Bruce Trigger in World Archaeology

Bruce Trigger was one of the few scholars whose work had a huge impact on the direction of world archaeology. However, he was not a leader, but more of a model, a kind of human landmark. As a result of Bruce Trigger’s work, it became possible to establish what was good archaeology and what was good in archaeology. Yet his work often took him outside the limits of archaeology. He was a prehistorian, an anthropologist-ethnologist and an archaeologist. Like his idol Gordon Childe, Bruce Trigger did not leave a school of archaeology, rather he developed, defined and promoted not only a whole direction in archaeology, but also, perhaps, many different directions. And of course, he influenced the career paths of many archaeologists.


A Personal Introduction
Bruce Trigger was one of the few scholars whose work had a huge impact on the direction of world archaeology. However, he was not a leader, but more of a model, a kind of human landmark. As a result of Bruce Trigger's work, it became possible to establish what was good archaeology and what was good in archaeology. Yet his work often took him outside the limits of archaeology. He was a prehistorian, an anthropologist-ethnologist and an archaeologist. Like his idol Gordon Childe, Bruce Trigger did not leave a school of archaeology, rather he developed, defined and promoted not only a whole direction in archaeology, but also, perhaps, many different directions. And of course, he influenced the career paths of many archaeologists. Today no other scholar is able to skillfully embrace the whole multifaceted range of activities of this modest and calm man. There must have been something unique about his spirit or personality that inspired and equipped him to deal creatively with American Indians, Ancient Egypt, world civilizations and the theory and history of archaeology, and it is interesting to try to understand some of the principles underlying his explorations of these very different themes. Indeed, Bruce undoubtedly had a very complex and integrated personality, and he had firm beliefs, and his own philosophy. I can only try to analyze those sides of Bruce Trigger's personality and creativity that I had chance to get to know.
The first example of Bruce Trigger's work that I read was his manual Beyond History: Methods of Prehistory (Trigger 1968a). I stumbled on this title in a list of new literature in some journal and wrote to the author, sending him my reprints. Bruce immediately sent me this book and I found it to be full of sober and sound judgments. There was literally nothing in it that could arouse aversion or irritation, which is often the consequence of such books. Everything was very sensible, well thought-out, and responsibly balanced. The author grasped that while one side of history appears to be a game of chance, the other side becomes sociology. I found myself feeling that this author's opinions completely corresponded to my own. Since then I always felt (and said) that if there were another archaeologist in the world whose positions were the most similar to mine, it would be Bruce Trigger.
Later, and occasionally, we differed in opinion about particular questions, sometimes we argued in print, and I liked some of Bruce's work less than I liked some other examples of his work, and I would have probably have written something else. But my admiration for what Bruce did in his work never diminished, and my feeling that our overall positions were proximate continued.
Ten years later I read and was inspired by Trigger's comments in Antiquity about my book Panorama of Theoretical Archaeology (1977). These were published under the remarkable title of 'No more from another planet' (Trigger 1978b), but alas, such mutual recognition appeared to be isolated and premature. At the same time that I received his marvelous collection of theoretical papers in Time and Traditions (Trigger 1978c) and relations between the Soviet world and the western democratic states became more politically tense, the two of us enjoyed a personal and friendly contact between members of two different civilizations. We believed in and enjoyed the potential of this communication.
Some years later Trigger published his work on the exemplary archaeologist and exponent of ideas dear to him in Gordon Childe: Revolutions in Archaeology (Trigger 1980a). He sent me this book too, but unfortunately it never arrived: probably because the Soviet state censors were frightened of the word 'revolution' in its title.
