this progression through forms of society. This approach was particularly popular in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, and as archaeologist Bruce Trigger later wrote: The dogmatism with which Soviet social scientists adhered to this scheme contrasts sharply with the views expressed by Marx and Engels, who were prepared to consider multilinear models of social evolution, especially with regard to earlier and less well understood periods of human development. Other Marxist archaeology places an emphasis on learning how people lived and worked in the past. In attempting to do this, Marxist archaeologists working in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and following decades denounced what they saw as "artifactology", the simple categorization of artifacts in typologies, because they believed that it took archaeological focus away from the human beings who created and used them. History Precedents When they were formulating Marxism in the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote many books on the subject of history, but wrote little about archaeology, or how it could be understood within a Marxist framework. According to Trigger, the most relevant passage that Marx made about the subject was found in his epic study of political economy, Das Kapital, in which he had written that: Relics of by-gone instruments of labour possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economic forms of society, as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct species of animals. It is not the articles made, but how they are made, and by what instruments, that enables us to distinguish different economic epochs. Instruments of labour not only supply a standard of the degree of development to which human labour has attained, but they are also indicators of the social conditions under which labour is carried on. In the Soviet Union Marxist archaeology was first pioneered in the Soviet Union, a state run by a Marxist-Leninist government, during the 1920s. Upon taking power in the Russian Empire and reforming it as a socialist republic following the 1917 revolution, the Communist Party—as a part of their general support for scientific advancement—encouraged archaeological study, founding the Russian Academy for the History of Material Culture in 1919. Soon renamed the State Academy for the History of Material Culture (GAIMK) following the re-designation of the Empire as the Soviet Union, it was centred in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and initially followed pre-existing archaeological theories, namely culture-historical archaeology. Following the ascent