Prof. Dr. Anna Kathryn Kendrick 

Rock, Fossil, Bone: Human Time and Deep History in Twentieth-Century Spain constitutes the first study of Spanish aesthetics of the deep past in the age of the Anthropocene, moving from the discovery of the Caves of Altamira in 1879 to the excavation of the oldest hominid fossils at Atapuerca in 1994 and the corresponding opening of the Museo de Evolución Humana in 2010. In the work of diverse artists and psychologists, poets and scientists, and curators and educators, this book project interrogates Spain’s archaeological heritage and argues for its centrality to twentieth-century national and cultural debates. Rock, Fossil, Bone shows how prehistoric imaginaries and Earth-centered representations of vast expanses of time offered both a way of responding to the violence of the Franco dictatorship and a renewed vision of Spanish society after the democratic transition of the 1970s. Conjoining gender, science, and prehistory with historical memory and justice, this research and book project posits the dignity of individuals outside the historical narrative through the imaginative and material vestiges of human ancestry in contemporary Spain.