Abstract:

This paper considers how the Communist dictatorship in Albania employed material symbols to help impose its ideological vision on the population. We illustrate the eventual demise of these strategies of domination, by describing what has become of some specific elements of Communist material culture (bunkers) in a post-Communist landscape, and by discussing the use and re-use of an individual artefact (a second-century AD architectural block) as a symbol of resistance during Communism and of new beginnings in the post-Communist era. Rather than presenting substantive archaeological data, this paper explores how the treatment of material culture in newly open post-Communist countries like Albania can stimulate archaeological thinking about the formation and manipulation of landscapes and the interplay between domination and resistance as an agent of change.

Author: Michael Galaty, Sharon R. Stocker, Charles Watkinson