ABSTRACT
While the carnage of civilians was going on in cities and countryside, the rebels progressed fast toward Madrid from Andalusia. War was waged by highly mobile columns of the colonial army of Morocco that fought against poorly trained Republican militias, while engaging in the kind of indiscriminate violence to which they had become accustomed in Africa. The situation changed in the outskirts of Madrid. Raids muted into all-out industrialized warfare and the archaeological record changes accordingly. This chapter examines the combats around the city, focusing on the Battle of Madrid (7–23 November 1936) and its aftermath. It deals mainly with two scenarios: Casa de Campo, a large park in front of the capital where the International Brigades had their baptism of fire, and the University City, which was the furthermost point inside Madrid reached by the Nationalist Army. In Casa de Campo, my team and I excavated one of the few intact trenches still preserved related to the combats of November 1936. The scarcity of documentary evidence associated with these combats offers an opportunity to rewrite a major episode of the Spanish Civil War from the point of view of archaeology. The same happens with the campus: most attention has been paid to the area closer to the city, but we have discovered traces of an unrecorded attack through the northern fringe of the University City, an attack that might have changed the course of the war. We also conducted excavations and surveys in one of the hotspots of the Battle of Madrid: the University Hospital, which, despite heavy modifications after the conflict, furnished astonishing material evidence of the brutal fighting—which preludes urban combats during the Second World War.
