As a consequence of the 2022 fires in Corbera d'Ebre (Terra Alta), multiple skeletal remains from the Civil War period have emerged on the surface. During the last months, the Department of Justice, Rights and Memory, through the General Directorate of Democratic Memory, has received multiple notices of findings and has carried out urgent actions regarding its collection and recovery. However, due to the large volume of remains located, the Department has planned and executed archaeological interventions that could indicate the existence of graves hitherto unknown with aerial observations with drones.
In order to recover the maximum possible number of remains, an innovative test is being carried out that consists of an aerial scan of the 400 hectares affected by the fire around the Mas de la Pila area. It is a pioneering initiative developed with the collaboration of the Innovation Directorate of the Center for Telecommunications and Information Technologies.
In July, part of the test was carried out with a drone with three high-precision built-in cameras to capture space in high definition. The device took into account different electromagnetic spectrums, such as the visible, thermal and infrared spectrum. The images obtained are being analyzed with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, based on convolution neural networks, some of them already prepared to detect aerial images.
It is expected that in September an extension prospecting work will be carried out, with the support of the images captured by the drone, which will allow the collection of all the remains, both those reported and those that may have occurred. The survey will have an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, anthropologists and historians. In addition, it is also planned to locate other places likely to be excavated later, such as trenches or other spaces where the soldiers of the Ebre front lived and fought.
At the same time, during August three locations were excavated in the Mas de la Pila where remains often appear on the surface to try to locate possible burial places. In the first location, more than fifteen meters of trench have been excavated so far and remains have been located that could correspond to at least seven individuals.
Although the area is full of ravines and difficult to access, several trench lines built during the third or fourth Francoist counteroffensive (August and September 1938) are currently documented. Due to the fighting and the lack of resources of the republican army, many bodies were scattered and/or partially buried. It is for this reason that human remains appear recurrently. We remember that the Battle of the Ebro was the deadliest of the Civil War, with more than 30,000 deaths.
For all these reasons, the recovered bone remains will be the subject of archaeological, anthropological and genetic studies with the ultimate objective of identifying them and being able to return them to the families participating in the genetic identification program of the Generalitat of Catalonia.
The bone remains located on the surface, often associated with war contexts, represent a fairly relevant part of the interventions included in the action plan in graves. In fact, during the first semester of 2023, a total of 25 notices of human finds on the surface were registered in Catalonia, presumably related to the period of the Civil War.
In accordance with the current protocol, when the discovery of remains on the surface is reported, a team of archaeologists travels to the area to collect the remains and assess their context. These cases imply urgent actions that can alter the schedule of actions scheduled in the Pit Plan; however, they show a historical reality of the Civil War in Catalonia, in which a large part of the registered disappeared are soldiers killed on the front lines and precariously buried in graves outside the cemetery for which there is no data.
In addition, some types of current events can be used to expand the information on the map to new wells and locations that would otherwise be impossible to document. Currently, the network of graves has around 911 documented records, 57 of which correspond to the events of 2008 to collect remains on the surface from the period of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. Of these actions, 26 later led to the excavation of graves.
