I have studied abandoned houses and villages in a depressed region of the northwest of Spain, where more than half of the population has emigrated to the US, Europe or Latin America throughtout the last century. Since the 1960s there has been also a local exodus towards big cities. During my research I have produced very detailed archaeological maps of abandoned houses and inventories of discarded artefacts. What I have discovered is people ashamed of themselves, their identity and their past. The collision with modernity has been fatal. Galicians are now engaged in a symbolic battle against their culture: all that is old and preindustrial has to decay and be lost forever. This includes vernacular architecture, traditional tools, family photographs, letters. I have recorded the material remains of a shocked cultural imagination. A book and several articles have been produced so far.

This is a work on the archaeology of the contemporary past, but it is also ethnoarchaeology. Archaeologist usually take ruins and rubbish for granted and they explain them through commonsensical approaches. Michael Schiffer provided more complex and elaborated frameworks of analysis in his influential book "Formation processes of the archaeological record" (Albuquerque, 1987) and still more nuanced work has been produced ever since (e.g. C.M. Cameron and S.A.Tomka 1993). However, I think that there is more to be done than explaining, quantifying and classifying abandonment. Beneath ruins, there is pain and suffering. How can we manifest trauma?