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Zoe Crossland B 1 1 1 * 1 6 0 11 V C S F o r e n s i c Archaeology and the disappeared in Argentina1

Abstract
This paper writes a history of the forensic excavations in Argentina of the remains of'the disappeared'; people who were abducted and murdered under the military governments of the 1970s and early 1980s. The physical remains of these people were, and still are, located at a nexus of desires and attempts to reconstruct both individual and national collective memory, through creating and sustaining the individual and collective identities of the disappeared. As such the human remains have become a vigorously contested site for different and irreconcilable constructions. This paper considers the ambiguity of human remains; the tensions between humans as bodies and as people, the difficult issue of human embodiment after death, and the incompatible narratives that arise from these ambiguities. A textual analysis of the narratives created around the excavations of the disappeared in the Argentinian and English speaking media is used to illustrate the ways in which archaeological narratives about the dead are used in the creation of conflicting societal and personal constructions of the human body in Argentina, and the effect that this has had on the ways the disappeared are remembered.

Keywords
Argentina, forensic archaeology, memory, embodiment, 'the disappeared'

Introduction
In early 1992, as an undergraduate, I went to Argentina to volunteer on a research excavation of human burials at the paleo-indian site of Arroyo Seco. Before leaving for the field site I was taken to visit the forensic excavations in the Avellaneda cemetery, just outside Buenos Aires. At the time I spoke Spanish poorly, and I didn't fully understand what I was being taken to see, until we reached the cemetery. The forensic excavations left an indelible impression, as did the commitment of the archaeologists to the difficult task of excavation and identification. This paper has been written out of my attempts to make sense of the often antagonistic reactions to the excavations which were recounted to me, and also in an attempt to try to understand my own archaeological experiences of excavating human remains. 146 The excavation of human remains is often difficult and emotive, especially when the remains are of recent date (Thompson 1998). In Argentina, the forensic excavations of the disappeared have been particularly controversial. Reactions to them by relatives and human rights groups have ranged from acceptance and reburial of the remains, to a refusal to admit that the disappeared are dead, together with claims that the excavations were part of a conspiracy to suppress the truth about the crimes of the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s. These reactions are explored in this paper, focussing particularly on the tensions between the co-option of the disappeared as political symbols and the negotiation of personal emotional relationships between the living and the dead.

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I ! I |

In this context it is informative to turn to the archaeological literature on mortuary studies. The idea that funerary rites and the monumental architecture of death do not simply reflect the status of the dead but are part of the active creation of social relationships has become an axiom of recent approaches to death (after Parker Pearson 1982). This position argues that as people make sense of the life and death of the deceased, they are also engaged in the negotiation and renegotiation of their own and others' positions within the living community. Analogously, the process of archaeological excavation and the analysis of human remains are also implicated in the creation and maintenance of social and political relationships. Through excavation the dead are effectively brought back into the realm of the living, and the ways in which they are perceived may be transformed as relationships within and between the living community and the dead are constructed and negotiated. Depending on the social conditions and present-day perceptions of the dead, their re-emergence into the living community may go relatively unnoticed, or may be highly controversial (see for example, Zimmerman 1989). AsTarlow discusses however, this understanding of how human remains are manipulated socially and politically understates the importance of human emotions in the constructions that are created of the dead (1999, 22-37). In the context of the forensic excavations of the disappeared, a consideration of the personal emotional relationships between the living and the dead is vital to understanding the ways in which the human remains are created as bodies and as people. Foregrounding the personal and embodied aspects of excavation and reburial resituates the work of forensic anthropology as part of that creation of the dead. As the disappeared were 're-appeared' through excavation, so their physical remains have become a site of struggle within the living community. Below, I look at the overlapping claims on the remains, and the tensions and conflict between them. I am particularly concerned here with the disembodied portrayal of the human remains as evidence, used to convict those responsible for the disappearances. The concept of'bodies as evidence' comes into conflict with the claims over the dead which have been made based on personal relationships between grieving survivors and their loved ones. Additionally, the tension between collective projects of creating national memory and identity in Argentina, and the personal memories and histories of the dead, is made clear in the incompatibility of the various narratives concerning the human remains.