Then I received an invitation, from Bruce Trigger and Ian Glover, to participate in their grand undertaking, the regional surveys of theoretical archaeology in the journal World Archaeology (Trigger andGlover 1981-1982). Bruce and Ian wanted me to provide an analysis of theoretical archaeology in the Soviet Union. Perhaps Bruce did not fully understand just how difficult a task this would be for me. I did not want to write about the subject in the usual Soviet propaganda style, but I could not tell the truth, because this would be regarded as unacceptable by the multi-staged filtrating machinery of Soviet state censorship. I attempted to exclude myself from the primary role in the survey, by involving a whole body of scholars, including Rybakov and his apprentices. But nothing written eventuated and I succeeded only in collecting a group of my disciples while I practically wrote the whole text by myself. When the survey's political stance emerged and sharp critical pre-departure discussions began, even my relatively sympathetic co-authors one after another withdrew their names from the publication.
In March 1982, when my written survey had gone through nearly all the official channels, I was arrested. In order to save my work, two of my pupils put their names back on the publication and renewed their support for it. While I was still in detention it became possible to mail it abroad, and it was published. Bruce demonstrated his support by sending a very gratifying letter to my pupil in Leningrad (and to a third attentive reader) in which he extolled the significance of my article and its importance for the recognition and accessibility of Soviet scholarly attainments. And then Bruce published a description of my arrest as a heavy blow for the development of the freedom of international scientific dialogue. This and other acts of support from abroad helped me to be freed from detention after a year and a half, earlier than my critics had expected.
Later, when Gorbachev's 'Perestroyka' began, I rewrote my survey of Soviet theoretical archaeology and it was published as Fenomen Sovetskoy Arkheologii (The Phenomenon of Soviet Archaeology, Klejn 1993a, translated into Spanish 1993band into German 1997. And so Bruce Trigger was there for its birth. Ten years after my liberation I finally met Bruce in person, in London, at the international conference devoted to 100th anniversary of Gordon Childe, where we both delivered our papers (Harris 1994). This was our first and only personal meeting. But we continued to 'permanently' correspond, and strange as it may seem to anybody else, we were in virtual discussion with each other through our articles and books. For scholars this kind of contact and support is so very important. His books were always near my working table and mine are frequently cited in his works.
During more recent times the most interesting of Bruce's books for me was A History of Archaeological Thought (1989Thought ( , 2nd edition 2006a. For many years I have given my students a course on the history of world archaeology and this book was the source of many ideas for it. Of course I have my own opinions about a number of historiographic issues and questions, and in general I try to provide a more detailed discussion of schools and teachings, but like Bruce I concentrate on the movement of archaeological thought rather than on field discoveries and the peripheries of scholarly organizations. Following in Bruce Trigger's footsteps I called my course (which has also been published) 'A History of Archaeological Thought'. Bruce and I continued to exchange ideas, and he was looking forward to my book, which he wrote 'must be different'. He was not jealous, indeed he will be the most cited author in it. So Bruce Trigger was one of my inspirations for this book too.
In the last few years we corresponded intensively about the various problems of archaeology, and then, when we both became ill with cancer (first me and then him), the theme of the struggle with this disease also became part of our correspondence. To my great grief Bruce, although ten years younger than I am, lost the struggle. I have to continue to defend our common views and work on our common themes alone, and this is very sad.
While I was still working on my 'History of Archaeological Thought', I continued to read, consult collect data from, and be inspired by, Bruce Trigger's work. Now, after his death, it is even more apparent that he was one of the outstanding figures of the world archaeology.

The Image of Bruce Trigger
Bruce Graham Trigger (1937Trigger ( -2006 came from a family in which the traditions of English deism or atheism, in the spirit of Frazer, were mixed with those of the Scottish Enlightenment and of German liberalism (the family of Bruce's maternal grandfather emigrated from Germany after the suppression of the 1848 revolution). Bruce Trigger wrote that in 1945 he was shocked by the sudden knowledge of German extermination camps. Due to his half-German origins he could not seek refuge in the prevailing Canadian opinion that Nazism happened because Germans were 'not such as we were'. Since that time and indeed for the rest of his life Bruce looked for some kind of logical understanding for the origins of this hateful cruelty and violence.
