Page 53 - Archaeology - October 2017

to France. Many hid out near the city or in the mountains with
the intention of keeping up the fight.
The Asturian landscape is limestone karst riddled with
caves and mines. Shepherds long used the caves, and still do.
During the war some nearby Oviedo were used as bomb shel-
ters. After the Siege of Oviedo, the caves then became a criti-
cal resource for the Republican resistance as they organized,
fought, and hid. Some caves were occupied multiple times and
the surface materials left behind are jumbled. Shepherds keep
the caves clean, and the fugitives who used them had reason
to hide their garbage. “It’s not so easy to do an archaeology of
caves,” says Fanjul. Nonetheless he has found intact evidence
in every cave he’s investigated.
Fanjul uses published accounts, police records, the writings
of fugitives, and, critically, the knowledge of locals, to find Civil
War caves. So far, he has documented 40 and been told of
hundreds more. He has been able to track how the guerrilla war
and local status of these fugitives evolved. In order to get to
one such hiding spot, Fanjul walks a medieval footpath through
a mountain forest in an area called Bueida. Around 100 feet
above the path is what has been named the Cave of the Bones.
It has a small shepherd’s fence topped with a goat skull at its
entrance. It’s tidy and seems shallow at first, but hides deep

This cave, called the Cave of the Bones, as it was used by
Republican rebels in Asturias shortly after the fall of the
capital of Oviedo. It provided shelter—as it does today for
shepherds—for fighters fleeing south into the plains.
reaches. The evidence of Republican use—in addition to the
local accounts that led him there—was a hidden war-era stash
of tuna and sardine tins in a smaller cave a dozen feet away
through the brush. Because of its proximity to the footpath,
use of this cave would have been about mobility, convenience,
and observation of police patrols, rather than long-term
shelter. Guerilla bands were continually on the move to avoid
detection. The cave was almost certainly in use shortly after
the war, and was a “temporary refuge” in Fanjul’s typology. At
this juncture, the fighters were lionized as heroes of the left.
“The fugitives become part of the local folklore,” says Fanjul.
In these years, there may have been as many as 5,000
Republican fugitives hiding out in the area. Some were actively
fighting, while others were just waiting for tempers to cool
so they could hope for prison instead of execution. The term
“guerrilla,” roughly translating to “little war,” comes from the
Spanish resistance to the Napoleonic invasion in the early
nineteenth century. It is a style of warfare built around small,
mobile bands of fighters who use local support and knowledge
to wear down larger, more organized forces. “In the nineteenth
century, the Spanish became experts in guerrilla tactics,” says
Fanjul. “And also counter-guerrilla.” The engagements that
concern him, however, happened more than 100 years later.
Fanjul approaches another cave site, located on a mountain-
side above a wide valley in an area called Entrago, southwest of
Oviedo. A roadway sits beneath it. Looking up, one can see an
The Republican army was composed of a loose coalition of
socialists, communists, and anarchists. Militias such as this one odd sight in front of the cave—a woman in athletic gear dangling
brought laborers, farmers, and miners into combat. from a rope. She’s one of a pair of German climbers navigating

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