Historical background
In 1976 governmental power in Argentina was seized by the military in response to the social and political demonstrations and violent protest that were prevalent in the country. T h e military juntas that ruled Argentina until 1983 became known for their brutal response to the social unrest. Any perceived opposition was violently suppressed by kidnapping, torturing and murdering thousands of people, known as desaparecidos or the 'disappeared'. T h e exact n u m ber of disappeared is unknown but estimates range from 9,000 to 30,000 people abducted during the period of military dictatorship (Brysk 1994). T h e military justified their actions by claiming they were waging a 'dirty war' against subversion and terrorism ( C O N A D E P 1984). During this time the most forceful voices of protest came from a small group of moth147

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ers of the disappeared. In April 1977, the first demonstration against the disappearances was held by a group of fourteen mothers in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. The formation of this group, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, marked the beginning of a muted protest against the military's activities. Subsequently, some members of the group were themselves abducted. Despite this, they persisted in their criticisms of the junta, attracting new members and worldwide support. The original group subsequently fissured into different factions which are now part of a spectrum of human rights groups in Argentina, often made up of ex-detainees and relatives of the disappeared. (For a history of the Mothers and discussion of the gendering of the protest, see Agosin 1990; Bouvard 1994; Fisher 1989; Malin 1994, also Crossland forthcoming with reference to the forensic excavations.) The last junta collapsed in 1983 under pressure from human rights groups both within Argentina and abroad, but also substantially weakened by its economic policies which created a huge foreign debt leading to demonstrations and wage strikes. Subsequently there was a call for investigations into the crimes committed by the state. The newly elected democratic government set up a commission (CONADEP) headed by the writer Ernesto Sabato to compile evidence and testimony in order to bring those responsible to trial. As part of CONADEP's investigations, excavations of the mass graves were ordered by the courts at the end of 1983. The first excavations were carried out haphazardly and without archaeological consultation. The unearthed bodies could not be properly identified and human rights groups and lawyers demanded that professional forensic anthropologists excavate the remains. As a result experts were brought in from the USA to train Argentinian students in the techniques of forensic excavation, establishing the Equipo Argentino de Antropologia Forense (EAAF). In 1985 the results of their excavations were presented in the Federal Appeals Court trial of the junta leaders as evidence that people who had been reported as disappeared had been murdered by the military (see Joyce and Stover 1991 for a detailed account).

Provoking memory
Accompanying the investigations into the crimes of the military, has been a concern with the need to construct a new national communal identity, as was described in the New Yorker: 'our tragedy is that we have n o real sense of'we' in this country', a Presidential assistant w h o did not want to be quoted by name said to me. 'Most people who protest148 ed did so only after their own kin disappeared, not those of their neighbors'. 'Borges', he went on, 'once said that Argentina was not a nation but merely a territory where democracy was an abuse of statistics and where people occasionally had virtues as individuals but as social beings only defects'. (Elon, 1986). The search for 'truth' and 'justice' (the terms used at the time) was therefore contained within the idea of creating a new Argentina; leaving the crimes of the past behind and moving into a unified and peaceful future. The choice of a well-known writer and novelist to head C O N A D E P underlined the perceived need to construct a new national narrative of truth and