After a childhood during which he was enthusiastic about Egyptian antiquities and Canadian Indians, Bruce graduated in 1959 from the University of Toronto in the South-East of Canada. He then wrote his PhD at Yale University in the USA, where Murdock and Rouse taught him, finishing in 1964. In Bruce's last year at Yale, the Chinese archaeologist, K. C. Chang joined its staff, and Bruce and he became friends. In a subsequent letter to Griffin, Bruce Trigger describes the atmosphere at Yale during his time as being dominated by Sumner, Murdock and Rouse, the great synthesizers and surveyors of the discipline. Such domination was characterized by: a nearly encyclopedic approach; the dislike of field work, the consequence of which for students was a 'total lack of any training in fieldwork or archaeological methods or of any opportunity to join in fieldwork that professors were doing'; and the eclectic approach to archaeological theory, which resulted in the preference for the neutral position and a reluctance to join sides in debates. He wrote that 'as a student and since I have sensed this orientation both in Rouse and the Murdock-HRAF people and I believe that my own stance has been strongly affected by it (particularly in my almost instinctive distrust and unease about 'cults' in anthropology' (Trigger in Griffin 1978: 8).
Trigger always strove to find a kernel of good sense in every view, and to build concepts suitable for implementation by many different camps. Lewis Binford, a man of one passion in science, once sarcastically said that Trigger was created to work as a shoe salesman (Trigger 1998: 78). As a result it was difficult for some archaeologists to determine if his work reflects 'some recognizable course… because my work has not been aligned explicitly with any of the more easily identifiable positions in contemporary archaeology, some readers have found it difficult to relate the arguments to specific current debates' (Trigger 1978c). Many talk about Trigger's contradictory position, but no matter the different and or even contradictory positions a scholar takes, they cannot be excluded in general. However Trigger's biography and his work have enabled us to elucidate his place in the history of archaeology more clearly, and to connect him with certain trends.
In his autobiography Bruce Trigger (2006b) records that the Canada of his youth was developing successfully and was full of optimism, and that Canadian social life was very liberal and tolerant. In contrast to Canada, in the USA he saw a highly energetic society, way in front of Canada technologically and scientifically, but socially harsh, rude and dogmatic. He had the impression that Americans were all persuaded that their mode of life was the best in the world, and that in the course of history there had never been a nation state that was more perfect than theirs. They divided everything into black and white, or good and evil, and were ready to become violent in support of whatever they held to be true or good. This behaviour was alien to the tolerant Canadian.
This independently thinking archaeological novice, who came from a more British influenced milieu, looked sober, and kept an aloof and skeptical eye on American archaeology, on the Boasian school and the taxonomists, but had more sympathy for the Murdock neo-evolutionists. He participated in excavations in Nubia, the result of his youthful and long standing knowledge about, and attraction to, Ancient Egypt. At the same time he did not miss the opportunity to study the culture of the Canadian Huron and Iroquoian Indians. The comparison of such distant regions (North America and Africa) provided him with an antidote against unilinear evolutionism. Bruce Trigger admitted that he was strongly influenced by the British functionalist school, especially by Radcliffe-Brown, and along with this scholar (and with Chang) he considered the concept of culture to be the result of German mysticism, while the real object of study should be society rather than culture. Trigger also attended the lectures of F. M. Heichelheim on classical economic history, and it was during these that his attention, at last, was drawn to the work of Gordon Childe. It was Gordon Childe who convinced Trigger that, contrary to the concentration of functionalists on momentary snaps and micro-historical frameworks, the long-time dynamics of social changes were interesting and important, and that archaeology was able to study this. Childe also argued that patterns of settlement were useful to more fully understand social systems, and Trigger could see how effective this was in the archaeological work of Willey and Chang. So Trigger joined the settlement archaeologists and became one of this direction's outstanding figures.
Despite the attractiveness of working in the north-eastern American scientific centers of Harvard and Yale universities, Bruce Trigger returned to Canada. He took a job at McGill University and settled in Montreal, Quebec, where he married Dr Barbara Welsh, a geographer (who tragically only survived his death by a few weeks).
