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Spain's magic mountain: narrating prehistory at Atapuerca

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2016

OLIVER HOCHADEL
OLIVER HOCHADEL*
Affiliation:
Institució Milà i Fontanals, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Carrer Egipcíaques, 15, 08001 Barcelona, Spain. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

The Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain is ranked among the most important excavation sites in human origins research worldwide. The project boasts not only spectacular hominid fossils, among them the ‘oldest European’, but also a fully fledged ‘popularization industry’. This article interprets this multimedia industry as a generator of different narratives about the researchers as well as about the prehistoric hominids of Atapuerca. It focuses on the popular works of the three co-directors of the project. Juan Luis Arsuaga, José María Bermúdez de Castro and Eudald Carbonell make deliberate use of a variety of narrative devices, resonant cultural references and strategies of scientific self-commodification. All three, in different ways, use the history of science and of their own research project to mark their place in the field of human origins research, drawing on mythical elements to tell the story of the rise of a humble Spanish team overcoming all odds to achieve universal acclaim. Furthermore, the co-directors make skilful use of palaeofiction – that of Björn Kurtén and Jean Auel, as well as writing their own – in order to tell gripping stories about compassion and solidarity in human prehistory. This mixture of nationalist and universalist narratives invites the Spanish audience to identify not just with ‘their ancestors’ but also with the scientists, as objects and subjects of research become conflated through popularization.

Type
Special Section: Palaeonarratives and Palaeopractices: Excavating and Interpreting Deep History
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 453 - 472
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2016 

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References

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6 Obviously, the three co-directors work in collaboration with co-authors, directors, press officers, curators, graphic artists, architects, journalists and tour guides. To talk about a ‘popularization industry’ is appropriate, given the number of people and instutitions that have contributed to it in the past two decades.

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17 Quote from the paperback edition: Arsuaga, Juan Luis and Martínez, Ignacio, La especie elegida: La larga marcha de la evolución humana, Barcelona: booket, 2006, p. 20Google Scholar.

18 ‘Científicos de Atapuerca cuentan en un libro la evolución humana’, El País, 24 March 1998, p. 26.

19 Sol Alameda, ‘Juan Luis Arsuaga “Homo Atapuerca”’, El País Semanal, 3 August 2003, pp. 36–41, 38, 41.

20 José Manuel Nieves, ‘Atapuerca esclarece el origen de los neandertales’, ABC online, 20 June 2014, www.abc.es/ciencia/20140619/abci-atapuerca-esclarece-origen-neandertales-201406191721.html, last accessed 31 August 2016. Since 2014 the EIA no longer assigns the fossils of the Sima de los Huesos to Homo heidelbergensis but to an undefined new ‘pre-Neanderthal’ species. Arsuaga, Juan Luis et al. , ‘Neandertal roots: cranial and chronological evidence from Sima de los Huesos’, Science (2014) 344, pp. 1358–1363 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

21 Juan Luis Arsuaga, ‘La sierra de nuestros mayores’, El País, 25 July 2000, p. 31. Similarly Arsuaga and Martínez, op. cit. (17), p. 53.

22 Juan Luis Arsuaga, El mundo de Atapuerca, Barcelona: Random House Mondadori, 2004, p. 224.

23 Arsuaga, op. cit. (22), pp. 156–158.

24 Arsuaga, op. cit. (22), p. 113.

25 Arsuaga, op. cit. (10), p. 22.

26 de Castro, José María Bermúdez, El Chico de la Gran Dolina: En los orígenes de lo humano, Barcelona: booket, 2005 Google Scholar; first published 2002. Chapters 2 and 3 describe the discovery and publication of El Chico/Homo antecessor.

27 Carbonell, Eudald, L'arqueòleg i el futur, Barcelona: Ara llibres, 2013, p. 49Google Scholar.

28 Carbonell, op. cit. (27), pp. 47, 10–11.

29 On this apparent contradiction see Hochadel, Oliver, ‘The multiple Eudald Carbonell: the various roles of Catalonia's most popular archaeologist’, Dynamis (2013) 33(2), pp. 389–416 Google Scholar.

30 Declan Fahy, ‘The celebrity scientists: a collective case study’, PhD thesis, Dublin City University, 2010, p. 250.

31 Fahy, op. cit. (30), p. 259.

32 Hochadel, op. cit. (29), pp. 389–391.

33 Pilar Quijada, ‘Atapuerca es un pasadizo de energía continua’, ABC online, 9 July 2010, www.abc.es/20100709/canal-natural/eudald-carbonell-arqueologo-atapuerca-201007091205.html, last accessed 31 August 2016.

