Ideology, Archaeology

Ideology pervades all forms of social practice, including theoretical reasoning and scientific practice. This chapter will first define ideology and the place it occupies in ways of thinking and acting. We define ideology as thought that always refers directly or indirectly to a given material reality. This reality is shaped historically and, hence, contains the remains of past ideologies, but it is at the same time the context of contemporary ideologies. The continuous adaptation of ideology to a changing material world becomes important in "scientific reasoning" when science claims to be value-free. The second part of the paper uses a representative archaeological study to analyze how ideology can guide the interpretation of the archaeological record, how it is imported from, and in turn fed back to, the collective consciousness as a settled truth.¹.