Journal of

MATERIAL
Article CULTURE
Journal of Material Culture

The scientific and affective

15(4) 449–463
© The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/1359183510382961
civilian victims from the http://mcu.sagepub.com

Spanish Civil War

Layla Renshaw
Kingston University, UK

Abstract
This article addresses the concurrent processes of the scientific and affective identification of
human remains, resulting from the excavation of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War. Affective
identification refers to the reconstruction of locally meaningful identities, recognition amongst
the living of affective bonds with the dead, and the emotions of mourning elicited in this process.
Drawing on fieldwork in two rural communities in the Burgos region of Spain, it follows the
exhumation of mass graves containing the human remains of local Republican civilians, victims of
extrajudicial killings during the Spanish Civil War. The long time lapse between these deaths and
current exhumations place these events on the boundaries of living memory, creating challenges for
the investigative process. Widespread experiences of political repression during Spain’s dictatorship
have resulted in a fractured transmission of memories of the dead, making the question of affective
and familial bonds with the dead more complex for these communities.

Keywords
exhumation, identification, memory, mourning, Spanish Civil War

Introduction
The Spanish Civil War (1936–9) was triggered by a military coup headed by General
Franco against a democratically elected leftist government. The war was fought on bat-
tlefields between Francoist and Republican military forces, but was also marked by a
very high number of non-combatant deaths, comprised of both civilians and prisoners of
war (Congram and Steadman, 2008). It has been estimated that at least 150,000 people
were killed away from the battlefields during the Civil War and in the first decade of

Corresponding author:
Layla Renshaw, Life Science, Kingston University, Penrhyn Road, Kingston KT1 2EE, UK.
Email: l.renshaw@kingston.ac.uk

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450 Journal of Material Culture 15(4)

Franco’s dictatorship (Juliá, 1999). Driven by a complex range of ideological, class, and,
in some cases, personal motives, many of these killings took the form of extrajudicial
abductions and executions.
The profile of the civilian victims was varied, but the majority were supporters of the
democratically elected Popular Front government, which became known as the Republi-
can side with the onset of war. Republican supporters were on a spectrum of leftist politi-
cal affiliations, including communists, socialists, anarchists, and those active in the trade
union movement. Aside from political affiliation, transgressions against the established
social order, particularly atheism, but also progressive attitudes towards gender, sex and
sexuality, were met with violent reprisals by Francoist forces (Graham, 2004). In small
rural communities, such as those under discussion in this article, the massacres perpe-
trated by Francoist forces and their sympathizers utilized networks of personal relation-
ships and local knowledge in the process of denunciation and blacklisting, which
identified those Republican civilians to be targeted. Security forces and locally active
militia also co-opted civilians, willing or otherwise, to participate in the killing, transpor-
tation, and burial of victims. The experience of violence, as victim, perpetrator, or wit-
ness, was disseminated widely through the population.
The end of the war by no means signalled the end of political violence. The enduring
trauma experienced by Spanish society is indicated by the estimate that 500,000 Span-
iards went into exile at the close of the war and official statistics recorded more than
270,000 political prisoners incarcerated by the Francoist regime by 1939 (Richards,
2002). Of these prisoners, an estimated 100,000 died in incarceration (Preston, 1989).
Franco’s victory in 1939 brought in a 40-year dictatorship, marked by periods of extreme
political repression, censorship and surveillance. Francoist memory politics strictly con-
trolled representations of Spanish history, above all the representations of the Civil War
(Preston, 1989). A condition of profound atomization was inculcated by Franco’s dicta-
torship, resulting in a near total breakdown in the inter-generational transmission of
memory (Cenarro, 2002). Under the dictatorship, there was a total prohibition on the
mourning or commemoration of the Republican dead (Graham, 2004).
There are estimated to be between 40,000 and 60,000 Republican dead remaining in
clandestine or unmarked mass graves throughout Spain. Prior to the late 1990s, a strong
taboo surrounded the public acknowledgement of the existence of the dead or their
graves (Walker, 2003). The perceived necessity to draw a line under the traumatic past in
order to achieve a peaceful transition to democracy in Spain in the 1970s was character-
ized as the ‘pact of silence’ (Desfor Edles, 1998). This pact of silence or pact of amnesia
remained largely unbroken for another 25 years after the dictator’s death in 1975 (Aguilar,
2002). Spain’s peaceful transition to democratic government was long admired; how-
ever, during the 1990s, as other contested regimes came to a close in former socialist
states and South Africa, alternative political models were presented, provoking a critical
re-evaluation of the Spanish transition. ‘This has proved that forgetting is not necessarily
a prerequisite for peace, even in those cases where war and dictatorship are extremely
close in time’ (González-Ruibal, 2007: 205).
A radical shift in Spain’s prevailing memory politics has been observed since 2000
with the founding of the Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory
(ARMH), which spearheads the activities of a diverse range of Republican memory

