Clashes of time : the contemporary past as a challenge for archaeology

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The divide that once existed between the past and the present and between the archaeology of distant times and that of recent ones has started to disappear. Excavations are now exploring 20^th century sites or ones that are even more recent. The barriers that once compartmentalised the fields of history, archaeology and anthropology have begun to crumble, yielding a vast common space, that of the present. The resulting challenges to traditional methodologies have generated a silent revolution that is undermining the ways these disciplines dealt with the past. Will we prove capable of acknowledging this new state of the social sciences and act accordingly ?

The GRAAL-series (Groupe de recherches en archéologie et anthropologie de Louvain) introduces new perspectives into the appreciation of the human past, regardless of existing scholarly chronological or geographical divides. Through cross-cultural approaches of materiality and social practices, our studies aim at showing the relevance of our field to present-day culture.