Forensic

 

Forensic

 

Forensic archaeologists and anthropologists from Cranfield University began retrieving the bodies of victims killed by the Franco regime at the end of the Spanish Civil War during excavations in the Spanish region of Ciudad Real.

The Cranfield team is working with colleagues from the University Complutense of Madrid (UCM) and social scientists from Mapas de Memoria (Maps of Memory) to locate, exhume and identify those killed and buried in the public cemetery in Almagro between 1939 and 1940.

 

Several corpses with gunshot wounds to the head, personal results and clothing have already been found and the team is searching for 26 people at the excavated site, which is concentrated in a separate cemetery that has been closed for decades.

The families of the victims were found in the hope of identifying relatives by DNA analysis and then returning the human remains for a proper burial.

 

The burial is part of a series of archaeological findings in the Spanish Civil War that are currently being investigated in Spain. Since 2000, more than 7,000 victims have been identified.

 

Dr Nicholas Márquez-Grant, Senior Lecturer in Forensic Anthropology at the Cranfield Forensic Institute (CFI), who leads the excavation work, said: The discovery of the bodies was done in a layer and is only the beginning of the process of identifying and bringing the dignity of the deceased and helping to provide closure and peace to their families. ”

José Barrios, his great uncle - also known as José Barrios - who was killed and buried in the area, said: “When the excavation began I did not hear much but when they found the first body, I saw a skull and human feet, I thought we had arrived now, we would find it. ”

 

The excavation period will continue until early June and will be followed by a lengthy investigation involving anthropological laboratory analysis and DNA analysis until the end of 2021 to identify human remains found.

 

The first phase of the whole process was done with a Memory Map to locate cemeteries through archival research and communication with the families of the victims through social networks and evidence from neighbors.

 

Dr Jorge Moreno, director of Maps of Memory, a project at the National Distance Learning University (UNED), said: “While archaeologists and forensic anthropologists work from the ground up, sociologists work from the ground up. While scientists search for human remains, social scientists search for their families, history, and stories. Originally we had four families targeted for this mining and in ten days now we have 21 families and 21 stories. We get bodies on the one hand, and issues on the other side that connect later. ”

 

A total of 11 mines have been identified, and most of the mines have more than one person in them. Cranfield team members include graduates and graduates of CFI's Forensic Archeology and Anthropology MSc.

 

Once the remains have been found, they are taken to a forensic anthropology laboratory at UCM to identify and determine the circumstances of the individual's death.

 

Dr. Maria Benito Sanchez, director of the science team at the UCM School of Legal Medicine, said: “As forensic anthropology experts we have a responsibility to incorporate our science into helping relatives who have been searching for their loved ones for a long time now. Ever since I started working in the big cemetery, there are a lot of rewards that I take with me, and it's all for the relatives - that's the engineer of this work. ”

 

Genetic analysis by samples from family members and bone samples are also followed and then again when checks are made, family members are identified. The remains will then be handed over to the families for burial or returned to the cemetery for reburial if that does not happen.

 

The extensive Memory Maps project, funded by the Ciudad Real Provincial Council, has identified 53 major cemeteries and identified 3,457 people killed in the province of Ciudad Real by the Franco regime over the past decade. So far the excavation of Almagro is the largest open tomb in the province, although it is known that hundreds of other people are buried there.