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Renshaw 451

campaign groups (Ferrándiz, 2006; Silva and Macías, 2003). A primary focus of the
Republican memory campaign, and particularly ARMH, is the investigation of Republi-
can mass graves, and the exhumation, scientific identification and formal reburial of
Republican remains. The work of ARMH, investigating and commemorating Civil War
deaths in communities throughout Spain, has triggered a massive popular engagement
with the question of the war dead (Fernández de Mata, 2004). Levels of popular interest
can be detected in the volume of media coverage (Renshaw, 2007) and internet activity
(Ferrándiz, 2006). As individuals explore their family’s or community’s Civil War his-
tory, and re-evaluate Franco’s legacy in present-day politics and society, Civil War mem-
ory has also become the focus of intensive scholarly work, creative responses in literature
and film (Ferrán, 2007; Resina, 2000), and legislative responses to grapple with the sta-
tus of the dead and the rights of their descendants (Tremlett, 2010). This article will
concentrate on the place of the dead in Spain’s recent rupture in memory politics, exam-
ining the relationship between exhumation and memory more broadly, and scientific and
affective identification in particular, in two small communities in rural Spain.

Scientific and affective identification

The aim of this article is to consider the dual processes of scientific and affective identi-
fication triggered by the resurfacing of the physical remains of long-dead Republican
civilians murdered during the Spanish Civil War. This article seeks to explore two con-
tentions regarding the ongoing exhumation and identification process in Spain. The first
is that the investigative process surrounding exhumation and identification constitutes a
new form of discourse about the past and provides a new representational or discursive
space in which to engage with a highly traumatic past. This is particularly salient in the
context of Spain’s repressive dictatorship and subsequent ‘pact of silence’ that rendered
both private and public discourses on the past politically and emotionally charged. The
goal of reassigning a name or individual identity to a set of human remains is ostensibly
a politically neutral endeavour, insofar as it does not necessitate an explicit political or
moral judgement about the deceased’s life or the circumstances of his or her death. Prac-
titioners and a wide range of authors now recognize the potential political significance,
and symbolic potency, of all our interactions with the dead (Verdery, 1999), including
scientific and technical interactions (Wagner, 2008). However, for those relatives of the
Republican dead in Spain, and members of their wider communities, who might find an
explicitly political or moral engagement with the past to be threatening or destabilizing,
human identification may provide a less fraught point of engagement with the past.
The second contention is that assembling the material and physical evidence of iden-
tity for the purposes of the scientific identification of human remains also entails the
construction of an object of affective identification and mourning. The time lag between
death and exhumation in the given context impacts upon first-hand memory of the dead
and on knowledge of the particularity of the dead as once-living individuals. The severe
nature of the political repression experienced in Spain impacts upon transmitted memory
of the dead and also upon the form and intensity of an affective identification with the
dead amongst their living descendants and community. This article contends that, for
some descendants of Republicans killed in the Spanish Civil War, the prevailing relationship

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452 Journal of Material Culture 15(4)

to the dead can be characterized as a form of postmemory, a term developed to character-

ize the relationship to the past experienced by the descendants of Holocaust survivors.
The losses of people, homes and communities sustained during the Holocaust were a
defining feature in the upbringing and biographies of many of those in subsequent gen-
erations. Yet these catastrophic events could not be remembered or mourned in the same
direct way as Holocaust survivors who had experienced them first-hand, creating anguish
and a gulf between the generations that was hard to bridge.
Hirsch (1996: 659) has used the term ‘postmemory’ to refer to a particular relation-
ship to the traumatic past, and to refer to the body of scholarly and creative work which
reflects upon, and works through, this relationship with the past:

Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or
source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and cre-
ation. Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives
that preceded their birth ... shaped by traumatic events that can neither be fully understood nor
re-created.

