Memoria y olvido en la Historia de la Arqueología: recuperando la figura de Francisco Benítez Mellado (1883-1962), el gran ilustrador arqueológico

This article starts with a discussion of memory and forgetfulness in the history of archaeology. As obituaries are almost exclusively reserved to university professors and museum curators, this pushes most archaeology practitioners to oblivion. This essay aims to recover the memory of one of the latter, Francisco Benítez Mellado (1883-1962). This Córdoba-born archaeologist was trained as an artist painter by José García Ramos and the well-known Joaquín Sorolla. In 1915, however, he became a technician responsible for drawing both the material of many of the key prehistoric sites excavated in the first half of the 20th century and most of the major discoveries of prehistoric cave and rock art published by the major prehistorians at the time in Spain.