[Archport] O caso Veleia: fraude ou ciência no país Basco?

[Alexandre Monteiro <no.arame@gmail.com>]

Archaeology, Volume 62 Number 5, September/October 2009


(texto e fotografias: http://www.archaeology.org/0909/insider/index.html)


The Veleia Affair
by Mike Elkin

Have researchers in Spain's Basque Country made the find of a
lifetime, or committed a very expensive fraud?

Up the stairs and against the back wall of Molly Malone's Irish pub in
Vitoria, Eliseo Gil and I speak discreetly. Sporting a white beard and
a tattered baseball cap, Gil may be trying to keep a low profile. He
was the lead archaeologist investigating the Roman city of
Iruña-Veleia in the Basque region of northern Spain when a series of
spectacular finds were made, turning him into a celebrity of sorts. In
June 2006, Gil was a daily fixture in the Spanish press. One headline
ran, "A discovery of this magnitude comes along once every two
generations."

At a series of press conferences here in his hometown, Gil announced
the discovery of several pottery sherds and other artifacts dating to
around the third century a.d. with some remarkable graffiti scratched
into them. One sherd depicted the Calvary scene, making it one of the
oldest images of Christ's crucifixion. Some animal bones were engraved
with the name of Egyptian queen Nefertiti, while inscriptions written
in hieroglyphics and Latin appeared on other sherds. Also found were
the earliest messages written in the Basque language.

"The first exceptional artifact that I held in my hands I saw being
taken right out of the ground, and it had a series of symbols that at
first glance looked like hieroglyphics," Gil, who peppers his speech
with Spanish idioms, tells me. "Imagine the impact I felt finding
something like that in a Roman context!"

The discoveries could have transformed Veleia from a city on the
periphery of the Roman Empire to a cultural crossroads that would
revolutionize our understanding of almost the entire ancient
Mediterranean region. Likewise, the ancient Basque texts would warrant
both archaeological and cultural celebration. While the origins of
this non-Indo-European tongue are murky, the Basque language is
important to the ethnic identity of the region's 2.1 million
inhabitants, many of whom consider themselves more Basque than
Spanish. These Basque Rosetta Stones helped rally excitement around
the so-called "exceptionals," as some of the more spectacular
inscribed sherds are known.

During the summer of 2006, Gil, often flanked by historians and
linguists from the Universidad del País Vasco (UPV) in Vitoria, touted
the finds. Radiocarbon testing on bones from the same archaeological
layer as the artifacts confirmed the date range. And an analysis of
the patinas that coated the sherds conducted at France's Centre
National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), showed that the
inscriptions were made before the pottery was buried. The experts'
reputations and the appearance of hard, scientific data helped deflect
skepticism.

Today, however, Gil is facing criminal charges in three courts for
fraud and attacks on national heritage.

Six miles west of Vitoria, the city of Veleia was settled in the
Bronze Age, around 1000 b.c. During the first two centuries a.d., it
expanded into a Roman city covering 200 acres inside a long meander of
the Zadorra River, located on the Roman road from Asturica Augusta
(Astorga) to Burdigala (Bordeaux). Around the end of the third
century, however, as Roman Hispania began to decline, the city shrank
to about 30 acres, protected by a wall almost a mile long.

Gil and Idoia Filloy, his codirector and ex-wife, began working at
Veleia in 1994 through their private archaeology firm Lurmen with
permission from the Álava provincial government. In 2001, they
embarked on a new plan to reevaluate and expand excavations that were
carried out in the 1950s and 1970s, find the outer limits of the city,
and conserve the structures that were already exposed. The 10-person
crew, plus a number of short-term archaeologists (usually eight), and
40 summer volunteers, focused on two Roman manors, known as the Domus
Pompeia Valentina and the Domus of the Rose Mosaic. The team also
excavated areas inside the city wall, and dug nearly 300 test pits
outside of it. Regional public train companies agreed to fund the new
plan over 10 years with [euro]3.7 million (about $5.2 million today).

Around 600 pieces of pottery, bone, brick, and glass carved with
graffiti, the "exceptionals" were uncovered during the 2005 and 2006
field seasons. According to Gil's archaeological report, in the Domus
Pompeia Valentina the crew found 270 pottery sherds inscribed with
graffiti among the 9,000 sherds from a single archaeological layer in
the semi-basement of one room. Another 75 graffiti were found in the
Domus of the Rose Mosaic, and the remaining graffiti came from two
areas inside the city's wall and several test pits outside of it.

