Arqueología en la época de las revoluciones liberales (1789-1876). Expresiones materiales de un conflicto secular y transcontinental entre la contemporaneidad y el mundo tradicional

A defining feature of the 19th century was the progressive emergence of a new world shaped by the Paris Revolution of 1789. This period was marked by the liberal-bourgeois revolution, which challenged traditional monarchical regimes and spread across both the Old and New Worlds, introducing a radically different societal model. This upheaval sparked a prolonged cycle of military conflicts, where supporters of both the old and new orders clashed on the battlefield in an effort to assert their dominance. This struggle is vividly reflected in the material culture of the time: 19th-century battlefields became arenas for the confrontation between the remnants of the traditional world and the birth of a new, modern reality. The objective of this article is to explore how this conflict—revolution versus reaction—manifested in the material culture of the period and how these material traces encapsulate its complexities, controversies, and ideological tensions. The study is grounded in conflict archaeology and takes a comparative approach to examine the material culture of Spain’s Carlist Wars—an emblematic example of these global conflicts. This analysis is further enriched through a broad comparative framework that includes case studies from Argentina, Mexico, the United States, Chile, Cuba, and Peru. This study is the first to approach the archaeology of the Carlist Wars from a comparative, transnational perspective. The article concludes with a discussion of the material dimensions of this conflict, offering a nuanced interpretation of a struggle that has often been oversimplified into rigid ideological binaries. The findings demonstrate that the material record itself embodies the disputes and contradictions that arose throughout this transformative historical period.