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From Plastered Skulls to Palliative Care: What the Past Can Teach Us About Dealing with Death

Yes / Modern, advanced healthcare detects and monitors long-term
and life-limiting illness more comprehensively than ever before.
However, death is now often considered medical failure, and is a
virtually taboo topic of conversation in daily life. At a time when the
societal relevance of archaeology is under scrutiny more than ever
before, the AHRC-funded Continuing Bonds Project – a collaboration
between archaeology and palliative care – explores the potential
of the past to promote discussion. Not only does archaeology
illuminate the diversity of practice surrounding death, the past
provides a safe, distanced platform for considering death, dying
and bereavement today. Through archaeological and ethnographic
case studies, health and social care professionals and students
consider topics such as place, choice and identity, in both personal
and professional life. This article examines participant responses
to a variety of archaeological material and presents post-workshop
reflections which demonstrate the success of archaeology in
opening up conversations and increasing confidence in discussing
this most enduring and problematic of life events. / Arts and Humanities Research Council

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/16695
Date26 June 2018
CreatorsBüster, Lindsey S., Croucher, Karina, Dayes, Jennifer E., Green, Laura I., Faull, C.
Source SetsBradford Scholars
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeArticle, Published version
Rights(c) 2018 Lindsey Buster, Karina Croucher. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License., CC-BY-NC-SA

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