After the 1995 conference and the controversial summer that followed it, in 1997 and 1998 permits were denied to both Gibert’s team and the new research team led by Palmqvist and Martínez-Navarro.1 As we saw earlier, a month after the conference, Palmqvist wrote a letter to Martín Delgado, director of the Junta de Andalucía’s Department of Culture.2 In it, among very harsh criticisms of Gibert and his research, he suggested the return of all of the palaeontological collections from Sabadell to Orce. In the summer of 1996, the idea to return the bones was taken up by the mayor of Orce, Leandro Torres, who claimed that more than 4,000 fossils from the early excavations in Venta Micena that were stored in Sabadell (including the famous VM-0 cranial fragment) should be transferred back to Orce.3 For the mayor, with this return they ‘hoped to put an end to the problem of disputes over the human classification of the Orce Man and to try to ensure that the controversy does not affect the rest of the town’s archaeological wealth.’4 For Torres, it
1 Troyano, ABC 1997 and F. R. A., ABC 1998.
2 Personal Archive Jordi Agustí: Letter from Palmqvist to Martín Delgado, 9 October 1995.
3 De León-Sotelo, ABC 1996d.
4 ‘Con esta medida pretendemos acabar con el problema de las disputas sobre la humanidad del hombre de Orce e
seemed that there was some ‘social alarm’ in Orce after Palmqvist, Martínez-Navarro, and Turq’s announcement and he felt that this ‘has to end,’ and therefore, ‘the cranial fragment […] must be made available to the scientific community.’5 Torres even threatened to go to court as ‘ownership of a discovery is not everlasting’.6 Finally, these claims became effective and the Junta de Andalucía requested the return of the fossils from the Institut de Paleontologia de Sabadell.7 Isidro Toro, then head of the Junta’s Department of Archaeology, traveled to Sabadell to organise the transfer of the bones.8
Gibert’s response to the return of the palaeontological remains to Orce is very interesting. In retrospect, in his 2004 popular science book, Gibert stated that the return of the bones to Orce was an honour, a source of ‘great satisfaction’ for him.9 Yet, according to newspapers at that time, we find quite a different response. First, ABC reported that Gibert had said that VM-0 ‘is mine and will go with me wherever I go’.10 Gibert also asserted that all the remains held in Sabadell, including the famous cranial fragment, were found before 1985 (when the Junta de Andalucía took all legal control over archaeological remains), so they were being held legally in Sabadell.11 By the beginning of 1997, for Gibert, the transfer of the bones could only be allowed if it was guaranteed that they would be properly stored and classified.12 Gibert also stated that what he was about to hand over were not only fossils but also ‘21 years of my work’, often carried out in very poor economic circumstances.13 Throughout the controversy, Gibert had even been publicly accused several times of being obsessed with the Orce Man fragment.14 Finally, the remains were returned to Orce after two ceremonies, one in Granada and another in Orce, with the presence of the Junta’s head of culture, Carmen Calvo. Gibert brought the most valuable remains in a metal suitcase, mainly the bones claimed to be human, including, of course, the so-called Orce Man, and some of the stone tools. According to Gibert, these remains were wrapped in ‘cloths that highlighted their importance’ and were shown to the political authorities and the media.15 Again, Gibert seized the opportunity to request new excavation permits and funding. All of this was reported on in the press, and even made the front page of the local newspaper El Ideal de Granada, which showed Gibert
intentar que esa polémica no afecte al resto de la riqueza arqueológica del municipio’, EFE, La Vanguardia 1996.
5 ‘alarma social’, ‘con eso hay que terminar’, ‘el fragmento de craneal debe ser puesto a disposición de la comunidad científica’, De León-Sotelo, ABC 1996d.
6 ‘la propiedad sobre un hallazgo no es eterna’, De León-Sotelo, ABC 1996e.
7 De León-Sotelo, ABC 1996e and Gómez, El Ideal de Granada 1997.
8 Gibert 2004, 99.
9 ‘Gran satisfacción’, Ibid.
