The book Marx's Ghosts: Conversations with Archaeologists by Thomas Patterson is divided into five chapters with a preface and an introduction. It opens with an autobiographical preface that spells out the author's encounter with Marxism, from his young years in California to academia on the East coast, at Harvard and Temple, and finally, back to the West coast at University of California–Riverside. The book's aim is clearly stated in the introduction: to explore the many dimensions of Marxism in archaeological practice and discourse on two principal topics—the rise of civilization and the origins of states.

The first chapter outlines Marx's legacy, on issues revolving around methods [dialectic], theory of history and society [historical materialism], and ecology [modes of production]. In Chapter 2, the author sees the beginning of a constructive dialogue launched by Gordon Vere Childe. The latter transferred some key Marxist concepts like mode of production, forces of production, and contradictions, into his view of historical development. He identified two “great transformations” of human history; the first being the “Neolithic revolution,” and the second the “urban revolution.” The former resulted from a process through which land and livestock shifted gradually from ‘objects’ to ‘means of production.’ The latter, the foundation of civilization, is partly based on class stratification, oppression, and exploitation. In the Western anglophone world, Childe was unique. In fact, as is argued in Chapter 3, widespread fear of the “Reds,” the Cold War, and academic traditions kept Marxism outside the gate of most, if not all, North American universities.

Thomas Patterson delineates a sort of stratigraphy building up from ‘disregard,’ ‘disengagement,’ ‘engagement,’ and finally, ‘dialogue.’ Each layer has its cast of characters. The book is particularly harsh on the so-called ‘new-archaeologists’; the ‘staccato” of questions is sustained and intense. Clearly the author has no patience with Binford's, Flannery's, and Renfrew's research programmes, which he brands as representative of the ‘disengagement.’ The period of ‘engagement’ subsequently develops with research by Carneiro, Cowgill, Johnson, Price, Sanders, and Wright on the archaeology of exchange, population dynamics, and warfare. The dialectics of domination, conquest, and exploitation is acknowledged and taken into consideration even if the Marxist lexicon is not used. The ‘dialogue’ finally takes off with the research of Adams, Trigger, and Wolff. Class distinction, private ownership of land, warfare, conquest, etcetera, become key elements in the study of the emergence of civilization. Chapter 4 discusses the development of an explicit Marxist approach to archaeology between 1975 and 1990. In the United States, Crumley, Gilman, and Kohl played leading roles in this turn of events, organizing key symposia and writing seminal articles. From then on, Marxist concepts and lexicon became part of the archaeological dialect. In this chapter, the author's distaste for a certain way of doing archaeology leads to extreme statements. For example, he asserts that, “as the processual archaeologists increasingly became technicians and state functionaries concerned with methodological issues, instrumental rationality, and value-neutrality, they sought standardized concepts and procedures that could be applied uniformly in diverse circumstances” (p. 91). This is not only excessive partisan-quibbling, but also flies at the face of evidence. It ridicules those with a different approach and attributes to them an unpleasant robot-dummy-like attitude.

After 1990, as outlined in Chapter 5, different authors develop distinct strands of Marxist archaeology. The “historical materialist” approach is now a constitutive component of archaeological scholarship. This is also the case with the absorption of social theory, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and neo-structuralism, essentially in the United States and the United Kingdom. The archaeological landscape thus appears as a textured field of competing claims for ‘completeness,’ ‘ethics,’ and political relevance. Because of the myriad philosophical difficulties of a focused causal approach to human history, it no longer seems to matter if some approaches are anachronistic, misguided, or irrelevant.

Thomas Patterson's book is interesting, and, if properly contextualized, will be important for undergraduate and graduate training alike. Whether sincere or coerced, Marxism has been in the mainstream of scholarship in The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Eastern Asia, South America, and Africa, and it has always been an influential body of ideas in Western Europe. This book is an exciting discussion on the adoption of Marx's ideas in the field of archaeological investigation in the United States, a country with an uneasy relationship to revolutionary social activism that has significantly impeded the expansion of Marx's ideas.