Ground-Truthing Historical Memory

Virtually Reconstructing Destroyed Villages of the Salvadoran Civil War

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This lecture is sponsored by the Penn Cultural Heritage Center and the Penn Museum Library. The Penn Cultural Heritage Center is supported by the PennCHC Advisory Committee, the PoGo Family Foundation, and other donors.

During the Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992), the Salvadoran military and paramilitary groups deployed brutal scorched-earth tactics to discourage support for guerilla groups, leading to massacres and mass displacement. These actions left behind a landscape of destroyed and abandoned settlements, or "necroscapes." While a number of these sites now host commemorations and memorials to the victims and survivors, many others have faded entirely into obscurity—overgrown or lost to pastureland.

In this talk, Zack MacDonald discusses the efforts of the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador research initiative to record, preserve, and reconstruct these destroyed villages in collaboration with local survivor groups. The talk explores the team’s research blending historical memory and qualitative mapping with geospatial data and physical evidence to map and reconstruct these sites to create tools for education and healing.

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About the Speaker

Zack MacDonald is the Map Librarian for Archives and Special Collections at Western University in London, Ontario. His research focuses on the use of 3D and immersive technologies to virtually reconstruct historic landscapes, and how we can use these immersive reconstructions as tools for data discovery and access.