Against functionalism: review of the Pietrele Archaeological Project
Against functionalism: review of the Pietrele Archaeological Project

Summary/Abstract: The present text is a review of the German-Romanian archaeological research of the tell of Pietrele-Gorgana in southern Romania. As we show in this paper, the functionalist interpretation and the Fordist organization of the archaeological practice at Pietrele are interdependent. Both draw their legitimacy from the same functionalist paradigm criticized in the social sciences as an ideology of maintaining and reproducing the system, stating that functionality is a natural, universal state. In our opinion, archaeology, as the discipline of “the other”, should fight the dominant discourses colonizing the past and implicitly or explicitly promoting the reproduction of hierarchical systems.

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