Layla Renshaw's book – examining the materiality and meaning of exhumed Republican graves from the Spanish Civil War – is the culmination of many years of combining anthropological and forensic archaeological research in the country. This book is substantially her 2009 PhD topic. She is a specialist in intertwining humanities and scientific methods to elucidate historic mass graves and is currently Senior Lecturer in Forensic Archaeology and Anthropology at Kingston University. This is a timely volume, not only in its truly interdisciplinary character but also with regard to the contemporary context of its Spanish setting. The previous ‘pact of silence’ ensured an uneasy consensus whereby the Civil War was not publicly discussed, but the exhumation of Civil War, particularly Republican, graves in recent years has been contentious in articulating demands for official recognition of historic atrocities. Because of its context and subject matter this research is in many ways groundbreaking. It is rare for someone to be so proficient in dealing with the scientific issues of forensic archaeology while simultaneously exposing the human and political aspects of anthropology. This volume effectively displays both her skills and reflexivity at being both the analyser and the analysed.

The volume has an unusual structure with a preamble, introduction, five substantive chapters and a conclusion. It begins by contextualising the subject chronologically through the politics of the Spanish Civil War, the so-called ‘pact of silence’, to the contemporary exhumation of bodies from mass graves. The initial preamble and introduction are not enumerated as chapters but are central to understanding both the academic context and the social importance of the two case-study exhumations to their contemporary society. Chapters 1 and 2 deal with Republican and then Francoist relationships and representations of the past – and each other – down to the present. They contain intricate detail and complexities in explaining why these mass graves were created and their continuing significance. Chapters 3–5 concentrate on the two case-study exhumations: ‘Villavieja’ and ‘Las Campanas’, which are two rural communities in Castile-León that suffered mass killings of Republican men in 1936. These chapters jump between the two case studies as Renshaw is guided by the chronology of the archaeological excavations: engaging with the processes and associated impacts of exhumation as a means of understanding enduring connections between the living and the dead. The recovery of artefacts as well as bodies through the processes of exhumation is central to interpretation of memory, meaning and loss as the narrative moves from the pre-exhumation materialisations of the dead, to the ‘Open grave’ and finally to the reburial of the bodies.

This book uses forensic techniques as the framing device but it is not a scientific examination that fetishises the grave goods or dehumanises the bones to the detriment of those who were bereaved. Instead the villagers – particularly the elderly generation who remember the awful events that led to the creation of these mass graves – are the central informants, subjects and lie at the heart of the text. The interdisciplinary nature of this project, which balances the processes of extraction and scientific examination and the emotional impact on local communities, ensures that one aspect must take precedence over the others. In a book of 259 pages decisions had to be made regarding the focus, which has resulted in the exclusion of the laboratory: the gap between Chapters 4 and 5 reveals a year-long hiatus between exhumation and the results of scientific examination. This major omission ensures that the volume is effectively an anthropology of mass-grave exhumation and, for the most part, this approach is warranted.

There is one further criticism of the volume, aimed at the publisher rather than the author, and this relates to the images. For such a visually engaged subject, which even has a section on the importance of photographs in maintaining relations between families and the mass graves (pp 177–83), there are only fourteen illustrations, and these are of small size and poor quality. They include powerful pictures of gunshot wounds to two crania (p 154): such emotive images need and deserve better reproductions.

Overall, this volume is a masterly achievement. That Renshaw is able to examine the exhumation of mass graves through multiple levels of interpretation is a credit to the quality of her fieldwork and her understanding of the places that she has researched. Her thoroughness particularly reveals the ambivalences and ambiguities of people's responses to the mass killings and their repercussions down to the present day, in a manner not always flattering to the subjects. To sustain this level of nuance for such emotive case studies without overstatement, sentimentality or imbalance is to be commended, both as a piece of writing and as an excellent anthropological study of the forensics of modern conflict archaeology.