From the Exhumation of Bodies to Historical Knowledge. Analysis of Francoist Repression in the Context of Extremadura

Abstract

According to recent publications, the grand total of victims, dead away from the battlefields, during the Spanish Civil War and the first years of the Franco dictatorship amounts to around 200,000 people. The bodies of these individuals were buried in mass graves, thrown into riverbeds or buried in mines. In this paper, we propose to examine this repressive phenomenon through the archaeological and anthropological study of mass graves, and of documentary and oral sources. The methods used for the analysis are based on three disciplines: History, Archeology and Forensic Anthropology. Our multidisciplinary approach has allowed us to reconstruct the facts connected to the killings, clarify the truth about these events and produce new historical knowledge about the contemporary traumatic past of Spanish society.

Keywords

• mass graves
• conflict archaeology
• forensic anthropology
• material culture
• history