For the summer of 1995, Gibert again asked for permission to excavate in Venta Micena. He used the organisation of the conference as his main argument for receiving the permit.63 He finally got the permission that he had not received for the last five years, since 1990. Besides Venta Micena, Gibert’s team excavated in yet another site in the Orce Basin (Barranco León), where stone tools and a supposed hominid tooth were found. But getting the excavation permit after five years was not Gibert’s only achievement. In order to organise the conference, he managed to get over 5 million pesetas (more than 30,000 euros) from the Junta de Andalucía and 2 million from the Diputación de Granada, plus one and a half million from the central government science ministry.64 This money allowed Gibert to invite several international scientists to Orce, as we shall see. The proceedings were published some years later thanks to money provided by the Diputació de Barcelona.65 But, why did Gibert have so many difficulties in getting excavation permits and funding before 1995, to then later get those permits and that funding from the Junta? The answer to this question is in many ways political and originates back in the early days of the controversy.
After the first controversy, around 1986, the two main scientists from Granada that were working with Gibert (Isidro Toro and Pascual Rivas) left the team.66 From then on, they became very critical of Gibert’s management. Both were members of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), the socialist party that governed Andalusia during those years. In 1984, Toro became the archaeologist for the Junta in Granada’s provincial Department of Culture. Rivas, besides being rector of the Universidad de Granada between 1989 and 1992, became a member of the Archaeology and Heritage Committee for Andalusia between 1985 and 1996. According to ABC, in
62 OCVR 1995 and Gibert 1999, 10.
63 AJG-ICP: Letter from Gibert to Manuel García León, 2 May 1995.
64 AJG-ICP: Conference expenses sheet, no date, from now on n.d.
65 ADB: Letter from Gibert to Manuel Royes, 8 February 1993. The Conference Proceedings: Gibert et al. (eds.) 1999.
66 See section 2.5.
1994 Rivas was in charge of this committee which wrote the negative reports that led to the Orce excavation permit denial.67 Naturally, neither Pascual Rivas nor Isidro Toro attended the conference.
According to Lluís Gibert, since 1986, and with the exception of 1990, these two characters and their political influences blocked all of Gibert’s requests for excavation permits in Venta Micena and for funding from the Junta de Andalucía.68
But something happened in the Andalusian elections in 1994: the PSOE lost their absolute majority. Although its candidate, Manuel Chaves, became the president, it was a very weak government. From 1994 until 1996, the second political force, the Partido Popular (PP), the Spanish conservative party, and the third political force, Izquierda Unida (IU), a left-wing coalition set up in 1986, unofficially joined forces in what was known as the ‘clothes peg’ (pinza).69 During those years, this strange combination of power between the conservatives and the left blocked several PSOE proposals and put forward several others against the governing party’s wishes. One of the proposals moved forward without the government’s approval was to give support to the Orce conference. Several reasons led IU and the PP to support the Orce research project. Firstly, as we saw in the first chapter, Josep Gibert was a member of the Catalan Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC) and later of the communist Partit dels Comunistes de Catalunya (PCC). Both political parties later joined Iniciativa per Catalunya (IC), the Catalan version of IU.70 Secondly, the conservative party’s desire to go against the PSOE also led to its support. As we shall see, the PP’s support for Gibert would continue after the 1995 conference. Thirdly, Gibert’s own strategy was fundamental. Sometime before the conference, Gibert sent a letter to Francisco Ríos, IU representative in the Junta de Andalucía. In this letter, Gibert presented a legislative proposal to Ríos with the title ‘The Development of Orce and its Surroundings through a Prehistoric Park’.71 Gibert first explained the uniqueness of Orce and his scientific team’s achievements and then presented other examples of prehistoric parks in Europe, mainly in Tautavel in France, where de Lumley worked. Finally, Gibert requested the creation of a committee formed by members of the Junta’s Department of Culture, the Diputación de Granada, the Orce Town Council, and the scientific team to study the further development of Orce through its prehistoric heritage. The committee, concluded Gibert, could take advantage of the presence of ‘prestigious foreign scientists’ in Orce during the conference to obtain their views on the Orce project.72 According to
67 Ruiz Antón, ABC 1994.
68 Interview with Lluís Gibert 2012. See also: Ribot, El Ideal de Granada 2007.
69 Durán 2012.
70 Wikipedia Contributors ‘Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya’ and Wikipedia Contributors ‘Partit dels i les Comunistes de Catalunya’.
71 ‘Desarrollo de Orce y su entorno a través de un parque prehistórico’ AJG-ICP: Letter from Gibert to Francisco Ríos, n.d.
72 ‘Prestigiosos científicos extranjeros’, Ibid.
ABC, Francisco Ríos championed the Orce cause in the parliament, where he complained about the refusal to grant permits to Gibert, asked for funding for the conference, and achieved the Junta’s commitment to spend 500 million pesetas (around 3 million euros) on building a palaeontological park in Orce together with a research centre and a museum. This money was never invested and the project was never implemented.73 When Gibert finally got the funding from the Junta to organise the conference, he sent a fax to Francisco Ríos thanking him for everything he had done and informing him that he remained at his disposal. Gibert also stated that ‘sincerely, I think that the unblocking [of funding] is due to your interventions in the parliament.’74
Similarly, Gibert, but also Bienvenido Martínez-Navarro and the Orce mayor, Leandro Castellar, send letters to the Diputació de Barcelona president those days, Manuel Royes, in order to ask him to support the Conference, to fund the publication of the proceedings, and therefore support the development of the little town of Orce and the scientific research performed there.75 As Agustí and Lluís Gibert acknowledged, the ‘clothes peg’ formed by IU and PP against PSOE allowed for the Orce conference to go ahead. This entirely political factor provided Gibert with the possibility of getting resources to develop his research strategies and to get the Orce Man recognised once again.76 Therefore, while Gibert claimed that scientific publications and other achievements provided positive conditions for organising an international conference, it was the favourable political conditions that finally allowed funding and permits for the conference to take place.77 As Granada’s provincial governor stated during the opening session of the Orce conference:
‘the political aspect [of the controversy] is inseparable from the scientific project’.78
73 Ruiz Antón, ABC 1994.
74 ‘Sinceramente creo que el desbloqueo se debe a tus intervenciones parlamentarias’, AJG-ICP: Fax from Gibert to Paco Ríos, 16 March 1995.
75 ADB: Letter from Gibert to Manuel Royes, 8 February 1993; ADB: Letter from Bienvenido Martínez-Navarro to Manuel Royes, 10 December, 1992; Letter from Leandro Castellar to Manuel Royes, 21 January 1993.
76 Interviews with Agustí 2012 and Interview with Lluís Gibert 2012.
77 Gibert 2004, 88.
78 ‘el aspecto político es inseparable del proyecto científico’, OCVR 1995.