The relevance of this body of work to Spanish memory is not dependent on a claim of
comparability between the two historical contexts, which is a contentious question cur-
rently under debate (Labanyi, 2010: 197). The idea of postmemory has been productive
within the critical analysis of the large volume of novels, memoirs and films addressing
the themes of the intergenerational transmission of memory and the way contemporary
Spain is haunted by the Civil War that have been produced in Spain since the 1990s
(Ferrán, 2007; Labanyi, 2007). However, Hirsch’s central conception of postmemory, or
more specifically ‘postmemorial work’, refers to the project of arranging, assembling or
constructing material objects of mourning, to fill the gap between losses endured in the
past, but not experienced directly by the present generation, nor transmitted explicitly to
them. It is this concept of postmemorial work that is of clear relevance to the processes
of human identification currently underway in Spain.
In order to explore the dual processes of scientific and affective identification just
outlined, the procedures which enable the scientific identification of human remains,
particularly in the context of the Spanish exhumations, need to be clarified. Scientific
identification operates on the principle that ante mortem data, or details of the person as
they were in life, are gathered in for reference, then post mortem evidence is gleaned
from the body and the artefacts found in association with it (Byers, 2005). Put simply,
ante and post mortem data are compared and probable identities assigned on the basis of
their compatibility. Therefore, the investigation of a mass grave entails not only the
exposure of human remains, but also an intensive gathering-in of reference data, assem-
bling knowledge and representations of the dead. This could take the form of eyewitness
accounts, for example the last sighting of the deceased on the day of their death. Ante
mortem evidence could also take the form of transmitted family histories, for example if
the deceased was reputed to be unusually tall or have suffered from a marked physical
injury or pathology which might be detected on his or her remains. It could include
physical objects such as shoes and clothing associated with the dead, documents such as
identity cards, medical and dental records, or photographs of the dead, all of which have

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Renshaw 453

the potential to contribute to a physical profile of the dead, to be compared to the exhumed
remains.
The challenges of both exhumation and identification will vary hugely in the different
investigations throughout Spain, depending primarily on the scale of the grave and its
locale. The appropriate working practices and scientific techniques to be applied to the
grave will vary accordingly. The ethnographic material in this article is drawn from two
mass grave exhumations that occurred in small rural communities in the province of
Burgos, in the autonomous community of Castile and León. Ethnographic fieldwork was
carried out at these two sites and their surrounding communities between 2003 and 2006.
This took the form of participant observation as an archaeologist, alongside interviews
with relatives of the dead, exhumation co-ordinators, and expert practitioners. The scale
and nature of the limpieza (or political ‘cleansing’) in this region is such that there are
substantial mass graves containing multiple victims whose identities cannot be immedi-
ately recognized simply through the visual observation of their skeletonized remains. Yet
the killings in these communities were sufficiently intimate and localized that a list of
probable identities of the dead occupying some of these mass graves may be available to
the investigators.
The nature of the violence in this region and the implications it has for techniques of
human identification are explored in detail from a technical perspective by Ríos et al.
(2010: 28):

The release of groups of people from prison, who were subsequently delivered to, and killed by,
paramilitary garrisons, was a widespread modus operandi in the province of Burgos as well as
in other Spanish provinces during the first months of the armed confrontation.

This brush with officialdom, immediately prior to an extrajudicial killing and clandestine
burial in a mass grave, furnishes an important source of potential documentary evidence
in the form of prison records. Of equal significance is the creation of a probable group of
victims, known to be together prior to death, that can be tallied with the number of indi-
viduals exposed in a mass grave. ‘The group of people released to be killed received the
name of saca, from the Spanish verb sacar (to take out)’ (p. 28). The saca constitutes a
‘closed synchronic group’ defined as a priori those individuals who could have ended up
in the grave (p. 34). This means there is a greater likelihood of determining individual
identities if sufficient ante mortem evidence can be assembled from archives, oral testi-
mony, and documents and photographs held by relatives of the dead. Congram and
Steadman (2008: 162) note that although 3000 victims had been exhumed from unmarked
graves since 2007, only 8 per cent of them had been identified. They cited the limited
existence or survival of documents such as dental and medical records, and limited
access to DNA technology of the kind that has been so successful in other mass fatality
investigations in recent years (Wagner, 2008). These observations reinforce the potential
significance of first-hand and transmitted memory, and personal archives, such as iden-
tity cards or portrait photographs of the dead.
To consider the dual processes of scientific and affective identification in the context
of the Spanish Republican graves, the impact of time and atomization on memory and
affective identification will first be assessed. The role of local co-ordinators in eliciting

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454 Journal of Material Culture 15(4)

and assembling knowledge of the dead will be considered. This gathering-in of memory
or ‘evidence’ pertaining to the dead both initiates and structures a potentially traumatic
engagement with the past. Locally meaningful conceptualizations of identity are appar-
ent and contribute to the sense that the dead are both known and knowable by their rela-
tives and community, despite the time that has elapsed and the fractured transmission of
memory. The gathering-in of other traces of the dead, including photographs, clothing
and letters, to construct a sense of the dead as real and once-living individuals who can
be mourned occurs concurrently with the exhumation of the physical remains. Finally,
the affective power and limitations of human remains are assessed in the light of the
postmemorial work that accompanies these exhumations.

