When ethics is not enough

While the traumatic consequences of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) have been widely confronted through its heritage, post-Civil War conflicts have not yet received much attention, even though their social and political consequences remain visible today. This situation can be approached as a problem of scale: while the Civil War affected Spain as a whole, post-Civil War conflicts mainly impacted the scale of local communities. This is crucial to understanding the role of archaeology as a mediator between local communities, their traumatic past, and their material conditions in the present. Over the past few years, the scientific association Sputnik Labrego has been carrying out archaeological and ethnographic works at the village of Casaio (Ourense, Spain), regarding two major post-Civil War conflicts: the anti-Francoist guerrilla war and the so-called War of Wolfram. In this chapter, I will reflect on two perspectives that are illustrated by these two conflicts. First, I will defend the importance of analysing difficult heritages from a local perspective, which implies a deep understanding both of the local communities themselves and of their relationship with the past from the present. Second, I will argue that the work on difficult heritage from the perspective of local communities implies not only a specific form of ethics but also a political commitment to the entanglements pervading these communities.