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reconciliation for Argentina; equally Sabato's scientific training also situated him as an ethical and independent candidate to head the commission. These dual perceptions echoed the concerns of the forensic excavations. As the above quotation indicates, this national reconstruction was, and still is placed within the context of an emphasis by Argentina's government on national unity, with the subsequent downplaying of dissenting voices (e.g. Sims 1998). The attempted writing out of difference and dissent from this 'national' project has directly affected the perception of the excavations, particularly in the light of recent legislation. During the late 1980s and 1990s the role of the forensic excavations became the focus of increasing controversy as Argentina's democratically elected government passed a variety of bills to call a halt to prosecutions of the military. President Alfonsin's creation of a statute of limitations in 1986 effectively halted all legal actions concerning military crimes during the repression, and President Menem's subsequent series of decrees, culminating in 1990, pardoned the last few officers remaining in prison. This meant that people who had been convicted using the archaeological forensic evidence provided by the EAAF were subsequently released without serving their full terms of imprisonment. The release of those culpable for the disappearances meant that, in the eyes of the media and much of the public, the excavations no longer played a role in searching for 'justice' and 'truth' through punishment of those responsible. Instead the archaeologists focused on providing grieving relatives with the remains of their loved ones and also on maintaining a public memory of the disappeared and the criminal acts of the juntas. Other human rights groups also had to adapt to reflect these changing circumstances, leading to much debate over how to react to the changes, and the creation of differing factions from within groups (Christian 1987a;Jelin 1994, 39). Prompted by the perceived lack of justice and the impunity of the officers of the junta, some human rights groups even went so far as to claim that the archaeological excavations were complicit in the pardons. The Association of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (composed of many of the original group of the mothers of the disappeared) was the most vocal in opposing the excavations. This group placed an advertisement in a Buenos Aires newspaper saying: 'The compromise reached by the government to pardon the genocists is the same as that authorised by the judges who exhume human remains... With these tactics they implement the forgetting and reconciliation required by the murderers' (1989, 6).2 The logic of this argument is not immediately apparent. The advertisement itself is startling precisely because the excavations were undertaken in order to provide the courts with evidence against those responsible for the repression. It therefore seems incongruous for this group of Mothers to argue that they are contributing to forgetting what happened. However this negative reaction to the excavations may be better understood when it is placed in the context of the collision of different and incompatible narratives created around the remains, by the courts, the media, archaeologists and relatives of the disappeared.

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Bodies as evidence
The forensic excavations captured the public's imagination, both in Argentina and abroad. A significant aspect of the EAAF's work that received media attention was their role in creat-

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ing an alternate form of narrative about the years of the repression. The visible, tangible proof of state-sponsored murder that they provided could challenge the lies, rumours and silences of the years of the 'dirty war'. When, after an abduction, people demanded to know the whereabouts of their relatives, they were often met with silence, secrecy and obfuscation. Sabato described the resulting uncertainty in the introduction to the C O N A D E P report: 'Days, weeks, months, years went by, full of uncertainty and anguish for fathers, mothers and children, all of them at the mercy of rumours and desperate hopes' (1984, 3). At the San Vicente cemetery in Cordoba, morgue workers were instructed not to release any information on those buried in a mass grave to families (Salama 1992, 34). In a country where Viola could make pronouncements like '...there are no political prisoners in Argentina' (quoted in the C O N A D E P report), and '...it must be understood that there has not been...any violation of human rights' (quoted in Salama 1992,45-6) - while thousands of people were being forcibly taken from their homes - there was a perceived need to confront these statements, not with other verbal statements and memories, but with the unambiguous testimony of murdered people; testimony that could not be denied or ignored. This was often framed in terms of the dead 'bearing witness from beyond the grave' (e.g. Green 1986, Joyce and Stover 1991). Clyde Snow, the principal forensic anthropologist underlined this:' ...in many ways the skeleton is its own best witness' (Joyce and Stover 1991, 268). This emphasis on the skeleton as providing an alternate form of testimony fitted well with the primary role of the excavations in the late 1980s, which was to provide supporting material that could be used in court to convict the guilty. It is therefore unsurprising that the bodies excavated by the EAAF came to be consistently described in the media and in court in terms of'evidence'. For the courts, in order to convict the officers of the junta, it was expected that the details of the excavations be presented independently and unambiguously. Thus the privileged narrative mode in the courts and the media for the results of the excavations was one of empirical scientific study.'Clyde Snow presented the forensic findings...at the trial of Argentina's nine former military leaders in April 1985. Such expert testimony provides the courts with objective and scientific evidence critical to convicting those responsible for the deaths of the disappeared' (Snow et al. 1989, 48). This was seized upon by the print media, particularly the North American and British press, which emphasised the search for facts and created narratives around the archaeologists in which they were often described as 'detectives'. Time reported: 'The task of identifying victims involves as much police work as forensics and anthropology' (Lopez 1989, 52). For The independent magazine, in an article entitled The body hunters, Unsworth wrote: 'This data base is unique. Not only does it aid the team's detec150 tive work, it also presents information in a cold scientific light, quite devoid of ambiguity' (1989, 35). Joyce and Stover, in their book entided Witnesses from the grave: the stories bones tell, describe the EAAF as 'bone sleuths' (1991, 265) and describe Snow as calling for forensic anthropologists to 'heed the call of our favourite fictional prototype: "Quick Watson, the game's afoot!'"This conception of archaeologists as scientist-detectives, and the material they excavate as 'evidence' is a dominant theme in popular media accounts of archaeologists in general (see Shanks andTilley 1987, 6-7), but is particularly current in accounts of forensic excavations. It illustrates the emotional distance between those reading and writing the popular accounts of crimes solved through forensics, and the human beings that are die subject of those accounts.

