A Pioneering Experiment: Dialoghi di Archeologia between Marxism and Political Activism

Abstract

The post-war politics of Italy had an impact on its archaeology and archaeological community. Some attempts at radicalisation were made via the journal Dialoghi di Archeologia, founded in 1967, with the aim of discussing problems and achieving changes within both academic and public archaeology. This paper traces the history of the journal and its legacy.

Crisis, Marxism and Reconstruction of Time

“…Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli with his structural art-historical approach was without doubt the single-most important representative of this Marxist movement directly after WWII (Cella et al 2016: 72-73), as he attempted to reintegrate previously marginalized groups of historical agents in scholarly debates to draw a more holistic picture of Roman society at large; an approach that had a significant and lasting impact outside of Italian scholarship (Bianchi Bandinelli 1967;D'Agostino 1991: 55-57;Hölscher 1995: 215). The 1960s and 1970s saw the climax of this Marxist movement with the establishment of the journal Dialoghi di Archeologia in 1967 (Guidi 2002: 355;Iacono 2014: 1), the ambitious large-scale research and publication projects of the Istituto Gramsci (Terrenato 2005: 40) and the excavation of Settefinestre inter alia (Dyson 2003: 27). Similar tendencies can be seen in Italian prehistory, which, heavily influenced by the works of V. Gordon Childe and Eastern Bloc scholars, took alongside French prehistory a leading role in the establishment and spread of Marxist theories in western European archaeology (Guidi 2002: 356).…”