10 ‘El cráneo es mío e irá conmigo donde yo vaya’, De León-Sotelo, ABC 1996e.
11 Ibid.
12 EFE, ABC 1997.
13 ‘21 años de mi trabajo’,Canal Sur 1997.
14 For instance: Antón, El País 2000 and Planas, La Vanguardia 2007.
15 ‘paños que resaltaban su importancia’, Gibert 2004, 101-102; F. R. A., ABC 1998a; F. R. A., ABC 1998b; Gómez, El Ideal de Granada 1998.
together with the Junta politician.16 The Orce Town Council announced the improvement of the local museum (the Museo de Paleontologia y Prehistoria de Orce) to hold the original cranial fragment of the Orce Man and the other remains.17 Pascual Rivas, head of palaeontology in the Universidad de Granada, and a member of the Junta’s Department of Archaeology, was one of the only dissenting voices, stating in the papers that a museum cannot be built around a ‘questionable fossil’.18
Fig. 4.1: Gibert showing the Orce remains to Carmen Calvo, head of the Junta’s Department of Culture in El Ideal de Granada (left), note that the title refers to Gibert’s request to restart scientific research in Orce. Source: Gómez, El
Ideal de Granada 1998 and Gibert 2004, 101. The Orce remains carried in a suitcase just before being showed to Andalusian television (right). Source: Canal Sur 1997.
This contradiction between a sense of owning the remains while simultaneously being proud of their return to the place where they were found is quite common in palaeoanthropology. Hominid remains are very scarce and hard to find. Palaeoanthropologists often limit access to remains which creates confrontations between researchers over priority and publication.19 As we saw in the first chapter, hominid findings often offer great professional opportunities. Due to these circumstances, researchers often have a sense of ‘possession’ of the bones and even see themselves as ‘fathers’ of the fossils they find.20 Hominid fossils thus become world heritage treasures and, at the same time, objects of science ‘owned’ by particular scientists. Like Gibert, Donald Johanson described how the return of Lucy to Ethiopia was very important and had great symbolic significance. Yet, at the same time, the American researcher described his negative feelings about becoming detached from the
16 Gibert 2004, 102-103 and Gómez, El Ideal de Granada 1998.
17 Troyano, ABC 1998b.
18 ‘fóssil dudoso’, Titos, El País 1999.
19 Gibbons 2002.
20 In his memoir, Phillip Tobias devoted a whole chapter to scientists’ inclination towards feeling ownership over bones, mostly using Dart as an example, Tobias 2005, 228-231 and 237.
remains and acknowledged that he was ‘the owner of an unparalleled collection of bones’.21 To sum up, both Orce’s desire to have the important remains again and Gibert’s ‘ownership’ of the Orce Man combined with his mixed feelings about its return to Orce are no different from other cases in international palaeoanthropology.