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This positiojj/argues that as people make sernse of the life am death of the deceased, they^are also engagan in the negotiation ano>r6n>floJjaUon of their own/and others' positions witrrfn the living nmunity. Thousands of Human beings...fell hto the sinister^-ghostlyXcategory of the
b e s a p a r e c i d o s >y(alogf>usly, tub process of archaeological /excavation and the anfitysis *f humanVemain'Sjffe also tmpttcated the creation anp marhtenanjbe nf nondi an6 political

idationships. then ttrgre are nounore disappeared, only

sad people a t t ^ p t i nV

to

reconnect

identities wi t \ \ anonymous bodies Depending on the social iwduitfHx and present-day perceptions ol the dead, their rVemsrgerrcfinto tbii living community may go relatively ulnoliceJL orltojlje highly

__pW is th&wtriFhave no real sense of 'we' in this country The compromise reached by the government to pardon the genocists is th same as that authorised 6y the Judgie who exhume human remains bodies as evidence ill many ways the skeleftfffisltscSwa^bcst witness objective wid scientific evidence crittlml to convicting those responsible This data base is unique. NSt only does it
aid the team's W c t i v e this has keen an enniianahexperieflce lor US all we musLfind stories of resistance and struggte in the everyday lives oMhosefcarjipaneros...and not in the silence of their bones yfhal arcwe going to do with bones? Through excavationJHe dea^are effectively brought back into the rdalm

of the livjiig I became very moved because I had found my son. The excavations were another part of the ' strategy. The example of the disappeared in fta demoristratesj>w the bodies of these people have kn used foKfnestory of the Des^ajjarecujars to ^conclude, thtgrayw-ffiu^J ultimatelVbeTflied. and trie ways in whicfithey are perceived may be yansformed as relationships within and betweentt\eliving comrWtnity and the dead are constructed and negotiateoV'Make her disappear" says one of the characters, ]^Hirn her iifto a dead woman

Although the popular media frequently placed heavy emphasis on the detachment of the archaeologists from the remains they excavated, this belied the often emotional and sometimes traumatic experience of the excavators themselves. In contrast to the way that the excavation results were portrayed in court and in the press, the excavators found that they felt a personal connection with the people they unearthed.The forensic anthropology team (EAAF) members had lived through the years of the repression and were aware that their own position in the early years of the democratic government was precarious. Any re-establishment of military rule would have threatened the population with disappearances again, and the members of the EAAF would have been directly at risk. As such they depended on the stability of the recently formed democratic government. However, soon after the EAAF was established, in April

