My interests on the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the failures of modernity in Ethiopia, which was briefly and violently colonized by Italy in the late 1930s and early 1940s, have come together in a broader project: the archaeology of fascism. The point is that, unlike art and architectural history, archaeology is used to work with the most trivial and ephemeral structures and objects. It also deals with material culture in an integrated way, linking together artifacts, landscape and the built environment. Since totalitarianism permeates every sphere of life, up to the most intimate crevices of the social fabric, an integrated archaeological approach may turn out to be a very valuable aid in understanding fascism.

I am currently working with some colleagues on a concentration camp and a prison from the post-war period in Madrid, and on the remains of two Italian military bases in western Ethiopia.

Tin cans, wine bottles, a 6.5 mm shell casing, a bayonet scabbard, fragments from a radio. These are some of the artefacts recovered in March 2006 during an archaeological survey of the Italian base of Gubba (Metekel, W. Ethiopia). Drawing by Anxo Rodríguez Paz (IEGPS-CSIC).