that could be used by everybody, and the newly founded State Archaeological Institute promised to become a center for heritage management. As will be explained shortly, these undeniable achievements were lost in the postwar socialist period.

The Socialist Period

Ideologically, the socialist period began just after World War II as nationalist propaganda stressed the allegedly close relationship between Czechs and Russians. This propaganda found immediate reflection in archaeology: archaeology was expected to demonstrate the eastern connections of the Czech nation, proving that the “Slavs” arrived very early from the east. This point was directed against the Germans, with whom the Czechs have, in fact, more in common than with the Russians. Most archaeologists did not recognize the ideological background of these views and actively participated in the officially supported boom of “Slavic archaeology” especially if no explicit ideological statements were required, and there were no direct nationalist implications. This period ended in 1968; thereafter anything “Slavic” became ideologically untenable because it was a reminder of the Russian military invasion. There was a subperiod just after the mid-1960s, preceding the liberalization of 1968, when achievements of Czech scientists in general were evaluated on the basis of references in the West: the regime recognized that it could not rely on reports put out by the party bureaucracy that ruled the institutes.

Contrary to the expectations of many western archaeologists, Marxism never became a widespread topic in Czech archaeology. However, statements on theory running against Marxist ideology would have been punished, something that automatically put an end to all discussions of major theoretical issues. Any theoretical debate had to have the usual dogmatic form, full of quotations from Karl Marx (see Neustupný 1967), but there were not many publications of this sort. Marxism was completely dropped after 1968, as some of its ideas apparently seemed dangerous to the communist ruling class; all that remained was the usual Marxist political rhetoric. But the situation in West Germany—where, despite the absence of Marxist ideological pressure, there was no discussion of theory in the 1950s through to the 1980s—makes it uncertain whether theoretical issues would have been raised by Czech archaeologists of that period if there had not been any communist regime. Marxist philosophy, however, had one positive effect in that every university student had to study the works by Marx and Friedrich Engels. Consequently, many students became acquainted with some kind of philosophy and a sort of anthropology, although a part of the related reading was purely political (see Neustupný1991).

As real archaeological theory, being ideologically controlled, was dangerous to touch, most archaeologists refused to go near it. It was also dangerous to write positively about anything coming from the West. To proclaim oneself to be a “New Archaeologist,” for example, was a risk that nobody took. In this situation many archaeologists preferred nontheoretical topics within the tradition of formal, typological archaeology; the main problems discussed in archaeological writings were chronology and cultural influences, assumed to come predominantly from the southeast. At the same time, the large-scale contemporaneity of prehistoric cultures was taken for granted, and this, of course, opened the door to the equation of archaeological cultures with ethnic units; the assumption of many migrations was a logical result. This kind of archaeology may have been a protest against the communist regime because it was utterly nonideological (see Kuna 1993), or at least not favorable to socialism, whereas an active engagement in communist ideology was otherwise required in any other sphere of life. New Archaeology and the beginnings of postprocessual archaeology were largely missed in this deformed intellectual environment.

In this way it happened that Czech archaeologists became very good at typological chronology (cf. Krumphanzlová 1972), and their detailed schemes created in the 1950s and 1960s are still valid; they became the basis for local sequences all over central Europe. Either