When the mother of archaeologist Lázaro Lagóstena learned that her son was going to dedicate his extensive georadar equipment to locate those murdered by Franco’s regime, she sent him a task: “Let’s see if you can find your great-uncle.” It was the first time that she had heard of that ancestor who she never heard from again after passing through the El Puerto de Santa María prison for a spurious reason. Lagóstena remembers that exhortation seven years later, shortly after passing a 3D radar through the streets of a patio in the El Puerto cemetery full of old children’s graves. They are looking for 600 missing people and, among them, there could be that uncle whose family memory was swallowed up. If they find them, the team from the University of Cádiz will add new success, after becoming one of the non-invasive archeology units in Spain that has most tracked down graves of people retaliated by Franco’s regime.
The Georadar Unit of the UCA already has 35 reports related to Historical Memory throughout Spain, which are added to the surveys of archaeological remains of the past, in which they already have more than fifty investigations with important findings, such as the port Punic of the Phoenician city of Doña Blanca. But the tracking of the victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship is a work full of singularities that only resembles – and, sometimes, not even that – the search for cities of the past in the use of the same technical means of geodetection. . “This is archaeological work. If I were looking for a Roman grave I would look for the same anomalies in the terrain, but these have a forensic 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 all cases, the four researchers who now make up the unit are aware of the emotional implications of their presence. “Behind them there are associations trying to find their relatives. Young people who start this job see that they are looking for people who retaliated brutally. It is obviously sensitive,” adds the head of the unit, while preparing his teams to take a walk through the streets of the second patio of the El Puerto cemetery, in some field work carried out in the middle of this month of October. The surveys are part of an agreement of more than 50,000 euros financed by the Commissioner for Concord of the Government of Andalusia with state funds.
Lagóstena and his people were already in that same cemetery more than two years ago with their georadars, but probing patio one, where oral sources located the graves. “There was no luck, they turned out to be normal burials,” recalls the professor. And before the arrival of the UCA experts, there had already been one more attempt in a town where they were searching for 600 missing people, 50 of them Porto residents murdered in the first months of terror, the rest political prisoners from all over the country. Spain that vanished without a trace. This is the case of Antonio Pérez Salguero, Lagóstena’s great-uncle who “had been lost in family oblivion,” until he opened his archaeological unit to these types of work. “It’s the third time we’ve tried, we look like moles,” admits desperately Raquel Bolarín, a member of the El Puerto Memory Forum.
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The surveys of the georadar unit draw on documentation from cemeteries, trials, ecclesiastical records or oral sources from gravediggers to mark the points on which to work, in information also collected in the map of graves made by the Ministry of the Presidency after Law 20/2022 on Democratic Memory. In El Puerto, after the fiasco of patio one, the second zone is emerging as hot to locate up to three possible graves. But the conditioning is great. “They were burials without much order. We have to distinguish metal pipes or meshes. Furthermore, the cemeteries at that time were not like that, in most cases the barracks of niches or pantheons were built a posteriori,” summarizes Lagóstena, accustomed to looking for clues in the gaps that are the current streets of the cemeteries.
The team works in two groups with georadars, each with its specifications. The first has a channel with two frequencies between 200 and 600 megahertz, which combine depth and image quality. The one that Lagóstena pushes between children’s graves this sunny October morning is a 3D radar, capable of reaching depths of up to 4.8 meters in one pass. The peculiarities of the cemeteries, variegated with cypress trees and barracks, force each pass to be geopositioned by hand, without using GPS that is not so reliable under these conditions. “The equipment is capable of detecting metal objects such as shell casings, since bone remains are not easily detectable,” explains the professor.
“We are looking for the anthropic footprint of the grave, anomalies of length, width or number of victims compatible with it,” adds Lagóstena. But those tracks are not even visible just by passing the georadar. The teams trace undulations depending on the composition of the land – sandy soils, for example, are simpler than clay soils – in a mass of data that requires subsequent work of interpretation and analysis in the preparation of the reports. If they conclude that the scanned places are compatible with the presence of reprisal graves, they give rise to subsequent phases of excavation in which the Lagóstena team also supports archaeological colleagues, if they need help with exact points or the intervention of another his instruments.
Researcher Ana Plaza, 27, joined the georadar team as a researcher last July, after participating as a volunteer in the excavation of graves such as those in the neighboring town of San Fernando. “I am helping a better society, so that there are families who can finally bury their relatives,” says the young woman while she helps the professor in the manual geopositioning of the last pass of her radar. In a few months, the team will refute whether, finally, the reprisals from El Puerto are no longer also disappeared. Lagóstena does not forget her mother’s request and if the graves appear she is clear about what she will do: “I will take the DNA test in case my great-uncle is among the victims.”
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