Still, the desire to control Orce’s remains was not exclusive to Gibert. As Palmqvist’s letter or Toro’s trip to Sabadell show, the scientists from the ‘other side’ also wanted to get their hands on the Venta Micena collection. Yet, while Gibert’s position is typical in palaeoanthropology, Toro, Palmqvist, Martínez-Navarro, and even Rivas’ is not. They wanted to have control over the Orce Man even when they denied the hominid origin of the cranial fragment as well as the hominid presence in Venta Micena. So, why did they want to control a bone fragment recognised as an ancient donkey remain? Why did they want to have 4,000 palaeontological specimens from Venta Micena, a site in which further research was being blocked by Rivas and Toro? One first obvious answer is that Palmqvist and Martínez-Navarro were studying Orce’s fauna and, for sure, the Venta Micena remains would be very useful to them. Yet, behind this more scientific aim, there was also the aim to take power away from Gibert by taking the disputed hominid remains away from him, most importantly the well-known Orce Man. By the end of the 1990s, this bone was still the flagship of Gibert’s research. For example, at the beginning of 1998, Gibert published a scientific article in the Journal of Human Evolution, one of the most prestigious journals in the field, again claiming that the bone belonged to a hominid. Of course, this publication was reported in the media.22
To sum up, the Andalusian researchers not only wanted to control precious scientific objects that could lead to important publications, but also ‘famous’ scientific objects that could bring Gibert again and again into the media. Therefore, in this case, the purely scientific relevance of the remains was not the main motivation for scientists to want to claim and control them; rather, it was their public relevance, especially that of VM-0, the so-called Orce Man. Thus, despite Martínez-Navarro, Palmqvist, and Turq’s discourse of forgetting about the hominid to perform much more interdisciplinary research in Orce (with studies in fauna and ecology), in the end control over hominid remains was a very relevant issue for their team. As we shall see, during the following years, this team used fauna discoveries to reassert the claim that the Orce area held the remains of the ‘First European’, a claim that essentially was no different from Gibert’s. As the newspaper ABC announced: ‘The remains of an elephant reinforce the hypothesis that Orce did have human presence’.23
21 Johanson and Maitland 1982, 206 and 332.
22 Gibert et al. 1998 and S. C., ABC 1998.
23 ‘Los restos de un elefante refuerzan la hipótesis de que Orce tuvo presencia humana’, Redacción, ABC 2001.
As mentioned earlier, during this period the Junta created an International Commission to control research in Orce, again following one of Palmqvist’s recommendations.24 The main aim of the Commission was to review the scientific projects presented for the Orce area. It was headed by Pascual Rivas and included Claude Guérin, a French palaeontologist from the Université Claude Bernard (Lyon), Gerhard Bosinski, a German palaeontologist, a friend of Gibert’s, and an Orce conference attendee, and the Spanish scientists Enrique Vallespí, a prehistorian from the Universidad de Sevilla, who also attended the Orce conference, and Fernando Molina, a prehistorian from the Universidad de Granada.25 Jordi Agustí, Isidro Toro, and Josep Gibert were in charge of the scientific project with participants from both Gibert’s team and Martínez-Navarro and Palmqvist’s new team.26 In this context, Gibert again looked for support for his views. This time, Raimon Obiols, president of the Catalan PSC-PSOE, received a letter from Gibert asking him to talk with Manuel Chaves (member the Andalusian PSOE and then president of the Junta de Andalucía) about partiality in the creation of the Commission, which granted excavation permits in Orce. In short, Gibert asked Obiols ‘to contribute to avoiding serious injustices being committed’.27 Once again, he used direct contact with politicians in order to champion his cause regarding the Orce research.
During this period, in April 1998, the Orce issue was debated in the Andalusian Parliament.
This time, the Member of Parliament from the right-wing PP Carolina González Vigo, who corresponded with Gibert, asked the Junta’s head of culture about the plans for the Orce research and the granting of permits.28 The head of culture, Carmen Calvo, responded that the recently created Commission, formed by several international experts, had recommended the denial of the permits. Soon afterwards, Gibert sent a letter to González Vigo, in which he stated that not all of the experts from the Commission had recommended the denial and he attached a letter from Bosinski to prove it.29 We do not know if the Orce issue was brought again to parliament, but this situation once more reveals the political interest in the issue. Finally, excavation permits where granted for the summer of 1999.30 Yet, they were granted for Barranco Leon and Fuente Nueva 3, not Venta Micena, the site where the controversial cranium was found, and which remained closed.31 In fact, apart from a brief permit for the conference, Venta Micena had been closed since 1990; almost 10
24 Personal Archive Jordi Agustí: Letter from Palmqvist to Martín Delgado, 9 October 1995 and Gibert 2004, 102.
25 For Guérin: Guérin, ‘Guérin’. For Bosinski see: Wikipedia Contributors ‘Gerhard Bosinski’. For Vallespí:
Anonymous. ‘Ficha Personal - Enrique José Vallespi Pérez’. For Molina: Anonymous. ‘Personal - Fernando Molina González’.
