and a series of government bills secured the protection and management of monuments from 1946 to 1948. This was the first integrated solution in the field since the abolition of Austrian legislation in 1918. Another important move was the establishment of the Arheološki Vestnik in 1949, designed to be the central archaeological journal; it was published by the Slovene Academy of Arts and Sciences.

It is interesting that the Communist authorities did not intervene to any great extent in the conceptual issues of archaeological research in the postwar period. Of course, all the scholars who were appointed to the leading positions had studied in the prewar period and were politically acceptable to the new regime, since they either supported the Liberation Front or were not compromised by collaboration with Germans or Italians. The official program of the Yugoslav (and Slovene) Communist Party encouraged the further emancipation of the Yugoslav nations (on a Marxist-Leninist basis, of course), and the development of a national cultural, scientific, and educational framework was part of this program. Had the new leaders in the field of archaeology been too rigidly selected on an ideological basis, the country would have lacked the cadre of intellectuals needed for the reconstruction.

The new ideology was expressed in various resolutions, manifests, and similar protocol documents presented at conferences, in new publications, and so on, but this had no operable effect on conceptual issues. Marxism could not anchor in archaeology as it could in historiography, philosophy, economics, and similar disciplines because the Yugoslav and Slovene Marxist ideologists were not capable of providing an applicable apparatus. Consequently, the positivist and culture-history paradigm in archaeology not only persisted but also further developed.

The late 1940s and 1950s were formative years that were decisive for the establishment of a stable archaeological institutional and conceptual framework. The formative process concluded in the mid-1970s when two networks were established: a network of regional Offices for Protection of Natural and Cultural Heritage and a network of regional museums. After that point the institutional framework remained largely unchanged. Today, there are three national archaeological institutions (the National Museum; the Institute of Archaeology of the Slovene Academy of Arts and Sciences, Department of Archaeology, University of Ljubljana; and the Agency for Protection of Cultural Heritage, with seven regional offices) and ten regional museums. The stability of the institutional and conceptual framework can be seen in the developments after 1991. Although Slovenia underwent another radical political change and became an independent, democratic state, the functioning of archaeological institutional and the conceptual frameworks were not affected. In fact, the only notable change was the development of contract archaeology on a much larger scale.

Conceptual Issues

The 1950s and 1960s witnessed the first clear division of specialization in archaeological periods among Slovene archaeologists. Their field was organized in five subdivisions: Paleolithic and Mesolithic archaeology (traditionally the domain of the naturalist scholars); Neolithic and Eneolithic archaeology; Bronze and Iron Age archaeology; Roman archaeology (classical and provincial); and early Medieval and Slavonic archaeology. This structure is largely intact today.

The field’s major effort in this period was the Archaeological Map of Slovenia project,coordinated by the Institute of Archaeology. In 1966, after almost fifteen years of intensive work, the data were collected, but it took another ten years to revise the data and publish Arheološka najdišča Slovenije (Ljubljana 1975). This gazetteer of sites and monuments contained more than 3,000 entries from the Paleolithic to the early Medieval period (nearly ten times more than any previous archaeological map). Particularly important was the series of syntheses on settlement history for each archaeological period, the first studies of this kind based on highly detailed information.

The archaeologies of the individual periods in Slovenia also needed new conceptual tools. Indeed, the only branch that was developed in the prewar period to a level comparable with