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across the full range of British archaeology. In more recent years, as archaeology has become more compartmentalized, the journal has developed a reputation as one of the few places where multiperiod sites can sensibly be published.
As the twenty-first century begins, the RAI remains one of the few archaeological societies in the United Kingdom that has a mixed membership of both interested members of the public and professional archaeologists. It also retains a broadly based organization catering to people who have a truly catholic interest in Britain’s past.
See also
Britain, Prehistoric Archaeology
References
Ebbatson, L. 1994. “Context and Discourse: Royal Archaeological Institute Membership, 1845–1942.” In Building on the Past: Papers Celebrating 150 Years of the Royal Archaeological Institute, 22–74. Ed. B. Vyner. London.
Evans, J. 1949. “The Royal Archaeological Institute: A Retrospect.” Archaeological Journal 106: 1–11.
Wetherall, D. 1994. “From Canterbury to Winchester: The Foundation of the Institute.” In Building on the Past: Papers Celebrating 150 Years of the Royal Archaeological Institute, 8–21. Ed. B. Vyner. London.
General surveys of the history of Russian archaeology were written only during Soviet times, and only one of them encapsulates the whole history—the chapters written by A.V. Arcikhovsky and published in a collective work of the history of historic disciplines in the USSR (Arcikhovsky 1973). His chapters are primarily factual and are carefully filtered to correspond to the Marxist and nationalist demands of the state ideology of the time.
The rest of the literature may be divided into two parts. One part comprises books describing prerevolutionary times, and the other part books dealing with Soviet times. The first accounts (Ravdonikas 1932; Khudyakov 1933), issuing from Marxist dogmatists, are too nihilistic in their evaluations of the prerevolutionary past, and few are objective (Formozov 1961). The most complete historiographic work (Lebedev 1992) is subjective and disordered.
Books describing Soviet times are often very critical (Miller 1956). Although written in freedom and abroad, Miller’s book was not particularly competent because he was a provincial archaeologist, and the essence of great scholarly debates eluded him. In contrast, the apologetic book by A.L. Mongait (1956) was written inside the country, and it is not so much a history of the discipline as a survey of its state during Soviet times. Two later books are also apologetic: V.F. Gening’s book (Gening 1961) was written in the framework of militant dogmatism, but A.D. Pryakhin’s work (Pryakhin 1986) is more moderate and factual. Pryakhin tried to present a more objective and frank exposition, as much as that was possible, first abroad in some articles in English (in 1977 and 1982) and then in a book published in Russian and Spanish in 1993 and later in German and English.
In the works of V.I. Ravdonikas and M.V. Khudyakov, the history of archaeology is viewed as a series of changing class approaches to archaeological activity: feudal, bourgeois, and proletarian (Marxist) archaeology. In A.A. Formozov’s work (1961), the history of Russian archaeology is divided into periods according to the changing place of archaeology among disciplines and to the shifts in its interests: geographic, art criticism, and historic (but not ethnographic). G.S. Lebedev has maintained that Russian archaeology experienced a change of paradigms “à la Kuhn” (in the sense used by the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn) and that these determined the methodological character of the study of antiquities. These paradigms were antiquarian, encyclopedic, applied-arts, and everyday-life-describing. The last, according to Lebedev, was developed in Russia instead of an evolution paradigm.
The attitude toward antiquities in the days before Czar Peter the Great, before the beginning of the eighteenth century, was one of traditionalism and negligence. The Tatar yoke hampered
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