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The work of the historian is to accompany
the whole process just a bit.
It has three fundamental stages.
The first one would be a preliminary stage where you know,
or it is known that an exhumation is going to take place,
then, it is necessary to do all the previous documentary work,
trying to gather all the information
that could help the process of exhumation.
This is the location, the number of bodies
that may exist inside grave,
and the circumstances in which the *** or the execution was commited.
Later, there is a part regarding the exhumation process
when it is carried out, then the historian accompanies
the social anthropologist, the forensic scientists,
the psychologists, the whole multidisciplinary team
that is working in the exhumation, to collect the testimonies.
Exhumations are places where there is a lot of talk,
it is fundamentally a place of voices,
which contrasts sharply with the silence that has been maintained,
or has surrounded the circumstances of a mass grave.
Also, at this time, for the historian,
the oral testimonies are fundamental
in discovering names and details to bring back to the archives,
where there are, let's say, the documents of testimony,
which provides information about the history of that mass grave.
So, these would be two steps.
The last one comes afterwards.
After the exhumation, with all the information we have collected
after extracting the bones from the grave,
the historian must prepare a report that reconstructs,
in some way, the silenced history.
Then, with these reports, the historian prepares a report
that will support the report of the anthropologist,
the report of the forensic scientist.
So, I think that the historian's work
in an exhumation runs in a sort of parallel way.
What I mean by that is, the journey that the bones take
from under the ground to emerging up into the air,
to the pure air of living, as it is said in a song,
runs parallel to the time that the historian spends trying to pull
the history out of the drawers.
The saved history,
the silenced history, or the non-history.