Republican (post)memory and identification with the dead

Many of the direct descendants of the dead had little memory or knowledge of their rela-
tive, either first-hand or transmitted by older relatives. In some older informants, a degree
of unease and ambivalence could be observed about the nature and strength of their
knowledge of their murdered relative. For some, this sense of ambiguity surrounding the
relationship, and disquiet about the authenticity of their affective bond with the dead, was
accompanied by an expression of strong reservation about both the necessity and the
practical possibility of achieving a scientific identification after a 70-year time lapse. This
was rooted in complex and painful sentiments of shame and loss regarding their own
inability to either know or remember a relative, particularly a parent. I was made sensitive
to the potential for value judgements on memory by the number of informants, particu-
larly women, who would express anguish as to whether their account of the past was
‘useful’ or whether it ‘helped’. Comparable feelings that one might fail the dead by failing
to aid in their identification are observed by Wagner (2008) amongst some relatives
engaged with the scientific identification of the victims of the Srebrenica massacre.
An ambivalence around the extent to which the dead were either known or knowable
could be detected in remarks by elderly participants, characterizing the remains as ‘only
bones’, or remarking on them as dry, white, as bones ‘with nothing’, as if emphasizing their
blank, unrecognizable form. These interviews strongly emphasized reburial or the cemetery
as the endpoint of exhumation, focusing on the relocation of bones, not the bones them-
selves (Renshaw, 2010). This perspective emphasizes the structural re-positioning of bodies
as ancestors and community members, but passes over their status as individuals. In this
context, the opening of the grave and the exposure of human remains may not be enough to
presence the dead as individuals or elicit a sense of affective identification amongst the liv-
ing. The aspects of the investigative process which construct an affective identity for the
dead can be considered by looking at the assemblage of knowledge of the dead and the
layering of different traces of the dead in conjunction with their physical remains.

Locally meaningful identification

During both investigations, a process was observed by which the paradigm of scientific
human identification, the privileging of a detailed physical knowledge of the dead, was
adapted to local conceptualizations of familial relatedness and ways of knowing and

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Renshaw 455

recognizing the individual. The features that constituted knowledge of the dead within
my field sites diverged in subtle but discernible ways from the paradigm of scientific
identification. A process of mediation between the two was primarily undertaken by a
key informant, Julio. He was a highly educated professional based in the city, confident
in navigating official archives, but also locally-born and entrenched in village history
and idiom. He was an active member of the Republican memory campaign who could act
as a bridge between the expert practitioners and the wider community, particularly in the
early stages of the investigation which entailed gathering in relatives and community
members as participants.
The way Julio used nicknames was significant. He invested time in collecting and
confirming the nicknames of the dead. He used the nicknames of the dead frequently
when speaking about the exhumation in the presence of elderly locals and relatives. The
nicknames of most of the dead, although occasionally derived from physical attributes
(a property which Julio emphasized as a possible source of evidence) are, in reality,
unlikely to aid in a scientific identification. However, I came to understand from
observing Julio that there was a parallel process of locally meaningful identification
underway, and nicknames are a key form by which individuals may possess knowledge
of another. Nicknames may reveal quirks of character rather than physiognomy, particu-
larly character flaws, or refer to a key episode in an individual’s life history (Gilmore,
1987). The simultaneous collection and dissemination, through verbal repetition, of the
nicknames of the dead performed a subtler task of reinforcing the notion that the dead
were ‘knowable’ and a sense of their characters and their unique individuality could be
recaptured, challenging the idea that they were beyond the reach of the living.
The two apellidos, or dual naming system, used in Spain contains an individual’s
matrilineal and patrilineal descent. In these field sites there are several dominant sur-
names with different branches of the family, so names provide considerable information
to unpick and decode. Tracing kinship backward in time and outward through an extended
geographical network is a prevalent theme in public conversations, especially amongst
the elderly, and precise knowledge of how people are related is an important knowledge
claim. Julio was clearly aware that unpacking these surnames was a safe entry point into
talking about the dead, particularly amongst those who seemed reticent or resistant.
These public conversations also served to constantly reiterate familial bonds with the
dead, reinserting them in social networks.
Physical resemblance between relatives and photographs of the dead, sometimes a
highly tenuous resemblance, was also invoked by Julio when attempting to draw in rela-
tives of the dead. He also encouraged them to find resemblance between the black-and-
white portrait photographs of the dead and other members of the extended family, once
again effectively re-inserting the dead into a network of relationships on the basis of their
physiognomy. I observed Julio point to distinguishing features in a photo, particularly a
strong jaw line or cheekbones that might be discerned in an analysis of the skull, and
predict to a relative that this could form the basis of a successful identification of the
skeleton. This locates their identity in readily apprehended facial features rather than the
much more complex skeletal characteristics of the rib, spine or pelvis that, in reality, will
be analysed in the laboratory (Buikstra and Ubelaker, 1994), but which are too far
removed from a vernacular notion of recognition or identity (Gere, 1999; Sofaer, 2006).

