Beyond Bunkers

Dominance, Resistance and Change in an Albanian Regional Landscape

Authors

  • Michael Galaty Millsaps College, Jackson, MS
  • Sharon R. Stocker University of Cincinnati
  • Charles Watkinson The David Brown Book Company

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/jmea.v12i2.197

Keywords:

material symbols, Communism, post-Communism, Albania

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 Biographies

  • Michael Galaty, Millsaps College, Jackson, MS
    Michael Galaty holds degrees in anthropology from Grinnell College, Iowa (BA), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (MA, PhD) and is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. His doctoral dissertation has recently been published as 'Nestor's Wine Cups: Investigating Ceramic Manufacture and Exchange in a Late Bronze Age Mycenaean State'. Research interests include ceramic ecology, the origins of Mycenaean states, European prehistory, and the archaeology of monumental construction, especially North American and European burial mounds. He is currently field director of MRAP.
  • Sharon R. Stocker, University of Cincinnati
    Sharon Stocker holds a BA degree in history and classics from Denison University, and a MA in Classics from the University of Cincinnati, where she is currently writing a dissertation concerning the Greco-Roman period in Central Albania. She has participated in fieldwork in Southern Illinois, Greece, and Albania. She is studying for publication Middle and early Late Helladic finds from Carl Blegen's excavations at the Palace of Nestor in Messenia, Greece, and has organized a program of conservation and re-publication of the finds from those excavations. She is museum director for MRAP.
  • Charles Watkinson, The David Brown Book Company
    Charles Watkinson holds a BA degree in Archaeology and Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. He has participated in archaeological fieldwork in Britain, Greece, and Albania, most recently as a team leader for MRAP. He is currently Vice-President of the archaeological publisher, Oxbow Books.

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Published

2000-05-01

Issue

Vol. 12 No. 2 (1999)

Section

Articles

License

© Equinox Publishing Ltd.

For information regarding our Open Access policy, click here.

How to Cite

Galaty, M., Stocker, S. R., & Watkinson, C. (2000). Beyond Bunkers: Dominance, Resistance and Change in an Albanian Regional Landscape. Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, 12(2), 197-214. https://doi.org/10.1558/jmea.v12i2.197