CLAS Lecture Series: Archaeology of State Terrorism in Argentina (1976-1983): Truth, Justice and Memories
Archaeology of State Terrorism in Argentina (1976-1983): Truth, Justice and Memories
Speaker: Dr. Andrés Laguens, Academic Director of the Institute of Anthropology Córdoba, Argentina
This talk will explain cases where archaeological intervention was useful in recovering repressive practices of state terrorism during the last dictatorship in Argentina between 1976 and 1983. This archeological intervention helped with the recovering of bodies and identities of people detained illegally and clandestinely by the armed forces of the state, a practice that was undertaken through a systematic process. The oldest archaeological work in detention centers and mass graves in cemeteries in the city of Córdoba, Argentina, allowed then to provide information used by the courts to solve these crimes against humanity and punish those responsible. At the same time, those places have become memory sites open to public access, and as such are permanently visited and resignified.
Andrés Laguens (PhD 1995, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina) is the Academic Director of the Institute of Anthropology Córdoba, Argentina and Senior Researcher at the National Council for Science and Technology of Argentina. He is professor of archaeology at the Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades of the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, and he has been Tinker Visiting Professor at CLAS during 2013. His research focuses in social inequality in past societies and the relationships between people, things and nature. He has been conducting a research project at the Andes of Argentina since 1996, analyzing the emergence of social differences and their reproduction and persistence as multidimensional phenomena. At the present time, he is interested in past ontologies and material culture in Andean societies. Since 2002 he has collaborated with Argentine Justice in the archaeology of clandestine detention centers of the last military dictatorship in Argentina. He is also interested in the public communication of archaeology, and has been curator of the current exhibition of the Museo de Antropología of Córdoba and other temporary ones.