Finding pottery sherd graffiti in Veleia is nothing new. Prior to
2005, excavations of the Domus Pompeia Valentina yielded around 360
graffiti, including one that gave the manor its name: POMPIIIAII
VALIINTINAII, using the cursive II for E (a trait that appears
frequently in the exceptionals). The majority of these graffiti were
marks or names to suggest ownership of the pot. The exceptional
inscriptions, however, include a dizzying array of themes in Latin,
Egyptian, and Basque. One of Gil's theories was that a Roman soldier
returned to Veleia with an eastern Mediterranean teacher who had his
students use pottery sherds as writing materials.

It would have been an unusual syllabus indeed, covering ancient Egypt,
the life and death of Christ, and Greco-Roman gods and rulers. One
inscription reads OCTAVIO AVGVSTO, a few pieces of pottery feature the
name "Deidre," others have what look like Egyptian hieroglyphics, and
on three animal bones are etched, respectively, NIIFIIRTITI,
NIIFIIRTARI, and RAMSIIS [or RAMSUS] SIITI FILIO.

During the initial euphoria over the discoveries, Gil was supported by
experts in ancient history, including Juan Santos, his former
professor at UPV, and Basque linguist and UPV professor Henrike Knörr.
Gil also asked Joaquín Gorrochategui, a professor of Indo-European
linguistics at UPV and an expert in ancient Basque, to inspect the
artifacts. Gorrochategui and other linguists have theorized how early
Basque sounded by working backward from modern regional dialects and
connecting the dots with Basque texts from the Middle Ages and Latin
inscriptions of Basque names from Roman Aquitania in southwestern
France. But as Gorrochategui tells me at a Vitoria café, Veleia's
Basque inscriptions seem too modern for the third century, and the
Latin inscriptions stand out for their odd grammar.

Eleven days after Gil gave his first press conference on the
artifacts, Gorrochategui says he delivered a letter expressing his
doubts to the head of the Álava Archaeological Museum, Amelia Baldeón,
who had a safe installed in her office to hold the artifacts. "She was
shocked," Gorrochategui says. "I said that I had seen only a handful
of pieces, so she showed me others and I saw ENIIAS, ANQVISIIS ET
VENVS FILI. This can't be. For one thing, there's a comma, which is
modern. And 'Eneas' should be written 'Aenae' and 'Venus' should be
'Veneris.' I had doubts about the Basque inscriptions, but it was
harder to confirm because of the scant information we have of ancient
Basque. But Latin is a different story. I decided that the Latin texts
were better explained in Spanish, and the Basque inscriptions better
explained in modern Basque. In the end, what explained everything was
that they were fakes."

Gorrochategui says he spoke to Gil about his doubts, but Gil cited the
archaeology and lab tests that supported the artifacts' authenticity.
And other experts backed Gil at the time. "Everything was so strange,"
Gorrochategui says. "Was Eliseo tricked? Are the tests wrong, or am I
wrong?"

Time passed and suspicions grew enough to cause the Veleia team,
including Santos and Knörr, to publish a letter in May 2007 on the
Veleia website: "The finds we are discussing... are from the Roman
period, and appear next to thousands of finds from the same period,
located in Roman stratification, under other layers from the Roman
period which enclose them. In addition, we have applied highly
specialized analytical techniques that demonstrate that the graffiti
were already made when these artifacts became buried, we insist,
during Roman times."

Santos and Knörr, however, would soon change their minds as more
exceptionals were studied. When a new government took over Álava
Province in May 2007, the head of the culture department convened a
panel of experts to tackle what was locally known as "the affair." The
commission, which held its first meeting in January 2008, included
Gil, Baldeón, the heads of the culture department, and around 10 UPV
professors in the fields of archaeology, linguistics, history,
chemistry, and nuclear engineering (including Gorrochategui, Santos,
and Knörr, before he died in April 2008). Later they would add experts
from Madrid, Italy, and Britain.

During the fifth and final meeting of the commission on November 19,
every report except Gil's found problems with the exceptionals. One
sherd has the modern Italian word CVORII (cuore or heart) carved into
it; some of the names inscribed appear more Spanish than Latin, such
as "Baco" instead of Bacchus and "Esculapio" instead of Aesculapius.
One of the most obvious problems is the letters RIP--for "Requiescat
in Pace"--inscribed on the cross in the crucifixion scene, which
contradicts the idea of Christ's resurrection. Also, one sherd bears
the incomplete name IISCAR in a list of ancient philosophers including
Socrates, Seneca, and Virgil. The commission experts believe it was
the name of 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes.

