CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas-Spanish National Research Council)

Faculty Member, Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit)

Staff Scientist

About

I am an archaeologist with the Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit) at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).

My research focuses on the archaeology of the contemporary past. In particular, I work on the darker side of the 20th and 21st century: wars, mass migration, failed development projects, colonialism, global consumerism and totalitarianism. I am currently coordinating an archaeological project about the civil war and the early dictatorship (1936-1950) in Spain.

I am also interested in the material strategies deployed by communities who still resist (or have resisted until recently) modernity, globalization and the state. In relation to this, I have conducted research among nonmodern societies in western Ethiopia (2001-2010) and Brazil (2005-2008).

Like many archaeologists of the contemporary past, I started as a prehistoric archaeologist. My PhD was about the Iron Age in NW Iberia. Some of the topics that I explored then still guide my research, such as cultural contact, domestic space, egalitarianism, moral and political economies, technology, and the long term.