Randall H. Mcguire

• PhD, University of Arizona
• Professor (Full) at Binghamton University

The late thirteenth century religious ideologies that transformed the Pueblo World sprang from far-ranging beliefs, rituals, and social relations inextricably linked to Mesoamerica (Figure 2.1). Indigenous peoples living in the southwest of the United States and the northwest of México (the Southwest/Northwest) clearly share many aspects of cosmolo...

Southwestern archaeologists have debated the nature of late Prehispanic western pueblo social organization for nearly a century. Weret he fiourteenth-centurpyu eblos egalitarian or hierarchical? This issue remains unsettled largely because of the oppositional thinking that has informed most contributions to the debate: that is, the tendency to fran...

The idea of archaeology as craft challenges the separattion of' reasoning and execttion that characterizes the field today. The Arts and Craftis Movement of'the lalte nineteenth century established craftwork as an aesthetic of opposition. We establish crafti in the Marxian critique of alienated labor, and we propose a unified practice of'hand, hear...

For most of the 20th century, the border cities of Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora formed the single transnational community of Ambos Nogales (Both Nogales). Today the people in Ambos Nogales nostalgically remember this border as a picket fence between neighbors. In the mid-1990s, the United States tore down the picket fence and erected a stee...

Conocí la obra de Bruce Trigger siendo estudiante de posgrado en la Universidad de Arizona a finales de los años setenta. Los embriagadores días revolucionarios de la Nueva Arqueología habían terminado, y mis profesores se afanaban en institucionalizar su revolución como arqueología procesual. En este contexto, el nombre de Trigger se mencionaba co...

Hanscam and Buchanan (2023) give us an insightful comparative analysis of Hadrian's Wall and the US/Mexico border wall. Their analysis shows how critically to study and use these long walls in an explicitly political archaeology. I have engaged in archaeology as political action (McGuire 2008), and have researched the materiality of the US/Mexico b...

De las cenizas del post-modernismo ha surgido un posthumanismo que ha declarado que el marxismo en arqueología está muerto. Los partidarios de la teoría posthumanista de la Arqueología Simétrica seleccionan a su conveniencia algunas ideas marxistas para luego refutarlas y descartarlas, sin considerar la profundidad y los matices que las diferentes...

En la arqueología, un Poshumanismo ha surgido de las cenizas del posmodernismo y ha declarado que el Marxismo ha muerto en la arqueología. Los defensores de la teoría poshumanista de la Arqueología Simétrica seleccionan ideas para descartar el marxismo sin tener en cuenta la profundidad y los matices de las diferentes teorías Marxistas. Tergiversan...

In archaeology, a New Materialism has developed. Archaeological promoters of this theory reject Marxism out of hand. These archaeologists equate the relational dialectic with oppositional thinking and declare Marxism as dead. A refutation of the New Materialism’s critique of the dialectic leaves open the question of why archaeologists should embrac...

In archaeology, a Posthumanism has arisen from the ashes of post-modernism and declared that Marxism is dead in archaeology. Archaeological advocates of the posthumanist theory of Symmetrical Archaeology cherry-pick ideas to dismiss Marxism out of hand without considering the depth and nuances of different Marxist theories. They misrepresent the re...

Fleeing violence, poverty, abuse, war, and climatic change, tens of millions of people have fled their homes in the Global South seeking refuge in adjacent nations and in the Global North. This modern migration entails a material, sensual experience in time. The craft of archaeology has traditionally engaged with the material, the sensual, and the...

The New Nomadic Age: Archaeologies of Forced and Undocumented Migration. YANNIS HAMILAKIS, editor. 2018. Equinox Publishing, Bristol, Connecticut. xiv + 253 pp. $50.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-78179-711-2. - Randall H. McGuire

Los arqueólogos están acostumbrados a asumir una relación directa entre la inversión funeraria y el estatus social (Binford, 1971; Saxe, 1970; Tainter, 1978; O’Shea, 1984; Bartel, 1982). Muchos han supuesto que los ricos siempre han adquirido para sí las formas de exhibición mortuoria más suntuosas. Para estos investigadores, el ritual mortuorio, l...

This Vital Topics Forum looks at archaeology as a form of bearing witness. While bearing witness has been an important frame for scholarly interrogation of structural violence for some time (Agamben 1998; Butler 2016), it is perhaps Paul Farmer (2004) who popularized this way of scrutinizing structural violence. For Farmer, there are two ways to be...