34 The twenty-six episodes (broadcast 2010 and 2012) showed excavations dealing with all periods from about 3.5 million years ago up to the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Sota terra means ‘under the ground’, specifically Catalonian ground, hence Atapuerca did not feature. On Time Team see Holtorf, Cornelius, Archaeology Is a Brand! The Meaning of Archaeology in Contemporary Popular Culture, Oxford: Archaeopress, 2007, pp. 39–44 Google Scholar.

35 For another example see Miquel Carandell, ‘Orce man: a public controversy in Spanish human origins research 1982–2007’, PhD thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2015, Chapter 1.

36 Querol, María Ángeles, Adán y Darwin, Madrid: Síntesis, 2001, p. 265Google Scholar.

37 E.g. Bermúdez de Castro, op. cit. (26), pp. 45–48; Arsuaga, Juan Luis and Algaba, Milagros, Elemental, queridos humanos: Vidas y andanzas del ingenioso planeta Tierra, Barcelona: temas de hoy, 2010, pp. 133–135 Google Scholar; Carbonell, Eudald and Bellmunt, Cinta, Els Somnis de l'evolució, Barcelona: La Magrana, 2003, pp. 74, 137Google Scholar.

38 Exhibition catalogues: Cervera et al., op. cit. (13); Arsuaga, Juan Luis, Carbonell, Eudald and de Castro, José María Bermúdez (eds.), The First Europeans: Treasures from the Hills of Atapuerca, Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 2003 Google Scholar (Exhibition Catalogue AMNH New York). Commemorative publications: Aguirre, Emiliano, Arsuaga, Juan Luis, Carbonell, Eudald and de Castro, José María Bermúdez, Atapuerca: 25 años que cambiaron la historia, Burgos: Diario de Burgos, 2002 Google Scholar. Histories of the project: Carbonell, Eudald and de Castro, José María Bermúdez, Atapuerca: Perdidos en la colina: La historia humana y científica del equipo investigador, Barcelona: Destino, 2004 Google Scholar; and de Castro, José María Bermúdez, Exploradores: La historia del yacimiento de Atapuerca, Barcelona: Debate, 2012 Google Scholar. Carbonell's autobiography: Carbonell and Bellmunt, op. cit. (37).

39 Nieto-Galan, Agustí, ‘The images of science in modern Spain: rethinking the “polémica”’, in Gavroglu, Kostas (ed.), The Sciences in the European Periphery during the Enlightenment, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999, pp. 73–94 Google Scholar.

40 Carbonell and Bermúdez de Castro, op. cit. (38), p. 276; similarly Bermúdez de Castro, op. cit. (38), pp. 39, 80.

41 Carbonell and Bermúdez de Castro, op. cit. (38), pp. 105–118, 276; Carbonell and Bellmunt, op. cit. (37), p. 146; also see Arsuaga and Martínez, op. cit. (14), p. 66. This is also the narrative thrust of Javier Trueba's 1997 documentary ‘Atapuerca, el misterio de la evolución humana’: see in particular minutes 9–13 where the difficult work in the Sima de los Huesos is visualized. All three co-directors acted as scientific advisers.

42 Carbonell and Bellmunt, op. cit. (37), p. 143; similarly Bermúdez de Castro, op. cit. (38), p. 27. The history of human origins research is full of similar examples – on the early career of Louis Leakey, for example, see Rees (this issue).

43 On the issue of the alleged scientific colonialism in Spanish prehistoric research see Díaz-Andreu, Margarita, ‘La Arqueología imperialista en España: Extranjeros vs. Españoles en el estudio del arte prehistórico de principios del siglo XX’, in Díaz-Andreu, (ed.), Historia de la arqueología en España: Estudios, Madrid: Ediciones Clásicas, 2002, pp. 103–117 Google Scholar; Lanzarote, José María, ‘Dangerous intruders or beneficial influence? The role of the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine in the development of prehistoric archaeology in Spain (1900–1936)’, Complutum (2013) 24(2), pp. 33–42 Google Scholar.

44 Carbonell and Bermúdez de Castro, op. cit. (38), pp. 57 (quote), 276; also see Bermúdez de Castro, op. cit. (26), p. 42; Arsuaga and Martínez, op. cit. (14), p. 66.

45 French: Carbonell and Bermúdez de Castro, op. cit. (38), pp. 172–173; German: Bermúdez de Castro, op. cit. (38), p. 91.

46 Carbonell and Bellmunt, op. cit. (37), p. 161; Carbonell and Bermúdez de Castro, op. cit. (38), p. 27.

47 A certain exception is Eudald Carbonell and Robert Sala, Planeta humano, Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 2000.

48 Eudald Carbonell, ‘Hacia un planeta más humano’, El País, 28 March 2000, p. 38; Eudald Carbonell and Cinta Bellmunt, Catalanisme evolutiu, Barcelona: Ara Llibres, 2011, p. 20.