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456 Journal of Material Culture 15(4)

While looking through photographs with relatives, there was discussion of other ‘unique’
traits passed down in oral accounts, features such as hair colour, freckles and skin tone,
even the intensity of gaze. These are all traits which, obviously, the skeleton no longer
possesses, but which animate the dead in the imagination of the living. At one point, Julio
reminded bystanders at the exhumation site that one of the deceased was famous for his
physical ugliness, although the possibility of identifying this post mortem is remote. This
is not a misapprehension or misrepresentation of scientific techniques, but more an
impulse to reassure the community that the dead are both known and knowable.
On a number of occasions, Julio would repeat a detail or anecdote, that he attributed
to another member of the community, to visiting relatives who were gradually becoming
more engaged with the exhumation process or who were hesitant and resistant to the idea
that they could ‘help’ with their own memories of the dead, and then he would tease out
another small detail. In this way, he cajoled people into feeling ownership of a common
pool of ‘memory’ surrounding the dead. It enabled them to re-evaluate the importance
of their own knowledge of the dead, however scant, and make a contribution to the
investigation, even if their starting point had been to profess total ignorance of them.
Julio also used photographs to situate the dead within the physical space of the vil-
lage, asking relatives if they recognized the backgrounds depicted. It is clear that, one
year in the 1930s, a commercial photographer set up stall in the village square, as a
couple of photos have the same background, a recognizable building that is still standing.
A particular marker in the masonry of this building is still visible today. Julio suggested
to a relative that the height of this man could be calculated in relation to the masonry,
even encouraging the relative to go and stand in this spot to calculate his height in com-
parison to that of the dead man, thus encouraging this relative to seek out both a spatial
and physiological point of connection with the dead man via the photograph. This
accords very closely with postmemorial work analysed by Hirsch (1997) in which pho-
tographs of the dead are projected, in scale, onto the original backdrops depicted in the
image, located in the formerly Jewish neighbourhoods of European cities. It also reso-
nates with a postmemorial journey described by Hirsch and Spitzer (2006) to locate the
site of a building significant to their parents’ wartime experiences. Julio’s observations
about the photograph were ostensibly utilitarian or pragmatic in that his goal was to cal-
culate the stature of a dead man, but it was also effectively a kind of emplacement of the
dead amongst the everyday village environment, thus presencing them in a shared physi-
cal space amongst their living relatives.

The assemblage of evidence as postmemorial work

In the early stages of the investigative process in my second field site, a public meeting
was called in the village hall to explain how the investigations into mass graves had been
conducted in other communities, what was likely to be discovered in the exhumation, the
outcomes achieved in other communities, and the possible sources of evidence to recon-
struct the events surrounding these deaths, and to make scientific identifications of the
remains of the dead. This meeting was part of a continuum of public gatherings of different
scales, punctuating the investigative process, which facilitated communication between
expert practitioners, Republican memory campaigners, and the local community.

