When archaeologist Lázaro Lagóstena’s mother learned that her son would use his extensive georadar equipment to locate those murdered by the Franco regime, she sent him a task: “Let’s see if you can find your great-uncle.” It was the first time I heard about this ancestor who was never heard from again after he passed through El Puerto de Santa María prison for a false reason. Lagóstena remembers this admonition seven years later, shortly after he guided a 3D radar through the streets of a terrace in the El Puerto cemetery full of old children’s graves. They are looking for 600 missing people and among them could be the uncle whose family souvenir was lost. If they find them, the team from the University of Cádiz will record another success after becoming one of the non-invasive archeology units in Spain that has most often uncovered graves of people who took revenge against the Franco regime.
More information
The UCA georadar unit already has 35 reports on historical memory throughout Spain, which are added to the studies of archaeological remains of the past, in which there are already more than fifty studies with important findings, such as the port of Punic Phoenician city of Doña Blanca. But the pursuit of the victims of civil war and dictatorship is a work full of singularities that resembles only – and sometimes not even that – the search for cities of the past using the same technical means of geolocation. “This is archaeological work. If I were looking for a Roman tomb, I would look for the same anomalies in the site, but these are forensic in nature,” says Lagóstena, coordinator of the unit and professor of ancient history at the university.
The team has seven years of reports in the provinces of Alicante, Huelva, Seville and especially Cádiz, “where almost every cemetery has its grave of reprisals.” In any case, the four researchers who now make up the unit are aware of the emotional impact of their presence. “There are clubs behind this that are trying to find their relatives. Young people entering this job see that they are looking for people who will take brutal revenge. It is obviously delicate,” adds the head of the unit as he prepares his teams for a walk through the streets of the second courtyard of the El Puerto cemetery, as part of some field work carried out in mid-October. The polls are part of an agreement worth more than 50,000 euros, financed from state resources by the Andalusian government’s commissioner for unity.
Researchers from the Geodetection Unit of the University of Cádiz during the mapping work of mass graves from the Civil War in the cemetery of the city of Puerto de Santa María, in Cádiz. PACO PUENTES
Lagóstena and his people were already in the same cemetery with their geo-radar more than two years ago, but examined the first courtyard where oral sources located the graves. “It wasn’t luck, they were normal burials,” the professor remembers. And before the arrival of the UCA experts, there was already another attempt in a city where a search was underway for 600 missing people, 50 of whom were Porto residents murdered in the first months of terror, the rest political prisoners from all over the country. Spain, which has disappeared without a trace. This is the case of Antonio Pérez Salguero, Lagóstena’s great-uncle, who “fell into family obscurity” until he opened his archaeological department to this type of work. “It’s the third time we try it, we look like moles,” admits Raquel Bolarín, member of the El Puerto Memory Forum, desperately.
What influences the most is what happens next. So you don’t miss anything, subscribe.
Subscribe to
The georadar unit’s investigations rely on documents from cemeteries, court hearings, church records or oral sources from gravediggers to mark the points to work on, and on information also collected in the graves map that the ministry of the Presidency under Law 20/2022 of Democratic Memory. In El Puerto, after the Patio One fiasco, the second zone is eager to locate up to three possible graves. But the conditioning is great. “They were burials without much order. We need to differentiate between metal pipes and braids. In addition, the cemeteries were not like that at that time, in most cases the niche barracks or pantheons were built after the fact,” concludes Lagóstena, who is used to looking for clues in the gaps that represent today’s streets of the cemeteries .
The team works with georadars in two groups, each with its own specifications. The first has a channel with two frequencies between 200 and 600 megahertz, combining depth and image quality. The device that Lagóstena is pushing between children’s graves on this sunny October morning is a 3D radar that can reach depths of up to 4.8 meters in one pass. The peculiarities of the cemeteries lined with cypress trees and barracks force each passage to be geopositioned manually, without using GPS, which is not so reliable in these conditions. “The device is able to detect metal objects such as bullet casings, as bone remains are not easy to detect,” explains the professor.
“We are looking for the anthropic footprint of the grave, for consistent anomalies in length, width or number of victims,” Lagóstena adds. But these tracks are not even visible if you just walk past the geo-radar. Depending on the nature of the terrain – sandy soils are easier than clay soils, for example – teams track using a wealth of data that requires subsequent interpretation and analysis when preparing the reports. If they conclude that the scanned locations are compatible with the presence of reprisal graves, they lead to subsequent excavation phases in which the Lagóstena team also supports archaeological colleagues if they provide assistance in the precise location or intervention of another of its instruments need.
Ana Plaza, 27, joined the georadar team as a researcher last July after volunteering to excavate graves like those in the neighboring town of San Fernando. “I’m helping a better society so that there are families who can finally bury their loved ones,” says the young woman as she helps the professor with the manual geopositioning of the last radar pass. In a few months, the team will refute whether the reprisals from El Puerto have finally stopped. Lagóstena does not forget his mother’s instructions and when the graves appear, he is clear about what he will do: “I will do a DNA test in case my great-uncle is among the victims.”
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_