Reading Gordon Childe, Trigger was immersed in Marxism. Like Childe's, Bruce Trigger's Marxism was not dogmatic, he did not commit himself to technological, nor more widely to production determinism, or to economic or political determinism. In Trigger's work context always overcame laws, and history vanquished sociology and social anthropology. He respected the importance of the laws of history, but he did not ignore fortuity. It was Trigger's opinion that so many forces, including chance forces, impact any event in history, and there is not one process that can predict the course of events, and so consequently one cannot reconstruct the past only on the basis of laws. It was necessary to find factual traces of events and this was the meaning and the significance and power of archaeology.
In his PhD dissertation History and Settlement of Lower Nubia (Trigger 1965) Trigger demonstrated that the density of the population in Nubia over four thousand years was determined by four main parameters: the height of floods, agricultural techniques, foreign trade and wars. In his article in Chang's collection of 1968 (Trigger 1968c) he analyzed the factors and determinants that impact on the state of settlement: natural, technical, economic, social, political, situational. There are three units of habitation in his work, rather than one, or 'the settlement': 'our most basic unit' was the 'individual building', or house; the two others were 'community layout', i.e. 'settlement', and 'zonal pattern', i.e. the agglomeration of settlements, and their location in the area.
Afterwards his dissertation Trigger began to gradually take more moderate Marxist positions, and became increasingly interested in the problems of social interpretation and the reconstruction of social history. His devotion to particularist history saved him from sociological schematization. He became friends with Colonel John Pendergast, a specialist on North American Indians, and together they studied local indigenous culture. In his work The Strategy of Iroquoian Prehistory (1978a) Trigger, on the basis of indigenous data, concluded that archaeological culture, even for a comparably recent, historical period, does not correspond principally with ethnic culture (Trigger 1978a). During the 1970s and the 1980s many of his works on the history and culture of the Huron Indians were undertaken. He considered North American Indians not generally i.e. as native or indigenous people compared with Europeans, but rather as a number of groups with their own economic and political interests and fates.
Trigger also wrote a number of books about the theory and methodology of archaeology, some I have already mentioned, and others such as Beyond History: Methods of Prehistory (1968a) and Time andTraditions: Essays in Archaeological Interpretation (1978c), andArtifacts andIdeas (2003b). He wrote the most authoritative biography of his mentor: Gordon Childe: Revolutions in Archaeology (1980a), and finally A History of Archaeological Thought (1989) in which the development of archaeology is considered to be conditioned by social forces and movements the most Marxist of his books.
Continuing with his work in archaeology and his interest in the cultures of the Nile Basin, and after the publication of A History of Archaeological Thought in 1989, Trigger became interested in the comparative archaeology of early civilizations. The results of this are Early Civilizations (1993), Sociocultural Evolution (1998b), and Understanding the Early Civilizations (2003a), in which he compared the development of seven world civilizations and found they had much in common. For Trigger the usual analysis, which meant foremost the Marxist one, was limited to economic and social-political factors, while he argued for the necessity of considering psychological and biological factors as well.

Childe's and Trigger's Marxism
Having been infected with Marxism by studying Childe, for the rest of his life Trigger remained interested in it. Like Childe he was primarily allied to certain (non-Marxist) archaeological directions rather than to special exclusive Marxist directions in archaeology. Childe was at first a diffusionist and then a neo-evolutionist, and Trigger was a contextualist adherent of settlement archaeology. Growing up in multilingual and multicultural Canada, and from a family that combined a number of ethnic and ideational traditions, Trigger usually deployed a combination of various methodologies, or a kind of creational eclecticism, and any Marxism in him got on well with non-Marxist approaches. In his autobiography he wrote that he had learned much from Murdock, Leo Pospisil and Chang despite their political and philosophical convictions. (Murdock and Pospisil had right-wing or conservative views about politics, while Chang was an idealist.) Marxism enabled Trigger to explain those changes in societies (and correspondingly in archaeological material) that nobody had succeeded in explaining using the ecological approach. Yet over time Trigger began to develop some uncertainty about the veracity of Enlightenment ideas (that Marx also shared) especially with those ideas that argued that mankind was inherently and naturally inclined to overcome his egotistic interests and create a more humane moral order. In his autobiography Trigger wrote that his own studies caused him to question (and not to completely reject) the idea that human beings are intrinsically and naturally good (altruistic). Yet man's nature is the result of a biological evolution, the meaning of which Marx ignored.
