Landscaping against the People: An Archaeology of the Francoist Industrial Forestry in Spain

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Developments and Challenges in Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this contribution we combine landscape archaeology and the archaeology of the contemporary past to critically rethink the material, social, and ideological effects of the industrial forestry developed by the dictatorship in Spain. This case is a particularly relevant example to reflect on how the transformation of the landscape is one of the most durable and successful resources at hand for totalitarian regimes in order to modify the memory of their social, political and material consequences. The industrial forestry was part of large-scale operations developed by the Francoist regime in his quest for the material construction of his ideal Spain. That resulted in the transformation of extensive rural areas where the people was literally changed by trees. The progressive rising of the pines converted many villages into a forest, destroying its historical landscape and concealing its remains. Today, the forestation process reveals its strategic functionality for the dictatorship in the long term, since the forestry policy is one technique of “naturalization” of old peasants' places and so of the political actions that changes those lands. We will see how the industrial forestry was here an agent of forced migrations, the abandonment of lands as much as one way of oblivion.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Developments and Challenges in Landscape Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39669.0