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Renshaw 457

A primary purpose of the meeting was to familiarize the relatives of the dead and inter-
ested members of the community with some of the principles of scientific identification.
The records, testimony and archive sources pertaining to other exhumations were pre-
sented, along with photographs of bodies and objects recovered from mass graves
throughout Spain.
When skeletonized remains from the Spanish Civil War are exhumed and removed to
the laboratory for analysis, the meticulous examination of bone in order to construct a
profile of the deceased’s age, sex, stature, dental anomalies, injury patterns and disease
history constitutes by far the bulk of the identification work that is undertaken. These
detailed biological profiles can then be used to create a presumptive match with the
known biographical details of the victim. Yet in the way the process is presented to the
relatives of the dead and the wider community in my field sites, there is an emphasis on
the achievement of identification based on a match between ante mortem evidence from
photographs or testimony, and post mortem evidence found on the skeleton. It may be
reasonably argued that this is a form of identification more readily comprehended and
intuitively grasped by the lay person and which does not necessitate obscure details of
human anatomy and biology. However, the presentation of identifications based on the
matching of human remains, possessions, clothing and photographs of the dead also pos-
sesses an inherent theatricality and entails an immersion by the audience in an assem-
blage of traces of the dead, each with their own aesthetic and affective affordances. The
matching of physical remains with these other traces to reassign an identity also embeds
the skeletons in the surviving traces of their lived existence, underscoring the reality and
particularity of their lived identities.
In an example of the way material evidence can contribute to the identification of
human remains, the portrait photograph of a young adolescent male is projected larger
than life onto a screen in the town hall’s central meeting room. The individual is wearing
a zip-up woollen cardigan, with a prominent zip-pull below his throat. The portrait pho-
tograph is juxtaposed with a photograph of a zip-pull discovered on the sternum of a
skeleton in a mass grave. The zip-pull is shown cleaned and in a close-up laboratory
photograph to verify that it is identical to that visible in the portrait. The presentation
consists of a series of comparable examples in which evidence is triangulated between
portrait photographs showing the deceased as they were in life, clothing or personal pos-
sessions that were used in life but were recovered from the graves, and the skeletonized
human remains recovered from the graves.
The emphasis on unique particularity inherent in the demonstration of ante and post
mortem matches clearly underscores the individuality of the dead. The ordinariness of
mundane possessions establishes visible points of similarity between the living and the
dead, fostering an empathetic response. It renders the materiality of their pre-death exis-
tence a tangible reality, allowing them to be more readily imagined as they were in life
(Gibson, 2004; Hallam and Hockey, 2001). The projections are very large and dominate
the meeting room. The objects have been cleaned in the laboratory prior to close-up, high-
quality photography and are much more instantly recognizable than an artefact in the
grave. In their cleaned state and with details revealed, intimate objects such as combs,
jewellery, false teeth and other dental prostheses, appear uncannily close to contemporary
objects that are still in use amongst the living, by extension situating their owners closer

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458 Journal of Material Culture 15(4)

to the living (Moshenska, 2006). However, in their cleaned state, objects such as pocket
watches and jewellery have a patina from burial that speaks of their unique provenance
and the biography of this class of objects.
It is important to reiterate that the meeting focuses on traces of the dead from other fami-
lies and communities but serves as a precedent for what potentially could be uncovered
during the current investigation. This raises the possibility that photographs, documents, or
mementos already possessed in the family home may contain important evidence or ways
of knowing the dead. Like Julio’s approach to the investigation, it helps counteract the
sense that the dead are unknown or unknowable. It is also significant that this demonstra-
tion of precedent taken from other villages, unknown to those in the meeting, a technical
precedent of what may be achieved through scientific identification, also subtly communi-
cates the existence of a wider community of Republican memory across Spain, and perhaps
instils some sense of solidarity in moving forward with this difficult undertaking.
The black-and-white portrait photographs of the unknown dead projected onto a large
screen to the assembled audience, but intercut or juxtaposed with modern photographs of
skeletal remains, have their own affordances requiring analysis (Edwards, 1999). The
age of these photographs, visible in the tone and quality of the image, has an aesthetic
effect that helps to overcome existing prohibitions on representations of the past: ‘Pho-
tographs turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and
disarming historical judgments by the generalized pathos of looking at time past’
(Sontag, 1979: 77). Encounters with these faces certainly elicit pathos and the ‘disarm-
ing of historical judgments’ is particularly important in the Spanish context, considering
how the dead were demonized by Francoist rhetoric. The visible periodicity of these
photographs conjures an entire epoch while the particularity of the individual face con-
jures a single biography.
The limited contexts in which people sat for photographic portraits in the 1930s
means that many of these individuals are depicted on their wedding day or holding small
infants, and the optimistic or future-oriented nature of the moments captured adds to the
pathos of the photographs (Renshaw, 2007), while the depiction of these rites of passage
underscores these individuals’ roles as ancestors. Pinney’s (1997:153) analysis of the
capacity of old photographs to construct a sense of historicity, and their place within it,
unites these aspects of content and material form: ‘The historicity that springs from this
intersection of the cyclical and the unique is compounded by the materiality of the
images, the small sepia images, the disintegrating records.’
The attributes identified by Barthes (2000) in the photograph of a condemned pris-
oner on the eve of his execution, youthful and healthy but approaching death, resonate
with the photographs of the younger Republican men. The role of historical hindsight in
mediating encounters with photographs has been noted by both Fussell (1975) and
Briggs (2006) in relation to images of First World War soldiers. The mundane personal
possessions of the dead that are retrieved from the grave also possess this aura of a con-
tingent normality immediately prior to disaster, a quality analyzed by Shanks et al.
(2004) in their consideration of how everyday objects became icons of Ground Zero in
the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center.
Near the end of his presentation, an expert practitioner explains how both official and
personal archive material can be investigated to reconstruct the events surrounding the

