The glass coffin, to be or no to be Snow White

We can widen the notion of « end of life » by including lives that are out of the race/circuit, excluded from “active life” and economic usefulness, and which entered this other major area of life we usually consider as the garbage of existence. We could compare this space to the glass coffin where the dwarves secluded Snow White, neither alive nor dead, but in end of life. This “end of life” starts very early in institutions or for those who live in the streets. Our society reinstated, without noticing, a caste of “untouchables” with whom we don’t know anymore how to relate. Accompaniment of the end of life actually appears closely bound to accompaniment of these lives finished, considered as “obsoletes”, expendable, disturbing… It gradually appeared to me that my workshops with homeless people or people deeply damaged by addictions were closer to palliative care than to “psychotherapy”.

What is this thing called Historical Archaeology?

Historical archaeology, in its narrow temporal sense -as an archaeology of the emergence and subsequent evolution of the Modern world- is steadily taking pace in Spanish academia. This paper aims at provoking a more robust debate through understanding how Spanish historical archaeology is placed in the international scene and some of its more relevant particularities. In so doing, the paper also stresses the strong links that have united historical and prehistorical archaeology since its inception, both in relation to the ontological, epistemological and methodological definition of the first as to the influence of socio-political issues in the latter. Such reflection is partly a situated reflection from prehistory as one of the paper’s authors has been a prehistorian for most of her professional life.