49 Carbonell and Bellmunt, op. cit. (37), p. 29; Eudald Carbonell and Robert Sala, Aún no somos humanos: Propuestas de humanización para el tercer milenio, Barcelona: quinteto, 2003, pp. 168–169. For a demystification of the encounter see Lucas, J.R., ‘Wilberforce and Huxley: a legendary encounter’, Historical Journal (1979) 22(2), pp. 313–330 Google Scholar.

50 Carbonell and Bellmunt, op. cit. (37), pp. 25–29, Carbonell and Sala, op. cit. (49), pp. 180–181.

51 Again, Carbonell seems to fit perfectly Fahy's definition of a celebrity scientist: ‘Their standards of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences have been almost universally poor. There has been scant historical contextualization of ideas or events. There has been little evidence of systematic reading or research. Historical evidence and argument, when used, has been presented in narrow, internalist accounts.’ Fahy, op. cit. (30), p. 251.

52 Carbonell and Bermúdez de Castro, op. cit. (38), p. 301.

53 Arsuaga, Juan Luis, El reloj de Mr. Darwin: La explicación de la belleza y maravilla del mundo natural, Madrid: temas de hoy, 2009 Google Scholar. Arsuaga also published a booklet based on his talks on Darwin: Selección inconsciente: La clave para comprender a Darwin, Barcelona: Arcadia, 2009 Google Scholar. Darwin is discussed extensively in Martínez, Ignacio and Arsuaga, Juan Luis, Amalur: Del átomo a la mente, Barcelona: booket, 2003 Google Scholar; first published 2002, Chapter 2; and in Arsuaga, Juan Luis and Martín-Loeches, Manuel, El sello indeleble: Pasado, presente y futuro del ser humano, Barcelona: Debate, 2013 Google Scholar. The title of the latter book, ‘The Indelible Stamp’, is a famous quote from Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871): ‘Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin’.

54 Arsuaga, Juan Luis, El enigma de la esfinge: Las causas, el curso y el propósito de la evolución, Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 2001, e.g. pp. 16, 154–155 Google Scholar; Arsuaga, El reloj de Mr. Darwin, op. cit. (53), pp. 337–340.

55 Arsuaga, El reloj de Mr. Darwin, op. cit. (53), pp. 100, 160–161, 229–230.

56 Landau, op. cit. (15), p. 175.

57 De Paolo, Charles, Human Prehistory in Fiction, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2002 Google Scholar; Ruddick, Nicholas, The Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009 Google Scholar.

58 Hackett, Abigail and Dennell, Robin W., ‘Neanderthals as fiction in archaeological narrative’, Antiquity (2003) 77, pp. 816–827 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 De Paolo, op. cit. (57), pp. 113–119; Hackett and Dennell, op. cit. (58); Ruddick, op. cit. (57), pp. 84–88, 179–180.

60 Arsuaga and Martín-Loeches, op. cit. (53), pp. 369, 21.

61 Arsuaga, Juan Luis, Preface to Björn Kurtén, La danza del tigre, Madrid: Plot Ediciones, 2001 Google Scholar.

62 Juan Luis Arsuaga, Al otro lado de la niebla: Las aventuras de un hombre en la edad de piedra, Madrid: Gavá, 2005. We cite from the 2006 edition. Arsuaga is by no means the only palaeoanthropologist to write prehistoric novels. Donald Johanson and Yves Coppens, discoverers of ‘Lucy’, also published – in collaboration with professional writers/novelists – a novel about this famous Australopithecus: Johanson, Donald and O'Farrell, Kevin, Journey from the Dawn: Life with the World's First Family, New York: Villard, 1990 Google Scholar; Pelot, Pierre and Coppens, Yves, Le rêve de Lucy, Paris: Seuil, 1990 Google Scholar.

63 Arsuaga, op. cit. (62), p. 374.

64 Arsuaga, op. cit. (62), p. 13.

65 In Spanish, la celebérrima; Arsuaga, op. cit. (61).

66 See www.laxarxa.com/infolocal/comarques-barcelona/noticia/portes-obertes-a-l-abric-romani-de-capellades, 7 August 2012, last accessed 21 July 2016. Jean M. Auel, The Land of Painted Caves, London: Hodder Paperbacks, 2012.

67 This ‘obsession to demonstrate a sound knowledge of archaeology’ has become quite typical for writers of palaeofiction in recent years; Zapatero, Gonzalo Ruiz and Castaño, Ana Mansilla, ‘L'arqueologia en els mitjans de comunicació: Materials per a una reflexió critica sobre la divulgació del passat’, Cota Zero (1999) 15, pp. 42–62, 56Google Scholar.

