45 Introduction This contribution will look at the case of Spain’s mass graves containing the remains of tens of thousands of civilians killed by the Francoist regime during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and its aftermath. These graves are located in both urban and rural communities of all sizes, throughout Spain. Since 2000, these graves and the remains within them have become the focal point for intense inves- tigative and commemorative activity, primarily structured by a campaign to exhume and formally rebury these remains. This campaign has achieved a rupture in the long-held “pact of silence”, which has hitherto surrounded the Civil War. This con- tribution is based on ethnographic interviews and participant observation in two small rural communities in Castile Leon, while, over three years from 2003, they experienced the extended process of exhumation, identification and reburial of bod- ies of Republicans buried in unmarked graves on the edge of their communities. Interviews and collection of life histories were undertaken with a cross-section of the different constituencies involved in the Spanish Republican exhumations: the relatives of the dead, the archaeologists and forensic practitioners conducting exhu- mations, and Republican memory campaigners who co-ordinate the exhumations and lobby to draw government and media attention to the graves. Focusing on the Spanish case, and considering this material alongside ethnographies of exhumation in other contexts, namely Cyprus and Argentina, this chapter seeks to highlight the complexities inherent in conceptualizing the status of missing people, missing bodies, and concealed bodies, and the way these three may become conflated in encounters with the traumatic past, particularly those encounters which take the form of exhumation and reburial. The Spanish Civil War started through a military coup headed by General Francisco Franco against Spain’s elected government, a Leftist coalition which came to be known as the Republican side. The war was fought over a spectrum of L. Renshaw () School of Life Sciences, Kingston University, London, UK l.renshaw@kingston.ac.uk Chapter 3 Missing Bodies Near-at-Hand: The Dissonant Memory and Dormant Graves of the Spanish Civil War Layla Renshaw M. Bille et al. (eds.), An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-5529-6_3, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010