Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

Three Stages in the History of Cuban Archaeology / 35
ment known in Latin America as “Archaeology as a Social Science” or “Latin
American Social Archaeology.” This term serves as an umbrella that covers
different materialist views of indigenous societies, some of which include cultural
ecology blended with Marxist ideas. Some of the in®uential individuals
of this movement are Lumbreras in Peru (1974), Bate (1978) and Lorenzo
(1976) in Mexico, Sanoja and Vargas (1974) in Venezuela, and Veloz Maggiolo
(1976–1977) in Dominican Republic. The original meeting grew out of the
ideas published by Luis G. Lumbreras (1974), who aimed “to bring back the
essence of what V. Gordon Childe outlined in Archaeology as a Social Science
(1947), by advocating to conduct archaeology with a historical sensibility, by
clearly distancing from a colonialist archaeology, and by situating archaeology
in a ¤eld that makes its existence comprehensible and real: in other words,
using historical materialism” (Lorenzo 1976:6). The work group that considered
these questions in the Reunión de Teotihuacán consisted of José Luis
Lorenzo, Luis G. Lumbreras, Eduardo Matos, Julio Montané, Mario Sanoja,
and others not mentioned in the publication.
Several of the archaeologists af¤liated with the Social Archaeology movement,
such as José Luis Lorenzo, Luis G. Lumbrera, Mario Sanoja, Iraida
Vargas, and Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, visited the island and exchanged ideas
with Cuban archaeologists. However, the in®uence of this “school” of thought
in Cuba ended abruptly in 1978, when the senior Cuban archaeologist Dr.
Ernesto Tabío published an article in which he wrote, “Recently we have had
the opportunity of reading some publications by Latin American prehistorians
that present some ‘Marxist’ theoretical formulations that we cannot in any
way accept within a Marxist-Leninist perspective” (Tabío 1978:7). His main
concern was that the “social archaeologists,” especially Sanoja and Vargas
(1974), were taking particular modalities (or lifeways) of several groups and
elevating them to the level of a mode of production without considering the
relations and means of production. This approach led to a proliferation of
supposedly distinct modes of productions that in reality share similar relations
of production. For example, Sanoja and Vargas proposed the hunting
mode of production, the marine-gathering mode of production, and the
tropical mode of production. According to Tabío, all of these actually belonged
to the mode of production called primitive communism because the
means of production were communally owned and the societies lacked class
divisions and a state-level political system. Tabío’s criticism was directed most
strongly at the so-called theocratic mode of production that, according to
Sanoja and Vargas, included the presence of an inherited position of leader-