By Miguel Thomson
This is the English translation of Miguel’s latest version of COMENTARIOS SOBRE ALGUNOS GRAFITOS DE IRUÑA-VELEIA (Septiembre 2015)
«Due to the multitude of irregularities, the numerous contradictions in and between the reports of the DFA’s committee, their many errors, the subsequent rectifications by their authors, the disagreements expressed by various authors from different fields with such reports, and the inexplicable lack of scientific publications on the findings of Iruña-Veleia by the experts who analyzed them, the need is imposed to proceed to a proper scientific evaluation of such findings. This evaluation should rigorously conform to the standards and rules usually required for any serious scientific evaluation.
Those taking part in it should be leading international experts whose competence, independence and lack of conflicts of interest would be beyond a shadow of a doubt, which should include experts in all disciplines relevant to the study of findings, among them experts in Vulgar Latin, Egyptologists and archaeometrists.
In this scientific evaluation, physical tests will be essential, whose performance was proposed in the reports by two of the members of the DFA’s committee, the philologist Joaquín Gorrochategui, who publicly asked for the intervention of archaeometrists5, and the archaeologist Dominic Perring, who suggested conducting scientific tests on the objects, as well as in other reports by authors outside of the Committee. Such tests were decisive in other controversial archaeological findings, in some cases to support their authenticity and in others their falsehood.
The authenticity of the Paleolithic cave paintings of Altamira, initially rejected or questioned by the most renowned sages and experts of the time, took more than two decades to be accepted due to the lack of archaeometric dating methods at the time of their discovery.
Today there is a large array of sophisticated archaeometric methods available to estimate the age of an object and even the incisions made on them. These methods can at minimum determine with almost absolute certainty whether these incisions are recent or not, and, therefore, to verify whether the hypothesis of recent forgery proposed by some members of the DFA’s committee is correct or not. Finally, as pointed by Dominic Perring, the last word on the authenticity or falsehood of the findings should have to wait for peer-reviewed publication of scientific studies by leading international scholars1. Only in this way it will be possible to begin to dispel the doubts and to resolve the disputes surrounding the findings of Iruña-Veleia.»
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