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1987, President Alfonsin's government was threatened by a military rebellion which erupted after an army Major refused to answer charges of human rights abuses (see reports in the New York times for April 1987 by Christian and Riding). As such the EAAF had a complicated and personal understanding of the role of the excavations and of the people they excavated. A particularly marked example of the personal involvement of the EAAF members in the excavations was the realisation by Alejandro Inchaurregui that one of his friends was among the list of people buried at one cemetery (Joyce and Stover 1991, 295). However, as Patricia Bernadi commented:'... this has been an emotional experience for us all' (Michaud 1987, 18). In Tumbas anonimas, the official account of the excavations, Mauricio Cohen Salama (1992) emphasises that the principal objective of the Forensic Archaeology team was to try to return the names and histories to those from w h o m they had been stolen. This contrasts with the interests of the media and courts, who portrayed the bodies as evidence, used to bring those responsible to trial. In its emphasis on the names and stories of the people they excavated, the account of the excavations moved away from an excavation report that treated the remains as data, and instead tried to integrate the people as they were in life with their remains.This represented an attempt to relocate the disappeared in society; re-establishing them within the network of human relationships that was ruptured when they were abducted. Ironically, the attempts by the EAAF to remember the individual histories of those they excavated, and to engage with them as people rather than as bodies or as evidence, came into conflict with certain human rights groups who actively seized the concept of bodies as evidence, rather than people, and who have used this as a strategy to keep the disappeared in the public eye. In contrast to the way it was portrayed by the popular media, and as is reinforced by the experiences of the excavators, the 'data base' produced by the Forensic Archaeology team is clearly not 'devoid of ambiguity'.The 'evidence' is not simply 'data'; it is also people.This may appear to conflate different conceptions of'ambiguity'. While the empiricist tradition drawn upon in the courtroom considers facts as unambiguous, in so far as the correct methodology is used and an objective position is maintained, this does not extend to claims that the social and political interpretations which may be made of these facts will be unambiguous. Indeed, an empirical approach is held up as prior to, and standing aside from, these interpretations. Much has been written on the theoretical difficulties of scientific approaches based on an empiricist foundation; and I do not need to labour the point that facts are theoryladen. This is one aspect of the 'ambiguity' of the excavated human remains which was consistently and understandably - played down in the courts and subsequently in media accounts.This is not to assert that the truth claims that were made, based on the evidence of 152 the bodies of the disappeared, are invalid. Although observed facts are clearly informed by context and theory, they can still be used critically in the construction of arguments that can contest or evaluate claims about the past (see Wylie 1996). Rather, I am more concerned here with the idiom of bodies as evidence that derives from popular understandings of the empiricist tradition. In particular, I want to trace the ways in which the idea of bodies as evidence has been used in the creation of the disappeared as individuals, as bodies and as political symbols. Herein lies another ambiguity particular to human remains; in the disparity between the way that they are perceived simultaneously as objects and as people.

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Conflicting narratives The attempts of the EAAF to return the histories and identities of the disappeared to the human remains that they excavated was a strategy intended to combat the violent effect of the act of'disappearance'. Part of the purpose and outcome of the disappearances was to deny agency to those whom the military regime perceived as a threat. To achieve this the disappeared were taken out of society, hidden and refused a voice. Dr Norberto Liwsky, an exdetainee, described the experience of being disappeared in the CONADEP report:'We were objects. And useless troublesome objects at that. They would say 'You're dirt.' Since we 'disappeared'you, you're nothing. Anyway, nobody remembers you.'"You don't exist."...' (1984, 25). Elaine Scarry in The body in pain notes that 'political power entails the power of selfdescription' (1985, 3) and clearly this power of self-description is not available to the dead or the disappeared. The description of people who had their identities taken away from them by the state, as 'data' or 'evidence', had the effect of re-inscribing this lack of identity, re-creating the disappeared again as objects rather than human subjects, divorcing their physical remains from their histories, homes and families. The Association of Ex-detainees and Disappeared recognised this when they stressed that'.. .we must find stories of resistance and struggle in the everyday lives of those companeros... and not in the silence of their bones.' (1988) This statement reflects attempts to remember the disappeared as they were in life, rather than as they were created in death. It claims that the bones are effectively silent because they are divorced from the people who inhabited them. This directly contests the idea of skeletons as witnesses, as being able to 'speak'. The disconnectedness between the physical remains of the disappeared and the idea of the person as he or she was in life illustrates the paradox elaborated by Turner (1996, 219) that humans both have and are bodies. Because these humans had died, it was assumed for the purposes of the courts that the physical body was of primary importance, and that the inhabited body no longer existed, and was in any case largely irrelevant. Unfortunately this echoed the strategy used by those responsible for the repression, of making people - embodied beings - into objects or bodies which could then be disposed of and manipulated by the state. The references by some human rights groups to the excavations as producing 'only bones' demonstrate an awareness of how the use of the human remains as evidence has served to erode the memories and identities of individuals who have been disappeared. One of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Beatriz de Rubinstein explains her perception of the role of the excavations: 'They used a team that had come from the United States to identify the remains. The bones don't interest us. What are we going to do with bones?' (Fisher 1989,128-9) In stressing this, they themselves have appropriated and propagated the disjunction between the remains and the individual. To understand this position it is necessary to look at what happens when the disappeared are identified and reburied.

