reconstruction of the past on the basis of material remains they invented “the method of ascending.” Supposing that Marxism gives absolutely reliable schemes for a one-to-one correlation of implement types with the socioeconomic structures of society, these archaeologists believed it possible to “ascend” in reconstruction from implements of labor as a fundamental aspect of social building to economic structures (in Marxism, the basis of society) and even further to social as well as ideational relations (in Marxism, superstructures). As this process of “ascending” came to be regarded as completely plausible, there appeared to be no need to address oneself to neighboring disciplines—such as ethnography and linguistics—or even to written sources. Archaeology itself appeared as history, a history that was more trustworthy than the written one, for material records were considered as more objective evidences of the past, free from subjective distortions and admixtures.

True, history supposes an interest in personalities and particular events that is mostly inaccessible to archaeologists. Yet in the Marxist view, another notion about history dominated in which “collectives” (societies, masses) and processes acted instead of personalities and personalities figured only as “products” and “markers” of social relations. This type of history could be “built” by archaeologists.

Later on, the theoretical basis of “the method of ascending” was not further developed by its creators (Arcikhovsky, Kiselev, Smirnov, and Bryusov), who became prominent and authoritative Soviet archaeologists. However, those same students and their pupils used the method in their work and considered the whole of archaeology as another history—a “history armed with the spade” (Arcikhovsky). That idea became the initial premise of this approach. Arcikhovsky became the head of the Department of Archaeology at Moscow University and the editor of the main archaeological journal, and his younger associate and disciple Rybakov acted for three decades in the post-Stalin era as the head of the leading archaeological institution of the country and all of Russian archaeology. Given the problematics of ethnogenesis, these students preferred local development (in Russia, this preference is called “autochthonism”), and in that respect they did not diverge from Marr’s ideas. After those ideas had been discredited, they restored the argument of the old Russian autochthonists Zabelin and Samokvasov and combined it with Marxist discourses on the inner sources of the state origins in each society.

This trend corresponded more than the others to Soviet ideology and was skillfully adjusted to it. It appeared to be very tenacious. In the last decades of the Soviet regime, Vadim Masson in Leningrad advanced methodological elaborations in the spirit of sociological historicism (1976, 1990), and Vladimir F. Gening in Kiev put forward a detailed methodological substantiation of “sociological archaeology” as he understood it—quite in the spirit of the 1930s. Masson’s recommendations do not go beyond searching for stereotyped correlations to social structures in archaeological materials, and the expansive works of Gening are distinguished by dogmatism and scholastics. Thus, one can say the trend has been exhausted. However, analogous interests have started to appear in the West (the “sociological archaeology” of Colin Renfrew among others), so it appears that Russian archaeologists initiated a worldwide movement.

Sequention of Cultures

The views and interests of Efimenko and Artamonov were formed in the Leningrad paleoethnological school. Efimenko first studied Slavic-Russian barrows and then the Paleolithic period before moving from Leningrad to Kiev to become the head of the Institute of Archaeology there. Artamonov dealt with many branches of prehistoric archaeology—from the Bronze Age to Scythian and Slavic-Russian antiquities—as well as heading the Leningrad University Department of Archaeology and serving as the director of the Hermitage. After World War II, when the dogmatic settings of the stadialist theory were first weakened and then dismissed entirely, Efimenko and Artamonov, their pupils, and the pupils of their pupils began to reconstruct migrations in any direction, including invasions into the territory of the country of the researcher. This was not migrationism, for they