Edward Harris, Director of the National Museum of Bermuda and author of the archaeological stratigraphic method used worldwide, knows perfectly the history of the archaeological site of Iruña-Veleia, since he personally visited it and participated in the 1st International Conference on Iruña-Veleia, where he saw that those who support the falsehood of the findings failed to go to defend their arguments, and, additionally, he requested from Eliseo Gil the field notebooks to see whether he had performed the excavation correctly or not.
In the letter he strongly asserts that in modern archaeology nothing like this has ever happened, that it is an utter disgrace to the archaeological profession, not only in the Basque Country, but also in the Europa, and that it is necessary to reinstate Eliseo Gil and the other archaeologists for the appropriate work that they have done.
It is impossible to forge the 400 graffiti from Iruña-Veleia
While I can make no pretence to understand all of the matters relating to the graffiti from Iruña-Veleia, your discussion of the extraordinary inept way in which this matter was handled by the authorities is extremely well argued and is a very important statement on the disgraceful proceedings which have resulted in the libel and slandering of several very professional excavating archaeologists.
One does not need to be an archaeologist to agree that these objects are authentic, for the bases for declaring them to be forgeries defies all logic and understanding of circumstances in which normal forgers operate, to say nothing of the total lack of monetary or other gain that supposedly should accrue to the archaeologists who allegedly created those 400 “masterpieces” of ancient graffiti.
The matter is an utter disgrace to the archaeological profession in the Basque Country, in Spain and indeed Europe. The way must be found to reinstate Eliseo Gil Zubillaga, Idoia Filloy Nieva and any other archaeologists who have been tarred with the hideous brush of being forgers, there being no earthly reason or motivation for them to carry out such an massive fraud on the archaeological community and indeed the world at large.
The defamation of the character of those individuals is without precedence in archaeology, and once would venture to state has NEVER been levelled at any EXCAVATING archaeologist in living or recorded memory, especially in the modern period, starting from the 1960s, when the stratigraphic method finally came to the fore as THE ESSENTIAL SCIENTIFIC METHOD for archaeological excavations, a process accelerated in the later 1970s with the publication of Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy in 1979, methods Gil and Filloy adhered to in their work.
The scientific fact of the matters is that stratification, as the great geologist Charle Lyell once wrote, is an unbiased record of the Past; that it is “undesignedly commemorative” of the Past, and if excavated correctly on an archaeological site, the archaeologist will recover its stratigraphic sequence, which is that unbiased (untouched by human hands) record of each archaeological site, its DNA, if you will.
One would have thought that in order to make a full and complete forgery, the archaeologists would also have for forge or fabricate the stratigraphic record of the site as well, but in the case of Iruña-Veleia, it appears that they did a very good job of recovering that unbiased record, that unbiased stratigraphic sequence—against which ALL later analyses of the site AND ITS CONTAINED REMAINS must be tested.
Since Gill and Filloy have recovered the stratigraphic sequences of their various trenches at Iruña-Veleia, it follows that if they state the “forgeries” were found at such and such positions in the sequences, that the artifacts are “true”, authentic, and datable in relation to the stratigraphic sequence and other artefacts and physical evidence found on the site. To suggest otherwise, given the 400-odd graffiti objects recovered would be to suggest a fraud that would have had to included everyone on the site, from the lowest-level diggers in the trenches, to the staff and conservators in the artefacts laboratories and offices, and indeed anyone who discovered or subsequently handled those objects in any way whatsoever.
Regarding apt suggestions about the extraordinary range of skills and knowledge that would be needed to produce the 400 “forgeries”, the Iruña-Veleia archaeologists would have to be some of the most outstanding geniuses in modern archaeology and should be given the best university chairs in the land, rather than being drummed out of the profession by those whose motivation beggars the imagination.
Edward Harris