26 Gibert 2004, 102-103.
27 ‘contribuir a que no se cometan graves injusticias’, AJG-ICP: Letter from Gibert to Raimon Obiols, 28 January 1997.
28 AJG-ICP: Debate minutes, Sesión Plenaria 23 April 1998.
29 AJG-ICP: Letter from Gibert to González Vigo, 1 June 1998.
30 Troyano, R., ABC 1999.
31 Ruiz Antón, ABC 1999.
years.
To sum up, ‘control’ is the key issue in this section. With the controversy, the different parties’ desires to control the archaeological remains, the sites, and the excavation permits show up very clearly. These different parties, Gibert and Palmqvist and the new team, but also the mayor of Orce or the Junta politicians, made several moves and developed strategies around the Orce Man’s cranial fragment in a kind of ‘fight for control’, although with different aims. On the one hand, as we have already seen, the Orce Man was Gibert’s main scientific achievement, representing his own credibility and standing as a member of the scientific community. On the other hand, for Palmqvist, Martínez-Navarro, and the other members or supporters of their team and their claims, the Orce Man was not in fact a man, but they needed to control it in order to control the research and the claims made in the area. As we saw in the final sections of the previous chapter, and as we shall also see in the following one, this team’s strategy was to erase and forget the hominid claims, specifically the Orce Man, in order to have a fresh start with a new research project. To achieve this, the Orce Man could not be in Gibert’s hands and must be controlled from Andalusia. For the Orce Town Council, Gibert’s findings represented a major tourist attraction that could bring prosperity to the town. With a discourse of wanting to end scientific disagreement and provide access to the remains for the scientific community, the Orce authorities achieved the return of the remains to the town. VM-0 has been always a prominent image in the Orce town tourist promotion. According to Lluís Gibert, around 2012, the original Orce Man fragment was brought by the Orce Town Council to a tourism trade fair in Madrid and presented as a tourist attraction.32 In 2015, a new museum was open in Orce. Despite a lot of research has been performed in the last years, and a new hominid remain had been found, as we will see in chapter 5, the Orce Man original fragment still had a prominent position as a bone ‘attributed’ to a hominid. The Orce mayor José Ramón Martínez Olivares discourse in the inauguration stated that palaeontological and archaeological research was a very useful way to attract tourism to the area and therefore generate richness and employment to the town inhabitants.33 For the Junta politicians, mainly the head of culture, the Orce remains represented an opportunity to appear before Andalusians promoting culture and scientific research.
But, on the other hand, and maybe more importantly, the pompous ceremony of the delivery of the bones from Gibert to the Junta shows how these politicians also presented themselves as having achieved the return of important ‘Andalusian’ heritage to Andalusian soil. As we saw in chapter one, for both the institutions and the media in Andalusia, the Orce remains were much more than just a simple scientific artefact.
32 Personal communication with Lluís Gibert. Martínez-Navarro 2012, 16 also states that the fragment still is a significant part of Orce's cultural heritage despite the years passed since its discovery and the subsequent controversy.
33 Utrera, El Ideal de Granada 2015.
Fig. 4.2: Fragment of a flyer that promoted Orce in English with a photo of VM-0. AJG-ICP: Flyer ‘Orce, the Cradle of European Humankind’, around 1992.
All of these different representations from different actors in the story show, on the one hand, the extent to which the Orce Man fragment had become a famous and important scientific object both in public and scientific arenas. More than fifteen years after the discovery, the fragment was still commented on, disputed, and desired by different parties. On the other hand, this situation shows the different faces that a simple scientific object can have. The Orce Man was not an objective, independent thing taken from nature, but had several interpretations, appropriations, and even uses by the different ‘actors’ involved. Since its public presentation in 1983, the Orce Man bone became much more than a hominid or equine cranial fragment; it was the flagship of certain claims, the solution to economic problems, and even a chance to get publicly recognised.