Becoming older Trigger began to look at Marx's ideas more critically. He described Marx as bad politician and 'mediocre economist' who fell into unilinear evolutionism and was ready not only to explain the past but also (of what, in Trigger's view, was impossible) to predict the future. Yet he continued to consider Marx a brilliant commentator on current political events, a sincere historian of capitalism and a great theoretician of sociology. Marx's thesis, that people are created by the cultural traditions in which they are born but they are also disposed by their nature to change this situation when conditions permitted it, interested Trigger. At the Childe Memorial Conference I gave a paper about the hitherto secret and last letter that Childe wrote to Soviet archaeologists, in which he outlined his disenchantment with Soviet politics. During the following discussion of my paper Trigger remarked that based on Childe's disillusioned letter to Soviet archaeologists it was clear that he had already abandoned their ideas, and that he had been shattered by the crisis of Stalinist Marxism, and was trying to rebuild for himself a new kind of Marxism, still based on the philosophy of Marx and Engels, but independent of the reality of the Soviet situation. From Trigger's tone it was possible to ascertain that although he was talking about Childe, it was a situation he had also experienced. And so despite the evident weakening of Marx's authority for Trigger, his non-dogmatic Marxism remained close to the Marxism of Childe and of Second International.
The whole idea of Marxism as an integral part of teaching does not exist now. But then the whole nature of capitalism has changed as well, and so too socialism has had to adjust to change. Splinters of old Marxist parties survive their last years as sects, as refugee dogmatists stuck in the past, otherwise they have to vastly change their ideology from original Marxism, or in the case of my country, to have little relationship with Marxism at all. An example of this departure from Marxism is the USSR of today, where Communist ideology has merged with Nationalism and with Orthodox religion. Marxism, as Trigger admits, has been broken up into a number of concepts now very distant from each other, and each one has to be evaluated separately. Now there are attempts by various para-Marxists groups (which Trigger calls them) to create their own archaeology -critical, dialectical, Marxist-structuralist, post-structuralist and feminist. Maybe it would be better to just identify and call them these names and not try to fit them under the Marxist banner.

Trigger as a Historiographer
As a member of The Royal Society, and in his sixties, Bruce Trigger reinterpreted the development of archaeology in a Marxist way (Trigger 1968b). He wrote the article 'Archaeology and the Image of the American Indian' (Trigger 1980) about the impact of racism on American archaeology, following the example of Benjamin Keen who wrote the book The Aztec Image in Western Thought (Keen 1971). Then Trigger completed his grand historiographic work A History of Archaeological Thought (Trigger 1989).
It was the most Marxist of his books, but nevertheless it was the most authoritative book on the historiography of world archaeology, and it still is, with the publication of the new and modified edition in 2006, that became the last publication in Trigger's life (cf. review by Klejn 2007). This new edition is a massive and thorough book by a clearly thoughtful and wise author. Strictly speaking it was also the first complete history of archaeological thinking.
This book was primarily concerned with explaining scientific development via social factors, and it is the most thorough account of all so far, including all branches of archaeology and all continents, it was indeed about world archaeology. Yet for me the history of the discipline in this book was almost too broad -the author traced the inter-relationships of ideas and did not detail personalities and schools. The history of the development of Classical archaeology was not included, although there is more of this in the second edition, and the history of Russian archaeology was second hand and from translations, and not from primary sources.
Trigger elucidated some of the trends in the historiography of the discipline, and organized the field into early (didactic), popular, intellectual, social and postmodernist periods. While such a division seemed to be not very logical (due to lacking of general criteria) it was practical and useful. His own work fell simultaneously into the framework of intellectual and social histories.
