Spanish poet Julio Martínez Mesanza wrote:
“I only want to return to the trenches,
to the trenches where I have never been…
I only want to return to the sadness
of the Western front, which is my sadness”
I share the feelings of Martínez Mesanza each time I work in a site from the Spanish Civil War. I feel that I am arriving to a place where I have never been, but it is familiar. It is not properly speaking a travel to the past, but a return. Like the poet, I want to retrieve the sadness of the trenches which I feel as my sadness. Martínez Mesanza captures well the paradox of the archaeology of the contemporary past: being at home and in a strange place at the same time: the heimlich and the unheimlich brought together.
The archaeology of the contemporary past is a sort of anamnesis: unearthing what we already know. But in this process of bringing to light what we have, in some way, already-always known, we come to know it deeply and in truth. A revelation from the earth.

I have just finished an excavation in a trench from the Spanish Civil War in Abánades, Guadalajara. This small village was on the frontline for the entire duration of the war (1936-1939). The houses were flanked by a Republican fortification to the south and a Nationalist one to the north. It is a powerful memory of a divided Spain. Our excavation focused on trenches that were occupied by personnel of the Nationalist army. The Nationalists fought against the democratic Republic and eventually prevailed. The ensuing dictatorship would last for 40 years.
In the course of the excavation, I found myself more than once questioning my task as an archaeologist on this site. I have significant doubts about the utility of investigating recent military remains. Most of the time, the results of our work are far from being counterintuitive: they used to shoot from this point. They ate here, slept there—anecdotal bits of micro-history.

These doubts increase in the case of a Nationalist trench. After all, the Republicans were the defeated and, for that reason, there are fewer official documents to tell their side of the story. Is it an archaeology of the perpetrators that I have been conducting (Reinhardt and Pollock 2007)? It is, but not only. A trench is not a detention center or the residence of a military leader. It is a place where people suffered and were frightened. It is a place where some were wounded or died. It is difficult not to pity them—conscripted soldiers, many of them; very young soldiers, most of them.
I remind myself of the rationale: I am looking for the material strategies employed by fascism in every field of daily life, and this includes the trenches, too. It is true, but there is more to it.
The qualities of the recent archaeological record are unique, even surreal. One digs through things that are so near and yet so remote, so unthinkable yet so true. It is akin to returning to a place where one has never set foot since childhood, but of which one has dreamed many times. Going back means returning to a place where we have been and never been at the same time—a disturbing feeling that Mesanza captures so well. It is the place of experiences and recollections, but also of fantasies and distorted memories. The trench I excavate is the trench I have heard of and read stories about. Of this trench—or a trench like this—I have seen films and documentaries. Now this trench I excavate is dirty and material, fragmentary and alien.

There is the aura of the objects related to war, when a personal object turns up, or a spent cartridge, or a tin can opened with a bayonet— maybe we should name it as a sort of fetishism. We know so much about the recent past that we cannot help but see an intriguing story ‘behind’ every artifact, a story we can relate to so easily. For example, a small brooch recovered from the floor of a shelter: a gift from a wife, a girlfriend, a lover? A cherished memento? A tale from another life beyond the trenches.

There is the forensic pleasure of assembling a puzzle with minute, fragmented evidence. Filling record sheets, drawing maps, identifying stratigraphic layers, postdepositional events. We discovered the probable location of a mortar position by mapping tiny mortar pieces, mechanisms and fuses scattered through a large area. In a Republican trench, in front of our site, an intact mortar shell was located that did not explode and that was shot from the very place (the very place!) where we excavated. The shock of actuality.

There is the capacity of modern objects to carry with them global connections and grand narratives. We found a First World War helmet in our trench, an Italian model based on the famous French Adrian type –the one with the metal crest. How not to think of other trenches, of other, more infamous massacres (Asiago, Isonzo, Caporetto)? And the helmet brings memories of Italian Fascism, as well, the Corpo di Truppe Volontarie, which fought around this remote corner of Spain during the Spanish Civil War, leaving a trail of ambiguous, less-than-heroic memories behind.

There is the upsurge of memory elicited by our work in the village. Old men approach us and tell us about their experiences during the war, fighting with General Franco’s armies. B_____ tells us several times about the same episode, when he brought the corpses of two comrades—two cooks—to a military morgue. There was a huge heap of bodies, a huge heap. E_____ remembers a woman he shot dead with a machine gun (a Russian Maxim captured to the Republicans) in an Aragonese village. She looked like a good woman—an honest woman—dressed all black. Her husband might have been killed recently and now she was dead as well. An honest woman.
There is the abolition of time in a village where war is not remote, but very near. Spatially near and thus temporally near and amplified by our presence. The brutal and massive materiality of the conflict prevents oblivion and makes the past always present, always active—and dangerous. Going to Abánades is like landing in 1939. People talk about the war not as if it had happened 70 years ago, but last month.

There is a strange intimacy with historical things. The villagers experiences have been framed, since early childhood, by the trenches which crisscross the entire municipality, by shell casings which were gathered by the thousands and sold as scrap metal, by bombs which appeared while plowing and sometimes exploded, killing mules or tearing a finger or an eye apart. People harvest barley and wheat, and shrapnel and bones. How do they cope? Indeed, they are content in living with bombs. It made them rich when many were dying of hunger. For decades, they lived by gathering and selling war debris. Yet there is still so much, everywhere.

There is the counterfactuality of recent ruins. What if the Nationalist soldiers that occupied the trenches of Abánades had not won the war? There is the prospective qualities of ruins, too, like those of photographs. Every photograph is a catastrophe, wrote Barthes (1982). In front of the trenches of Abánades, I tell myself, paraphrasing Barthes, “Franco is going to win the war” and I shudder over a catastrophe which has already happened. There is a sense of alertness and expectation in the materiality of the parapets, of undecidability, as if time was suspended here and the result of the war was still to be seen. I imagine sometimes that by excavating the trench I could change the fate of the conflict—as when one reads a novel, whose end one knows well, but still harbors the hope that, somehow, in the last minute, everything is going to change. The trenches are still there, the war is not yet over. 140.000 people died after the Nationalist victory, 50.000 by firing squads, the rest of hunger, beatings and diseases in prisons and concentration camps (Preston 2004). This past future is embodied in the trenches of Abánades as well. There is a continuum between the concrete pillbox of the frontline with their fascist graffiti and Nazi bullets, and the concentration camp of the postwar period.
The concentration camp that I am excavating now, wondering, again, what am I doing here? What am I really looking for?
Punctum.

References
Barthes, R. 1982. Camera Lucida. Reflections on photography. New York: Hill & Wang.
Bernbeck, R. and Pollock, S. 2007. Grabe, wo du stehts! An archaeology of perpetrators. In Y. Hamilakis and P. Duke (ed.): Archaeology and capitalism. From ethics to politics. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 217-234.
Preston, P. 2004. Las víctimas del franquismo y los historiadores. In E. Silva, P. Salvador, P.A. Esteban y J. Castán (eds.): La memoria de los olvidados: un debate sobre el silencio de la represión franquista. Valladolid: Ámbito, 13-24.
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The excavations at Abánades are funded by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Ruin Memories project (Norwegian Research Council), directed by Bjornar Olsen. Photograph of the mortar shell by Jorge Fernández Bricio.
Arqueología de la Guerra Civil Española