History is written and told by the victors. Then, it is up to historians to purge and rectify that narrative. In the 19th century, Lord Acton thought that, with the appropriate sources and methodology, it was possible to write “a story capable of appearing precise and defining reality,” explain historian Miguel Ángel del Arco and archaeologist Francisco Carrión. Both admit the failure of that assumption: “Today we know that this is impossible,” they say. “On the path to reaching the full truth, history comes up against numerous obstacles,” they add. One of them is the partiality of the available texts. If the conflict is recent, testimonies from the victims can be found, sometimes first-hand, sometimes converted into a family story that is passed down from generation to generation, explains Carrión, with the loss of fidelity that this implies. There is, however, an area of history that has gained strength in the task, literally, of unearthing the truth. It is archaeology, which extracts bone remains and material from everyday life from the earth, which analyses the materialities of the conflict, which do not lie, which cannot be contradicted.
Carrion and del Arco have published Unearthing the past: Archaeology and history of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorshipby Editorial Comares, a volume in which numerous authors participated and which aims to “delve deeper into the violence deployed by Francoism” so that “the silence of the texts” is compensated by the tool of archaeology. An instrument that, explains Carrión, “discovers what is hidden not only under the earth, but in history.” No official text, for example, will admit that children were shot in the Spanish civil war. And the reality is that there were. This is the case of the boy between 11 and 14 years old found in the Barranco de Víznar who, also not mentioned in any document of the Administration, was carrying a pencil and an eraser in his pockets. This child, nonexistent for history, appeared in a mass grave a few months ago. Without documentary sources that mention him, it has been archaeology that has remembered his existence. And his murder.
The objects found allow us to describe many things, including the social context of those shot. In Víznar, for example, and perhaps because the murdered came from the capital of Granada, there are many “rubber soles and the presence of the manufacturer’s brand” compared to other more rural areas of Andalusia or Extremadura, explains Francisco Carrión, where the soles are “made of esparto grass or tire rubber and are hand-made” typical of the rural environment. urbanity of those killed in Víznar can be seen in the “buttons, stocking clips, bras” and, based on dental analysis, “in the presence of fillings, dental crowns and false teeth.”
Nor is it easy to find written records describing the execution of women and their burial in mass graves. “It is barely documented,” writes historian Laura Muñoz-Encinar, from the University of Barcelona. Not recognizing it does not mean that it did not occur. In fact, says the historian, “the execution of pregnant women was a common practice within the Francoist repression,” with greater incidence in Andalusia and Extremadura. Archaeology, despite the fact that it is not easy to prove the existence of fetuses in women so many decades later, has found numerous cases. In Gerena (Seville), 17 women were exhumed, one of them pregnant. In Fregenal de la Sierra (Badajoz), a woman was documented to be between seven and nine months pregnant. Seventy kilometers away, in Llerena (Badajoz), several pregnant women were executed and then burned in the pits of the Romanza stream.
Muñoz-Encinar writes that “the materiality and objects associated with the women’s bodies have also provided a huge amount of information about the victims and what happened.” Thus, she describes the appearance of “small sewing kits, thimbles or pins,” which shows that “sewing is closely linked to the feminine roles of the time,” without forgetting at the same time that many of these women were executed for actions such as embroidering the Republican flag or carrying it in demonstrations. Archaeology also shows, she adds, that some of these women carried religious elements, “mainly medals, but also crucifixes, pins with Catholic iconography or reliquaries.” This shows, she concludes, that Republican women were also religious.
Forensic archaeology, also known as conflict archaeology, which investigates contemporary events – as opposed to the well-known task of deciphering prehistoric caves or sites thousands or hundreds of years old – has been around for just over two decades in Spain. It was born in 2000, according to what they write in Unearthing the past The historians Xurxo Ayán Vila and Luis Antonio Ruiz, with the exhumation of Priaranza del Bierzo in 2000. It is one of the first occasions in which archaeologists look at recent events. In their contribution to this publication, Ayán Vila and Ruiz study various war fronts and living conditions based on the premise that “archaeology can make these silenced cartographies speak, it can revive objects and subjects that tell us about the real living conditions at the front” and, at the same time, make those who had their voices taken back recover their voices. They mention some bone remains found in a home in Castiltejón (León) that, in the first year of the war, “show how hunting and trapping were basic practices for subsistence, going so far as to make fox meat cured meat… The diet was complemented with remnants of Asturian cider, wine, cognac and condensed milk”. There were no cans, they continue, but there were bones from cows, goats, sheep and chickens.
Archaeology has also shown that the Civil War was not a place of a few frenetic battle fronts – well studied by military historiography – and the rest of Spain was converted into a territory of calm or appeased fronts and with normal life restored. Ayán and Ruiz have carried out archaeological campaigns beyond the battle of Brunete, Teruel or the Ebro. And they have discovered that the Civil War was a “total war”, with a very intense fight even in remote places. And the archaeological evidence is evident: mine warfare craters next to the Clínico hospital in Madrid. Or the spent ammunition found in the “late trenches of Ciudad Universitaria, when the frontal battle in Madrid had long since died down”. Or “the profusion of hand grenades and anti-tank shells found in the Los Rosales area of Brunete, used a year and a half after the famous battle”.
The remains also allow us to learn about human behaviour. Thus, the interventions carried out a decade ago in Alto Tajuña (Guadalajara) allowed, among many other discoveries, “to find the body of a young man covered in shrapnel whom his comrades or enemies,” write Ayán and Ruiz, “honoured with piety by delivering a coup de grace to his skull.” None of this is in the texts; only direct excavation can bring these stories to light.