Trigger did not reject the impact of social conditions on the researcher, but went with the idea that by and large archaeologists were able to manage the contradiction between their own subjectivity and knowledge provided by the archaeological record, and that in this way they found an adequate reflection of past reality. Trigger's Marxist convictions gave him opportunities for the profound sociological analysis of the position of archaeologists but sometimes they also lead him to make simplifications. For instance, he over-stressed the racist views of evolutionists (as all of them were middle-class scholars) and unites them under the broad heading of an imperial (i.e. colonialist) synthesis, and then puts all archaeological theories into three groups: colonialist, nationalist and imperialist (Trigger 1984). To me this seems an oversimplification.
Using accepted scientific terminology, Trigger distinguished five main approaches in the history of archaeology as: paradigmal development (by scientific revolutions); cumulative growth; non-linear and unpredictable change; stable or cyclical state; and regional variability (Trigger 1989: 4-12). He was more partial, because of his own work, to the second, and partly to the fifth, approaches. He inserted paradigmal development into first place, not because of its recent chronology, but because of its popularity or 'fashionable' nature, but because, for him, paradigms were his main adversaries. In his 1968 article Bruce Trigger argued that 'the basic concepts of prehistoric archaeology have shown surprising continuity in spite of progressive modifications and development'. He traced the development of these progressive modifications over more than a century, revealing a unilinear view about the development of basic concepts of archaeology. He concluded that 'the development of the basic ideas of prehistoric archaeology exemplifies the "orderly, cumulative pattern" that Toulmin … has stated is typical of the "hard" sciences, but which he finds conspicuously lacking in certain of the social sciences' (Trigger 1968b: 537). Trigger's view has endured few significant changes, but there has been some shift when considering regional variations.
As I have already mentioned, at the beginning of the 1980s, Bruce Trigger and Ian Glover published two special issues of the journal World Archaeology, comprising surveys of regional traditions of archaeological studies (Trigger andGlover 1981-1982), in which I wrote the survey for the Soviet region. The grouping of national archaeologies into large blocks, to elucidate the development of types of national archaeologies, was first used by Trigger in his interesting and frequently cited article Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist (Trigger 1984). In this article Trigger not only devised these three rubrics but also explained the basis of this division, i.e. the social conditioning of archaeological trends.
Trigger believed that the majority of archaeological traditions are nationalist in their orientation. By 'nationalist' both he and I did not mean it as an evaluation (especially in the case of modern Russia), or negatively ('nationalistic') and or positively ('patriotic'). Yet all of these could also be appropriate derivations. This means that these archaeological traditions were expressions of both the patriotic feelings of the population (mainly of the middle classes described by Trigger as the group most connected with archaeology) and the political aspirations of their nationalist propensities. Historians and archaeologists concentrated their attention on the periods and cultures connected with the development of the nation-state, which always glorified its past. In some cases such glorification could be produced by national humility, while in others it was the result of attempts at the political unification of a nation, or by economic or market competition between nations. In most cases these sentiments were supported or even directly stimulated and encouraged by rulers and governments. Trigger used the examples of Danish archaeologists' support for the Three Age System, Napoleon III with his enthusiasm for the Celtic Iron Age, and the Israeli preoccupation with the Zealot revolt against the Romans.
The second group that Trigger described as colonialist archaeology, comprised archaeological traditions that developed in colonies and dependent countries. Both Trigger and I used the term 'colonialist' instead of the term 'colonial', because the latter meant only the archaeology of colonial countries. In principle this term could be used to describe any archaeological tradition according to the level of a nation-state's cultural and political moods as well as the national identity of its archaeologists. Yet Trigger had in mind that in these colonial or dependent countries colonialists developed an archaeology unconnected to their local indigenous population and its past. Colonialists either maltreated or neglected the monuments of their local native people, or demonstrated little interest in them because of their 'primitive' nature. Those monuments they couldn't ignore and that demonstrated anything other than the most primitive social and cultural behaviours, were often subscribed to some other past conquerors or migrant people, rather than to the ancestors of the current native population. The conclusions of this kind of archaeology had to both justify the dependent position of native people, and the domination of the conquering invaders. Some classic examples of this kind of archaeology are the North American's treatment of the Mound Builders, or the original European explanations for the existence of Greater Zimbabwe.