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Burying the disappeared In a newspaper interview Berta Schubaroff explained how when her son Marcelo was kid-

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napped, 'At that point, my life ended'. It was not until the EAAF identified his remains that she felt able to grieve and to resume her life. She described her reaction on receiving his remains:'...I became very moved because I had found my son. I began to kiss him, kiss all of his bones, touch him, and caress him. But the feeling was mixed with pain, because now that I had found him, I knew that he was dead... I lived the wake and burial as if he had died only yesterday' (Kisilevski 1990, 8)'. Significantly this intimately embodied understanding of the dead contrasts with the disembodiment of the dead which underlies the idea of bodies as evidence 4 . Others who received the remains of their loved ones also discuss the need to see and bury the physical remains in order to come to terms with their death. Karina MannTs family was abducted when she was a child. She explained in an interview in Pagina 12, that only after finding their remains could she feel at peace, as finally, along with the remains of her family, she recovered a sense of her own identity (Verbitsky 1993, 9)'. Thus in a personal sense, as people are united with the remains of their loved ones, there is a final coming together of the bones and the disappeared person. One scholar, Andrea Malin, considers the psychological aspects of the lack of knowledge of the whereabouts of the physical remains of the disappeared for relatives. She cites Chaim Shatan's work on genocide to emphasise the importance of the mourning process for individuals i n ' . . .helping the mourner let go a missing part of life and acknowledging that it continues to exist only in memory' (1994,196-197). However, this is not seen as a positive contribution by all the mothers and relatives.The 'closure' allowed by the identification and reburial of a disappeared individual releases many relatives from the struggle to find out what happened to their children and concomitantly, at least in the eyes of some, it lessens the desire to seek punishment for those responsible. Beatriz de Rubinstein explained their position: 'The excavations were another part of the government's strategy. It's very difficult for a mother who has received the remains of her child to go on fighting...' (Fisher ibid.). Clearly the members of the EAAF would vigorously deny that their work was part of a strategy created by the government to cover up the crimes of the military government. Yet, it is indisputable that, as David Lowenthal notes: '...the memorial act implies termination. We seldom erect monuments to ongoing events, or to people still alive' (1985, 323). This comment is particularly salient in the context of understandings of the disappeared in Argentina. The legislation brought in by Alfonsin's government to call a halt to prosecutions of the military was known as the 'Full Stop'. The idea of a chapter in Argentina's history being closed and becoming of the past is anathema to many Argentinians who still do not know what happened to their relatives, and who see those responsible at liberty and apparently unpunished. The acts of exhumation, subsequent reburial and completion of funerary rites therefore 154 have a social and political significance that goes beyond the individuals involved. The funerary ritual surrounding the remains of the disappeared has the effect of remaking the world as the dead take their 'proper' place in individual and collective memory becoming of the past, rather than of the present; of the dead, rather than of the living: for the story of the desaparecidos to conclude, the graves must ultimately be filled. Forensic anthropology and organisations such as the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo make their contributions toward that end, attempting to reconnect identities with anonymous bodies and to thereby fill in haunting voids. (Graziano 1992, 188)

