The Veleia Affair	Volume 62 Number 5, September/October 2009
by Mike Elkin

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

After leading the Veleia project for 15 years, Eliseo Gil amazed the archaeological world with his discoveries, but now he must defend his "exceptional" finds in court. (Mike Elkin)

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 Iruna-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."

Translated into English, this inscription reads "Aeneas, son of Anquises and Venus." The use of a comma and the spellings of the names seem too modern to be Roman. (Mike Elkin)



Some of the inscriptions seem to conveniently avoid damage that was done to the pottery after it was buried. (Mike Elkin)

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 Pais 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.

Mike Elkin is a freelance journalist based in Madrid.

© 2009 by the Archaeological Institute of America
www.archaeology.org/0909/abstracts/insider.html

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