68 Eudald Carbonell, ‘Amiga de los prehistoriadores’, El Periódico, 11 March 2011, p. 51. Also see Jacinto Antón, ‘Cuando las mujeres olfateaban el sexo de los hombres’, El Pais, 28 April 2014, p. 35.

69 Jacinto Antón, ‘La prehistoria hecha Best-Seller’, El Pais Semanal, 12 December 2010, pp. 24–28, 25.

70 For a brief overview see Hublin, Jean-Jacques, ‘The prehistory of compassion’, PNAS (2009) 106, pp. 6429–6430 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. For a comprehensive synthesis going well beyond human origins research see Spikins, Penny A., How Compassion Made Us Human: The Evolutionary Origins of Tenderness, Trust and Morality, Havertown: Pen & Sword Books, 2015 Google Scholar.

71 Björn Kurtén, La danza del tigre, Barcelona: RBA, 1984, p. 189.

72 Lordkipanidze, David et al. , ‘The earliest toothless hominin skull’, Nature (2005) 434, pp. 717–718 Google Scholar.

73 de Castro, José María Bermúdez, La evolución del talento: Cómo nuestros orígenes determinan nuestro presente. De Atapuerca a Silicon Valley, Barcelona: Random House/Mondadori, 2010, p. 161Google Scholar; cf. Bermúdez de Castro, op. cit. (38), p. 148.

74 Shanidar is a site in Northern Iraq, c.50,000 years old, first excavated in the 1950s. This interpretation of the fossil was first put forward by Solecki, Ralph, Shanidar: The First Flower People, New York: Knopf, 1971 Google Scholar.

75 See Trinkaus, Erik and Shipman, Pat, The Neandertals: Changing the Image of Mankind, London: Jonathan Cape, 1993, p. 341Google Scholar; Ruddick, op. cit. (57), p. 222; Antón, op. cit. (69), p. 26.

76 José María Bermúdez de Castro, ‘Próximo Oriente: un agujero negro de la prehistoria’, Quo (online), 14 May 2015, at http://reflexiones-de-un-primate.blogs.quo.es/2015/05/14/proximo-oriente-un-agujero-negro-de-la-prehistoria; also see http://blogs.publico.es/ciencias/general/1045/dia-de-difuntos, last accessed 21 July 2016.

77 On this point in relation to botany see Endersby, Jim, ‘Deceived by orchids: sex, science, fiction and Darwin’, BJHS (2016) 49(2), pp. 205–229 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

78 Elías, Carlos, ‘La revista Nature en las noticias de prensa’, Comunicar: Revista científica de Comunicación y Educación (2002) 19, pp. 37–41, 41Google Scholar; Arsuaga, Juan Luis et al. , ‘A complete human pelvis from the Middle Pleistocene of Spain’, Nature (1999) 399, pp. 255–258 Google Scholar.

79 Bonmatí, Alejandro et al. , ‘Middle Pleistocene lower back and pelvis from an aged human individual from the Sima de los Huesos site, Spain’, PNAS (2010) 107, pp. 18386–18391 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bonmatí, Alejandro et al. , ‘El caso de Elvis el viejo de la Sima de los Huesos’, Dendra Médica Revista de Humanidades (2011) 10, pp. 138–147, 139Google Scholar.

80 Gracia, Ana et al. , ‘Craniosynostosis in the Middle Pleistocene human Cranium 14 from the Sima de los Huesos, Atapuerca, Spain’, PNAS (2009) 106, pp. 6573–6578 Google Scholar; press coverage: Alicia Rivera, ‘Atapuerca cuidó de Benjamina’, El País, 31 March 2009, p. 38.

81 Josep Corbella, ‘Ley de dependencia en Atapuerca’, La Vanguardia, 31 March 2009, p. 25.

82 César-Javier Palacios, ‘La receta de Atapuerca contra la crisis’, 20 minutos, 17 January 2013.

83 An analogous argument has been made for Homo floresiensis – the ‘hobbit’ (LB1): Goulden, op. cit. (2), p. 586.

84 Víctor Fernández Correas, La tribu maldita, Madrid: temas de hoy, 2012, pp. 473–474. There are other Atapuerca novels aimed at younger readers: Bermejo, Álvaro, El clan de Atapuerca: La maldición del Hombre Jaguar, Madrid: Anaya, 2012 Google Scholar; and Bermejo, , El clan de Atapuerca 2: La elegida del arcoíris, Madrid: Anaya, 2013 Google Scholar.

85 Carbonell helped, for example, Gironell, Martí to promote his prehistoric novel El primer héroe, Barcelona: Ediciones B, 2014 Google Scholar; see Antón, op. cit. (68).

86 Some of the books of Arsuaga and Carbonell have been translated, the hand axe Excalibur was deliberately named after the sword of a British king and the MEH actively attempts to attract visitors from abroad. So far the results of these efforts have met with limited success.