Spanish Translation of Shanks, Michael and Randall McGuire, The Craft of Archaeology, American Antiquity, 61(1):75-88. La idea de la arqueología como arte desafía la separación entre razonamiento y ejecución, teoría y práctica, que hoy caracteriza a la disciplina. El Movimiento de Artes y Oficios de fines del siglo XIX estableció a la artesanía co...

Ancient Paquimé and the Casas Grandes World. Minnis Paul E. and Whalen Michael E. , editors. 2015. Amerind Studies in Anthropology, University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Xii + 256 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978- 0-8165-3131-8. - Volume 27 Issue 3 - Randall H. McGuire

At the turn of the twenty-first century, critics suggested that warfare profoundly shaped cultural change in the prehistoric Southwest/Northwest. This challenge was part of a much larger debate concerning violence and warfare before civilization. It has become clear that scholars need to consider violence and warfare to understand the aboriginal hi...

V. Gordon Childe tuvo una relación larga e importante con la antropología y la arqueología de América del Norte. Muchas de sus ideas tuvieron una profunda influencia en los investigado¬res norteamericanos, que aún hoy en día continua. Los manuales introductorios mencionan constantemente a Childe por sus criterios arqueológicos para identificar la c...

En la actualidad, muchos arqueólogos buscan escribir historias del presente que comprometen y hacen visible el detritus de la modernidad. Siguiendo a Benjamin, los arqueólogos estudian las ruinas como vidas petrificadas que nos dan acceso a los procesos destructivos de la modernidad. Una creciente devastación de las personas y las cosas caracteriza...

The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology provides an overview of the international field of historical archaeology (c. AD 1500 to the present) through seventeen specially-commissioned essays from leading researchers in the field. The volume explores key themes in historical archaeology including documentary archaeology, the writing of hist...

La Arqueología se ha utilizado tradicionalmente para apoyar al poder en las arenas de lucha por la econom- ía, las ideologías, las identidades y la política. La ar- queología puede ser una forma de praxis para ayudar a crear un mundo más humano, una vez que los arqueó- logos se convierten en más que “simples oradores”. La gran mayoría de los arqueó...

Traditionally when Americans went to work they expected that they would earn a reasonable wage, work in a safe environment, put in a 40 h week, collect paid vacation days, earn sick leave, have the right to organize and receive health and retirement benefits. Increasingly, however, fewer and fewer workers receive these rights and today only a minor...

My review of Stephen Chrisomalis and Andre Costopolus edited volume Human Expeditions, leads to a reflection of festschrifts. The festschrift and the memorial volume are dying enterprises. Many scholars find festschrift volumes a waste of time because they often lack coherence and frequently consist of papers that the authors could not publish else...

A menudo, la arqueología es como un perro que habla. Que el perro pueda hablar fascina a la gente aunque ellos no tienen interés en lo que el perro diga. Desde la década de los 1970s, la Arqueología Social Latinoamericana (ASL) ha estado haciendo hablar al perro utilizando la teoría marxista para hacerle decir cosas importantes acerca del mundo mod...

Archaeologists have rarely taken up the complex concept of ideology. When discussing past ideologies, they mainly use the term as a substitute for 'world view', 'religion', or 'political doctrine'. However, 'ideology' is not a coherent sphere of collective thought that can be investigated like a landscape or group of material objects. Instead, it r...

In his well-known essay Man Makes Himself, V. Gordon Childe (1936:134) wrote that "war helped in a great discovery-that men as well as animals can be domesticated. Instead of killing a defeated enemy, he might be enslaved." Generations of students and scholars seem to have read this sentence by a "Marxist" scholar without sensing a problem. Another...

The history of the notion of ideology is as convoluted as the many attempts to define the concept. Our account points out the relationship of this history to early anthropology and archaeology. We highlight the nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual histories that constitute the background to present disputes over what anthropological archa...

The land! don't you feel it? Doesn't it make you want to go out and lift dead Indians tenderly from their graves, to steal from them—as if it must be clinging even to their corpses—some authenticity.

This quantitative examination of economic stratification in a Swiss Alpine village is based on data of individually owned farm land and building valuations for the period 1851–1915. Comparisons with other societies and with European peasant communities indicate a relatively low degree of inequality and the possibility of considerable intergeneratio...

This article examines the archaeology of North America. It highlights the variability in North American Native American cultures, ethnic groups, and languages and discusses anthropologists' attempts to order this variability through the notion of culture areas, a widely used concept that employed a number of criteria to group societies assumed to h...