While the commission admits that there are probably some genuine
graffiti in the mix, the suspicious artifacts taint everything else. A
few hours after the final meeting, the Álava government suspended
Gil's permit and all activity on the site. The commission cost Spanish
taxpayers the equivalent of almost $80,000. Gil, for one, didn't think
it was money well spent.

"Well, on November 19 I didn't see any of their findings," Gil says.
"They read summaries. How can I reply when previously there was no
communication? There were some very interesting points of view, but
there are also many daring assertions. They have their arguments, but
while we argue our opinions do you think that we can accuse someone
and go to trial? They gave the politicians some examples to make
conclusions."

Nevertheless, several outside experts agree that certain graffiti
present serious problems.

"One strange thing is that we have adjoining sherds with graffiti on
one, but the inscription doesn't pass the break," says Dominic
Perring, director of the Centre for Applied Archaeology at University
College London and an advisor to the commission. "If you're selecting
sherds to write on, those sherds are separated from the ones that are
discarded. But the stratification doesn't show this separation. It
looks like the graffiti was a post-discovery activity. Of course
strange things happen, but it would be even stranger if they were
genuine."

Another apparently bogus inscription is OCTAVIO AVGVSTO. It fits the
sherd and deftly avoids the imperfections that the pottery developed
during the centuries it spent underground. Jonathan Edmondson,
professor of Roman history at York University, points out that the
name itself is problematic.

"When he became Augustus, he was no longer an Octavius," Edmondson
tells me. "When adopted by a family you lose the name of the previous
one." Before [Julius] Caesar adopted the man who would become his
successor, he was Gaius Octavius Thurinus, and afterward was Gaius
Iulius Caesar. It was only after consolidating his power in 27 b.c.
that he took the honorific title Augustus, making him Imperator Caesar
Augustus.

As Edmondson scans other photographs of the exceptionals, he says,
"And then there's dear old 'Deidre,' and that cannot be." The
commission highlighted this inscription as well because not only is it
a contemporary Irish name, but it's written with a capital "D" and the
rest of the letters in lowercase, a modern device. "I don't see much
ground for scoring any of them as genuine. There are too many
suspicious pieces."

Aidan Dodson, an Egyptologist at the University of Bristol, likewise
says the hieroglyphic symbols are not authentic. Concerning the
inscriptions referring to Ramesses, Seti, Nefertiti, and Nefertari, he
says, "These are clearly a joke. No one in classical antiquity would
transcribe Egyptian names like this. All classical references to
Egyptian kings use Greek forms that differ widely from modern
transcriptions, on which these are clearly based. And both queens had
been long forgotten by classical times. But I must say the whole idea
is bizarre. Hieroglyphs had become restricted to temple walls by the
end of the first century, and the Egyptian language as used then was
written in the cursive Demotic script, not hieroglyphs. Indeed, by
[the third century] there are likely to have been a limited number of
people who read and wrote hieroglyphs fluently in Egypt itself, let
alone running evening classes in the Iberian Peninsula. It all feels
to me like a scam of some kind."

Dodson's opinion coincides with the commission's Egyptian expert, but
not that of Gil's expert. In June 2006, Montserrat Rius from the
universities of Barcelona and Tuebingen verified the hieroglyphics at
a press conference. In late November 2006, however, history buff
Salvador Cuesta, who runs an online community dedicated to Veleia,
posted that he could not find Rius at either university. Soon the
cyber-sleuths discovered that Rius and her husband help fund a Spanish
excavation in Egypt. Aside from completing a course at a foundation
linked to Barcelona's Egyptian museum, she had no academic expertise
in Egyptology. "They ask for faith," Cuesta wrote of the Veleia
archaeologists, "but they feed my heresy."

>From the beginning, online historical communities such as Celtiberia
and Terrae Antiqvae have hounded the Veleia case, exchanging ideas,
information, and insults in tens of thousands of message board posts.
A forum fixture is Alicia Canto, professor of classical archaeology
and epigraphy at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

"It was the Internet that began to disseminate voices of skepticism,
and we had only around five photographs to look at," she says. "From
day one we issued caution."

The next online coup took place in November 2008. Cuesta, who works at
a water analysis laboratory, wrote that one of the graphs in the
Veleia patina report, which supposedly proved the inscriptions were
made before the sherds were buried, was actually a manipulated copy of
a sample graph advertised on the Internet by the German scientific
instrumentation company FAST ComTec. The measure time, real time, and
live time of the sample acquisition in the Veleia report, compiled by
physicist Rubén Cerdán for Gil, are identical to those of the FAST
ComTec graph, as is the date of acquisition: October 31, 1990.