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Although this act of sanctified burial and commemoration relocates the disappeared person within society, it is clearly incompatible with certain constructions of the disappeared. Each burial and ceremony incrementally brings the nation as a whole closer to closure, while leaving those responsible unchallenged. The memorial act implies tacit consensus through public participation in the ceremonies of the wake and funeral. It can therefore be seen as creating a stabilising and dominant view of the dead disappeared as their relationship to the past is confirmed. The disappeared are often referred to as ghosts, such as in the CONADEP report, ('...Thousands of human beings...fell into the sinister, ghostly category of the desaparecidos...') and this partly derives from their liminal state, belonging neither to the world of the living nor of the dead; their ghostliness intensified by the lack of any funerary rites to mediate their transition from one world to another. Huntington and Metcalf note, after van Gennep, that it is in the context of death that liminality has the most autonomy aside from its ritual context. The fundamental ambiguity of the transformation from life to death can lead to the creation of ghosts, and this has been capitalised upon by some interest groups. Another mother, Graciela de Jeger explained: 'we don't agree with the exhumation of the bodies. With the exhumations they want to eradicate the problem of the disappeared, because then there are no more disappeared, only dead people' (Fisher 1989, 128-129).The recognition that the disappeared are a 'problem' as long as they are neither alive nor dead, illustrates how human rights groups - such as the Association of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have taken the violent act of'disappearance' and subverted it, by refusing to 'find' the disappeared unless they reappear alive. The excavations directly negate this strategy. Not only do the exhumations locate disappeared individuals without truly 'reappearing' them, but after burial and commemoration, the disappeared no longer exist in a powerfully liminal state. These interest groups have therefore maintained and exaggerated the separation between the physical remains of the dead and their lived histories, in order to contribute to the disembodiment of the disappeared. The problematic nature of this ghostliness plays a vital role in maintaining the memory of the abuses of the military, and in preventing the creation of a new national identity based on leaving the years of the 'dirty war' behind in the past.

Politicised death
Although the refusal to admit the deaths of the disappeared is a new strategy created by certain human rights groups in response to the military's crimes, this fascination with the dead as a site for exploring issues ofArgentina's politics and identity is not confined to the disappeared. The palpable embodiment and politicisation of human remains appears to be a particularly Argentinian understanding of bodies after death. This contrasts with the disembodied dead body of present day Euro-American Protestant traditions, as exemplified in media accounts of the disappeared. There is almost a tradition in Argentina of using the corpses of national luminaries to legitimise or criticise a political position or group. Various political figures have been exhumed, mutilated or put on display after death Eva Peron's corpse is a particularly wellknown case. Her body disappeared after her death and was finally returned from Europe in

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1974 where it had been held after confiscation by the Argentinian military. Tomas Eloy Martinez's recent novel addresses this. 'Evita turned into a story' he writes. Although the corpse was hidden in order to counteract the powerful and subversive rumours and narratives that were created around Eva Peron after her death, Martinez suggests that it actually propagated her myth. 'Make her disappear' says one of the characters: 'turn her into a dead woman' even though she is already dead (1997, 13,16). Another example is that of Juan Manuel de Rosas, governor of the Province of Buenos Aires in the first half of the nineteenth century. Rosas ruled as de facto populist dictator of the nascent Argentine nation-state until 1852 when he was forced from power and fled to England where he died in exile. In 1989 President Carlos Menem brought his remains back to Argentina as a palliative to ease through the pardons of the military (Grazianao 1992, 188-9; Sims 1996). By making explicit a connection between the military's actions and the violent acts committed by Rosas during his rule, Menem hoped to create consensus around the pardons, portraying both circumstances as historical and of the past. The state ritual around Rosas s body was thus the focal point of the act of forgetting the past and moving on to the present and future. By enacting state sanctioned ritual around the remains of Rosas, an attempt was made by the government at 'fixing' public understandings of his remains, and stabilising the nation's understanding of his past, the recent past of the 'dirty war', and by extension the national identity of Argentina as a whole. These uses of corpses echo Taylor's observation that in objectifying people who had been abducted as 'missing', the military erased their individual identities through creating a new and stronger signifier of desaparecido (1997, 142). As with Evita, they were turned into a story.The excavation of the disappeared has played into this 'tradition' of using the corpses of the dead for political ends, as yet again the bodies of the dead become powerful symbolic sites, at the centre of societal struggle over memory and forgetting.

