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The social anthropologist
has multiple roles in the exhumation of mass graves.
In this same program, there are other people have spoken
about the forensic archaeologists, who are working inside the grave.
But the grave, like a pace of memory, creates a very important social,
cultural, ritual and symbolic dynamic around it.
Social and cultural anthropologists work
on the outside of the grave;
however, we are not as concerned with what happens
on the inside of the grave.
We are interested in other motives: to know what is happening,
what kind of people come to visit the grave,
what expectations they have and why,
and from there we speak with them and gather materials.
What we need to bear in mind is that this is not a new process,
it has not come from nothing.
It is part of a very long process that started during
the Spanish Civil war with the relocation of bodies
that took place during the war and in the early postwar period.
Information still needs to be organized from many exhumations
that took place, some of which were very large
with many bodies, such as the “Soto de Alcolea”,
or others in Barcelona.
Other smaller graves exist in municipalities where the people
were killed by Republicans.
Those exhumations were carried out for many years
and we are recovering fragmentary information about them.
Expectedly, the information was wrapped
in political and religious rhetoric,
national-catholic heroism and martyrdom.
The mass graves were exhumed and many of the bodies moved to cemeteries,
honored and buried in pantheons,
while the mass graves of the Republican side remained in silence,
forgotten, which accumulated over time,
with the years passing over them.
Another very important moment of exhumations surrounds
the opening of the “Valley of the Fallen” in 1959.
The Spanish Government decreed that corpses were to be moved
to the “Valley of the Fallen” and for a very long period,
especially in 1959, 1960, 1963,
over 33,000 corpses were moved to this place.
There was a huge movement of bodies
20 years after the Spanish civil war ended.
Whole military cemeteries and mass graves from battalions
were moved to an extraordinarily vast site,
known as the "Valley of the Fallen".
Nowadays, one important thing is starting to become known
is that some mass graves of Republicans
were exhumed and were moved to the “Valley of the Fallen”.
Of course, without the permission of the families.
With regard to the mass graves one the National side,
we have to say that they are still being exhumed today
in much smaller numbers.
With regard to the mass graves on the Republican side,
there were many exhumations.
We have gathered this information from testimonies
of people who have spoken to us or because, in a mass grave, suddenly,
some remains are missing or there is a part that has been removed.
All of this happened in the 1940s, in the 1950s, also in the 1960s
and especially after Franco's death in the 1970s and the 1980s.
During the "Franco period", the exhumations were clandestine
and there are relatives who contacted to us and told us
that they came with a bicycle, removed two bodies
without knowing exactly if they were their relatives or not
and took them to a pantheon, but, of course,
all of this happened in the most strict secrecy.
Little by little, we have learned that, after Franco's death,
there were many, many exhumations of republican mass graves.
These exhumations are quite well documented in La Rioja,
Navarra and also in Soria and in other provinces.
There were historians or researchers who had travelled to the villages,
trying to collect some documentation about these exhumations,
but it is clear that it happened in many other places of Spain.