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Renshaw 459

deaths of those in the mass grave. However, rather than selecting official records, per-
haps from the police, military, prisons or hospitals, all of which his investigative team
gathers assiduously, he projects the scanned images of farewell letters written by those
Republicans incarcerated prior to their deaths. The text is hard to decipher but extracts
are read out. The letters certainly have an evidential value in that the dates, places and
circumstances of these deaths are recorded. However, the emotional impact of these
letters is discernible in the atmosphere of the meeting room. The sentiments expressed
in the farewell letters elicit pathos in that they are not only expressions of love, but
several show an urge to reassure and comfort their loved ones, revealing a protective
instinct towards their families. Some contain a reiteration of Republican idealism as
a cause to die for. The farewell letters were produced with the intention that they
transmit the agency of the writer beyond their death, to achieve a posthumous connec-
tion. The letters remind us that the dead were in a network of affective bonds and
draw us in to this network. The projection of these letters, faded and written in an
outmoded style of handwriting on improvised scraps of paper, elicits a powerful
charge of immediacy and direct connection with the dead. Several of the identifica-
tions demonstrated in this meeting created a palpable frisson, as if the identification
had achieved a moment of posthumous connection. This period of sustained immer-
sion in the traces of the dead, even other people’s dead, was clearly cathartic for some
attending the meeting who were left tearful and subdued, or with a strong urge to talk
about what they had seen.

The affective power (and limitations) of human remains

In setting out the problem of the ontological status of human remains, Domanska (2005)
considers the body as both corpus delicti – the substance of a crime – and as an object of
mourning. In Spain, the incontrovertible emergence of these skeletons from clandestine
mass graves effectively fulfils the function of a corpus delicti, but as objects of mourning
the Spanish skeletons are more problematic. Domanska (2005) also refers to the skeleton
as a trace left by the once living person, which helps to situate it alongside the other
material traces of their existence, rather than privileging the bones as closer to the essence
of the dead person, by virtue of their apparent humanness. Laqueur (2002: 85) situates
the impetus behind postmemorial work – the gathering-in and layering of traces of the
dead – within the post-Holocaust condition of having no physical remains to mourn, and
no possibility of ever retrieving the physical remains of the dead:

No bodies were more irretrievably lost than those of the millions who perished in the Nazi gas
ovens and perhaps in no other context has more effort been expended to restore a corpus delicti
... We name whom we can so as to extract a person from a multitude – from the ashes – and to
remember, mourn, or simply contemplate him or her. I am thinking not only of the walls or trees
of names but of the books and rooms of photographs – the spectral layers of a person – that have
been so painstakingly compiled.

This implicitly privileges the place of the body as an object of mourning, suggesting that
other material traces are necessary as a substitute in the absence of a body. On first sight,

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460 Journal of Material Culture 15(4)

the post-Holocaust condition identified by Laqueur seems far removed from the Spanish
context, where an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 skeletons remain buried in mass graves
throughout Spain. With Civil War graves of different sizes found in proximity to most
communities, there are likely to be more bodies within these graves than can ever be
exhumed or memorialized. Yet even with the gravesite revealed, the bones exposed to
plain view during exhumation and scientifically identified, this process of compiling ‘the
spectral layers of a person’ is still necessary for mourning to take place. An imaginative
and affective identity, an object of mourning, must be re-created to match with the human
remains recovered through exhumation and scientific analysis.
Sofaer (2006) argues that the materiality of the skeleton and its precise material affor-
dances (and limitations) have been under-theorized. The archaeological endeavour to use
skeletal remains in order to reconstruct a picture of the once living person has resulted in
the neglect of the ontological status of the bones. Furthermore, archaeologists have per-
haps been misled by the apparent humanness of the skeleton, seeing humanness as its
primary attribute. Sofaer traces the history of archaeological engagement with the body,
noting that a theoretical turn toward embodiment meant ‘an insistence on bodies first and
foremost as living things’ (p. 66). She describes this awareness of embodiment as an
acknowledgement of the materiality of the body, but ‘not the material’. Archaeologists
shied away from the reality of the inert body and the stark differences between it and the
living body, because this distinction was felt to be ‘part of an undesirable Cartesian leg-
acy’ (p. 68). Hallam et al. (1999) manage an othering of the dead body by an explicit and
detailed description of its dissimilarity to the living person, noting the absence of body
heat, facial expression, or muscular tone. Although this otherness should be readily
apparent for a de-fleshed skeleton, perhaps it is nevertheless necessary to make explicit
the limitations of the affective power of human remains and of the limitations of the
skeleton as an object of mourning when taken in isolation.
There are many contexts in which the reappearance of missing human remains can
trigger intense affective responses, and the physical remains clearly constitute an object
and focus of mourning. Writing on the return of the skeletonized remains of Argentina’s
Desaparecidos, Crossland (2000) notes the visceral response of some parents at being
reunited with the bones of their children, desiring to see and touch the bones, and express
their care for the dead through physical affection. Crossland describes their response ‘as
this intimately embodied understanding of the dead’ (p. 154). These human remains are
reappearing in a context of intense physical memories of the dead, as they were in life,
memories which can bridge the otherness of human remains identified by Sofaer (2006)
and Hallam et al. (1999). This comparison illustrates how ways of relating to the dead
body are shaped by the relationship experienced with the living body. In Spain, with the
widespread absence of any in-life relationship, postmemorial work can help to bridge the
otherness of human remains.