Concluding remarks
The ways in which the forensic excavations have been interpreted and used by different groups in the service of various political positions illustrate how any interpretive position taken by archaeologists can be appropriated or challenged.While detached objectivity cannot provide a refuge from the debates and complexities of the forensic excavation of human remains, equally it would be naive to suppose that any other more nuanced and locally sensitive position will not also be open to interpretations that may not be compatible with those of the archaeolo156 gists. However, a movement away from the seductive certainty of empiricism allows a better understanding of the ways that bodies are created as objects within society, and the effects of this production upon the individuals concerned. The archaeology of human remains is part of a network of embodied practices, including excavation, analysis and reburial which are implicated inextricably in the regulation and recreation of society and individuals. The example of the disappeared in Argentina demonstrates how the bodies of these people have been used, first by the military governments in attempting to construct Argentina as a homogeneous society without dissenting voices, and later by the democratically elected governments in reconstructing Argentina as a unified country reconciled with its past. Some human rights groups also used

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the bodies to denounce the 'forgetting' propagated by the democratic government, playing on the archaeological creation of bodies as evidence to do this, and characterising the remains as simply bones rather than people. This may be understood as part of attempts to create a national memory of the repression by maintaining the powerful liminality of the disappeared. These 'collective' projects have collided with individual understandings and memories of the people who were disappeared by relatives and by the archaeologists who excavate them.

Acknowledgements

This paper has been a long time in the writing. As such these acknowledgements will be a little lengthy. My first thanks must go to Dario Olmo and Patricia Bernadi of the EAAF for taking the time to tell me about their work and to show me the excavations at Avellaneda in early 1992, and for the encouragement to write this paper. Marcela Malmierca kindly translated it into Spanish. A preliminary version of this paper was first given at TAG96. Thank you to John Carman for his last-minute inclusion of the paper in the Archaeology of violence session. Since then, the paper has been substantially reworked and thanks are overdue to the following for critical comments on various drafts: Susan Alcock, Brian Boyd, Fernando Coronil, Kathy Fewster, James Herron.John O'Shea, Norman Yoffee and Henry Wright. This paper also benefitted from the helpful suggestions of the anonymous reviewers and editors of Archaeological Dialogues. Thanks also to the members of the Lampeter Staff and Postgraduate Seminar series for their comments on a related presentation and to Sarah Tarlowforher encouragement to submit the paperforpublication.

Notes
A version of this paper, translated into Spanish by Marcela Malmierca of the Institute of Anthropological Science, University of Buenos Aires, is available, on request, k>m the author. See also the advertisement placed by the families of the Disappeared and Detained for Political Reasons, Pagina 12, 1990 '...Primero yo no me di mucha cuenta, pero de pronto me vi frente a sus huesos, y tuve una sensacion tan extrana.Senti que estaba emocionada porque encontre a mi hijo.Yo volvi a besarlo, bese todos sus huesos, lo toque, lo acaricie. Pero la emocion se confundia con el dolor, porque una vez lo encontre, resulta que estaba muerto. Entonces llore la muerte de mi hijo y esos trece afios de biissqueda desaparecieron, no puedo conectarme con ese lapso de tiempo.Vivi un velorio y un enttierro como si su muerte hubiese occurrido ayer.' It may also be argued that the idea of bodies as evidence derives in part from body-soul
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dichotomies current in the U.S. and Europe, but this is beyond the scope of the current paper. 'Yo soy Manfil... Lo mas importante es que junto con ellos me recuperaron me identificaron a mi.'

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