Trigger's third group of imperialist archaeological traditions developed in a small number of states that attained economic and political domination over enormous territories of the contemporary world. 'Imperialist' archaeology uses world historical processes to explain and to justify its own nation's domination of the world. Archaeologists from this small group of nations appeared to be the most influential in the world, in their interpretations exerted 'disproportional' impacts on the whole of world archaeology. British evolutionists were one of the first examples of the power of this kind of 'imperialist' archaeology. In the same spirit British diffusionists also demonstrated this power while hinting that the Western world was in fact the true inheritor of ancient oriental civilization. Soviet archaeologists from Stalin's epoch claimed a great historical mission for their country and for their teacher's position within the world's archaeological community, on the basis that only they knew the real truth and it was far from any truth ascertained by bourgeois archaeology and archaeologists. Now American archaeology imposes its values, themes, methods, theories and moods onto all of us. Trigger would have completely agreed with the modern theory of archaeological antiglobalism, as long as it could be substantiated in a critical and scholarly way.
In this general way Trigger elucidated the important trends of modern archaeology, while at the same time in such rough approximations we have missed some important details and exceptions. Firstly, Trigger's scheme was built on the conviction that everything was determined by the moods of the middle classes. However, in Russia archaeology's initial development as a discipline was dependent on the support of the aristocracy and the royal court, and a significant number of archaeologists were aristocrats. Later in the Soviet Union, it was not a middle class that contributed to the directions of archaeology, but rather the Soviet bureaucracy who did this, and while it was also certainly a kind of class, it was not a middle one. Soviet bureaucracy was, according to its social position and status, the upper class, while its sources were from the lowest class. In England and France there was no similar pattern.
Secondly, Trigger himself admits that the archaeology of some countries moved from one category of traditions into another. So, for example, the archaeology of the USA transformed from colonialist into imperialist traditions. More than that, archaeology often featured several traditions at once: for example, the archaeology of Israel is simultaneously nationalist and colonialist. I would even say that in one and the same country the presence of different archaeologies depends on the political inclinations and convictions of individual archaeologists. Trigger admits that it would be reasonable to consider his archaeological traditions as merely 'ideal types' (Trigger 1984: 368). Then it would be more useful to note these different permutations of traditions and traits in each archaeology.
Finally, if Trigger's classifications were subject to the political aims of states and to the moods of the population, then why only three traditions and type? The archaeology of communist regimes had its own specific traditions, and the archaeology of Nazi Germany had a racist and geopolitical ideology all of its own. The archaeology of Scandinavian countries was nationalist, and was also colonialist, but what is it now? These alternative themes are troublesome. In short, there are patently more types. However Trigger's division by criterion of social conditioning and orientation was very interesting -and it was the first of this kind.

Conclusion
Bruce Trigger's work marks an important phenomenon that has developed since the last decade of the twentieth century -the idea that there are many attitudes to the analysis of archaeological materials that are contrary and not exclusive of each other but mutually complementary (Trigger 2003a(Trigger , 2003b). Trigger's broad-mindedness enables him to admit that: 'studies of archaeology, with a few notable exceptions … have failed to take account of the vast intellectual exchange that characterized the development of archaeology in all parts of the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. … Even the ideologically opposed traditions of Western Europe and the Soviet Union significantly influenced each other, despite decades when scientific contact of any sort was very difficult and politically dangerous for scholars on both sides of the Iron Curtain. For all these reasons it seems unwise to overestimate the historical independence or theoretical distinctiveness of these regional archaeologies' (Trigger 2006a: 14).
In all schools and in all scholars he tried to identify and isolate what united them, rather than what differentiated them from each other. Such an approach had its own risks: the specifics of various schools melted away into the background, and the methodological choice of each archaeologist in each epoch became less clear. Yet mutually complementary but different attitudes, and substantive tolerance came to the foreground instead. And this was Bruce Trigger's favorite idea, one that corresponds best to his friendly and charming character.