Conclusion
The investigative process accompanying exhumation represents a new form of discourse
on the past. Re-conferring identities on the human remains exposed during exhumation
serves as a premise, or a catalyst, for initiating new conversations and reflections upon
the dead, emphasizing their individuality. The investigative process also triggers a

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Renshaw 461

gathering-in of other material traces pertaining to the dead, such as photographs, letters,
documents and clothing. The form of communication observed during the investigative
process, particularly that employed by the local co-ordinator in these communities,
draws in people who might otherwise feel ambivalent or resistant to an engagement with
the past. Discussions of physical attributes, nicknames, anecdotes, kinship networks, and
talking through photographs are familiar and idiomatic ways of recalling the dead and
presencing them amongst the living, but previously have not been applied to the conten-
tious category of the dead in the mass graves.
Discussions of these more mundane, bodily, intimate, and familial aspects of identity
are ostensibly ideologically neutral in that they do not necessitate explicit political and
moral judgements on the dead or the circumstances of their deaths. This is important to
draw in the participation of those who have experienced political repression and may
find any investigation of the past to be threatening or destabilizing. Reconstructing the
identities of the dead collectively, through the kind of public discussions and cross-
checking employed by Julio, and building up a picture from disparate scraps of informa-
tion draws in even those who feel anguish or ambivalence about their own lack of
knowledge of, and affective bonds with, the dead. These discussions disseminate the idea
that the dead are both known and knowable, the first step in constructing an affective bond
with the dead, even amongst those of the living who had little or no relationship in life.
The public meeting examined in this article was conducted in order to explain and
illustrate the investigative process accompanying exhumation, particularly the process of
scientific identification. Although all the material considered in the meeting does, in fact,
constitute ‘evidence’ for the identities of the dead and the circumstances of their deaths,
it also structures a sustained encounter, almost to the point of saturation, with various
‘spectral layers’ of personhood. Instead of the more obscure clues to identity located on
the human skeleton, all of which require a trained eye to elicit individuality, the clues to
personhood presented here are readily recognizable. Portrait photographs, clothing,
handwriting and farewell letters all powerfully convey the reality and particularity of the
lived existence of the dead. ‘Postmemorial work strives to reactivate and re-embody
more distant ... memorial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and
familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression’ (Hirsch, 2008: 111). Even though
the exhumation and reburial of skeletal remains is the catalyst for revisiting the past in
these communities, a particular representation of human identification emphasizes those
traces of the dead drawn from their lived existence. This emphasis highlights some of the
limitations in the affective power of the skeleton discussed in this article. The material
presented as evidence has its own aesthetic and affective power, eliciting a discernible
emotional response in those who encounter it. With a particular selection and presenta-
tion of evidence, the expert practitioners elicit an affective engagement with the dead,
contributing to a process whereby the physical remains become objects of mourning as
well as corpus delicti.

Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the support and co-operation of all those who participated in the exhu-
mations referred to in this article. I am very grateful to the editors of this issue and the anonymous
reviewers for their detailed feedback on earlier versions of this article. Part of this fieldwork was
undertaken with the support of a doctoral award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

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462 Journal of Material Culture 15(4)

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Biographical note
Layla Renshaw is a Senior Lecturer in forensic archaeology and anthropology at Kingston University.
Her research interests include post-conflict investigations and representations of the traumatic
past, the political and theoretical significance of forensic archaeology, and its representation in the
media. She is currently writing a monograph on memory, materiality and the Spanish Civil War.

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