ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a different set of actors: not politicians or military commanders, but common soldiers and civilians, often anonymous. Hunger in the absence of animal bones in Republican trenches. Celebration are the bottles of cider drunk by the Nationalists in the last trench of the Spanish Civil War in Madrid. Bases were established in places where guerrillas had taken shelter in the Peninsular War and soldiers fought and were buried in the same battlefields where the Carlists had fought and been buried a century before. They also built bunkers, trenches and shelters using centuries-old vernacular techniques—the know-how of peasants and shepherds—and put their preindustrial ingenuity at the service of total war—in making improvised weapons and recycling industrial scrap. Archaeological data speak about time, but also space: they manifest something about the regional diversity of the war. Archaeology, in fact, belies the rhetoric of the war between brothers that transforms social violence into natural catastrophe.