At Ludlow, a granite coal miner gazes resolutely across the windswept plains of Colorado. Beside him, a woman in classical drapery clutches her baby with one hand and rests her head on her other hand in grief (Figure 1.1). Once they gazed up into mountain valleys teeming with activity. Great coal tipples loomed over miners' homes shrouded in the ac...

The Archaeology of the Colorado Coalfield War Project has conducted archaeological investigations at the site of the Ludlow Massacre in Ludlow, Colorado, since 1996. With the help of the United Mine Workers of America and funds from the Colorado State Historical Society and the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities, the scholars involved have integ...

"The Archaeology of Class War has much to recommend it, especially to specialists in Colorado, labor and industrial, ethnic, and gender history."-Center for Coloardo & the West The Archaeology of the Colorado Coalfield War Project has conducted archaeological investigations at the site of the Ludlow Massacre in Ludlow, Colorado, since 1996. With th...

Indians, Heritage, and ArchaeologyBacklash, or an Indigenous ArchaeologyThe Complexity Of KnowledgeBibliographic NoteReferences

For decades, archaeologists have “ponied up” to the Marxist buffet, picking and choosing from a vast array of appealing tidbits that are incorporated in various aspects of their research. We believe that praxis is one of the key issues separating Marxism from other theoretical approaches. For Marxist archaeologists, praxis comes from knowledge and...

The recent English publication of Che Guevara's (1995) journal of his youthful motorcycle trip through South America, The Motorcycle Diaries, has generated a resurgence of public interest in the iconic figure of Che. The publicity blurb on the back of the book represents Che as a South American James Dean who embarked on a journey of discovery and...

Ethics in archaeology have changed from how we treat things to relationships between people.

A gang of historians has gunned down the "romantic West." They have dismissed the notion of the West as a frontier of opportunity for all comers. The American West has been redefined as an arena of struggle involving complex relations of class, gender, ethnicity, and race. Western work camps and company towns existed as extensions of a global econo...

Many postprocessual archaeologists have argued that active individuals make history. The apotheosis of the individual has been achieved under the rubric “identity,” the most pervasive theoretical term of the last few years. This focus obscures the fundamental idea that individuals do not exist in isolation. The relational concept of struggle will h...

Archaeology, defined as the study of material culture, extends from the first preserved human artefacts up to the present day, and in recent years the has become a particular focus of research. On one hand are the conservationists seeking to preserve significant materials and structures of recent decades in the face of redevelopment and abandonment...

Culture areas haunt our research. They affect how we frame questions, how we define the boundaries of our studies, what journals we read, what colleagues we talk to, where we go to school and dozens of other aspects of archaeology, in subtle and complex ways. One way to understand these impacts is to engage the historiography of the concept and fro...

Consumer behavior and choice models have assumed a major role in historical archaeology. Recent interest in consumption is an honest attempt to move beyond an emphasis on production. Consumer models have clear material referents, making them useful in historical archaeology. These models, however, separate production from consumption, and privilege...

Archaeologist not only live class they also study it. Archaeology as a discipline serves class interests and as a profession, or occupation, it has its own class structure. The discipline of archaeology has, since its founding, primarily served middle-class interests. It has formed part of the symbolic capital that has been necessary for membership...

Rautman's critique of our article "Although They Have Petty Captains They Obey Them Badly: The Dialectics of Prehispanic Western Pueblo Social Organization" (McGuire and Saitta 1996) provides us with an opportunity to clarify some points about our theoretical perspective. Rautman shares our dissatisfaction with attempts to characterize Prehispanic...

In the last decade and a half more archaeological work has been done on the prehistoric Hohokam of southern Arizona than was done in the previous seven decades combined. We have substantially increased our sample of Hohokam remains both in terms of the total quantity of material and in terms of the geographic distribution of that material. This res...

The Evolution of Political Systems. Upham Steadman , editor. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990. xxi + 310 pp., figures, tables, references, index. $49.50 (cloth). - Volume 58 Issue 1 - Randall H. McGuire

This book, first published in 1992, seeks an explanation of the pattern of sharp discrepancy of wage levels across the world-economy for work of comparable productivity. It explores how far such differences can be explained by the different structures of households as 'income-pooling units', examining three key variables: location in the core or pe...

This book, first published in 1992, seeks an explanation of the pattern of sharp discrepancy of wage levels across the world-economy for work of comparable productivity. It explores how far such differences can be explained by the different structures of households as 'income-pooling units', examining three key variables: location in the core or pe...