Another forum participant snatched the baton and wrote to the German
company, which replied: "I agree that the picture of that [graph] is
copied from our datasheet...this [graph] is not a real measurement but
just a clumsy copy." The same day that Cuesta posted his discovery,
the Veleia webmaster replaced the tainted report with another one,
minus the graph.

The Álava government accuses Gil and crew member óscar Escribano of
attacks on national heritage. Escribano figures in the lawsuit because
he once etched the word "Veleia" onto a pottery sherd as a joke. Álava
also charges Gil and Cerdán with fraud. The public train companies
that funded the excavation have filed separate lawsuits against Gil
and Filloy on the grounds they committed fraud, and demand the return
of almost $1 million in funding.

Another nagging problem is that there is little evidence that the
exceptionals even came from the excavation site. So far, the original
field notes, excavation photographs, and results from the laboratories
have not been released. Félix López, the head of museums in Álava and
member of the commission, says the Álava government asked Gil for this
documentation but it is still waiting. He adds that, "We requested
information from the CNRS and they said there was not even a request
to conduct the [analytical patina] tests."

When I ask Gil about the graph, the CNRS, Cerdán, and evidence of
fraud, he says, "That's a very serious accusation, and they'll have to
prove that. Until now no one has shown me otherwise so I don't have
any other option except to believe [Cerdán's] reports."

Gil also tells me that the team didn't take many photographs and
didn't keep formal field journals--both are basic practices on
archaeological sites--but they might have kept notes. Miguel Ángel
Berjón and José Ángel ApellÁniz say otherwise. These two
archaeologists quit Lurmen in January 2007 following conflicts with
Gil. Berjón says that while working in the Domus of the Rose Mosaic he
filled around 10 notebooks. "In the original field notes we wrote you
won't see one mention of exceptional graffiti," ApellÁniz says. "I'm
convinced that the original notes no longer exist," Berjón adds. They
also claim that the exceptional inscriptions were discovered while the
artifacts were being cleaned in the lab. They never saw them in the
field.

Daniel Vallo, an archaeologist from Bilbao who worked on the Veleia
test pits from July to October 2006, says that his crew found one
sherd with the Latin alphabet carved into it.

"At first everyone believed [in the artifacts]," he says, "but it
began to sound fishy when I found out some of the graffiti that was
found while washing came from my work area. I was excavating with a
trowel, bear in mind. I might miss one or two, but not 20. So I
brought to the site one of those Chinese food tins to wash the sherds
as we removed them and we didn't find anything."

Not fazed by the mounting evidence against him, Gil's defense will
include "several sworn and signed testimonies from witnesses, among
other things, concerning the finding of certain artifacts," Gil tells
me. "I'm an archaeologist, I'm not the person who certifies the
authenticity of artifacts. We need to verify absolutely everything,
but I haven't seen anything to make me think they are fake...The only
thing I can do is put my faith in the justice system. Consciously or
unconsciously [the commission and the Álava government] have destroyed
my career."

The first hearing took place on June 30, a few days before this
article went to press. In court, Gil will likely try to pick apart the
commission's conclusions, and he might score a few victories.

"People have put too much faith in the commission," says Canto. "Its
reports are not completely reliable. Linguistics doesn't always
explain epigraphy. There are always exceptions. You can rarely say
that a certain word is impossible because, like now, people wrote
badly. But of course, there are texts like Deidre and CVORII that are
beyond salvation. And several of the commission experts at one point
believed [the inscriptions] to be authentic. How can they claim to be
experts when they swallowed this for so long?"

In addition, there has always been animosity between the Veleia team
and some members of the UPV archaeological department. Several
academics felt that such an important site (and its checkbook) should
not be managed by a private company. At the end of 2010, the Álava
government plans to present a new 10-year project for Veleia. Although
nothing is official so far, López says, authorities hope to forge an
agreement with UPV.

After three long years of scandal, archaeology is no longer trusted as
a science in the Basque Country. Will the courts' investigations
reverse the damage to the profession? And if the exceptionals are a
hoax, the questions on everyone's mind will be "Who?" and "Why?"

But for Ken Feder, a Connecticut archaeologist and author of Frauds,
Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, these
questions distract us from focusing on the analysis of the artifacts,
which is what really matters. "The people behind hoaxes," he says,
"are usually well-respected and you always hear, 'It couldn't have
been him, he would never do this.' Not knowing a motive is not an
argument for authenticity. There will be a smoking gun. The rest we
can leave to the psychologists."

Mike Elkin is a freelance journalist based in Madrid.