by layer, revealing its internal structure with each successive layer until reaching its core and then reassembling the whole. The technique involves looking behind and beneath superficial appearances; it includes critical examination and abstraction; and it concludes with careful attention to how what has been learned in the process is presented. Marx's criticism of the economists' method was that it did not adequately deal with the contradictions in their own conceptual apparatus, let alone with the structural and historical contradictions that underpinned capitalist society and its formation. Marx’s abstractions were also distinctive in the sense that they operated at different scales and levels of generality.
