A romantic primate. The passion for archeology

[karimamarika456]

When I was a kid, together with José Luis –my inseparable friend from the EGB–, every Saturday we went to the public library. We took possession of that large volume with green covers and golden capital letters – Ancient Egypt – and we resumed our secret project: writing a book about archaeologists, wearing pith caps, exploring among pyramids, sphinxes and pharaohs. Indeed, my love for archeology was born thanks to Egyptology. An attraction that, since then, I have never abandoned, nor will I abandon. It is true that the passion for the past crossed paths shortly afterwards – it was 1982 – with Charles R. Darwin. I then had 13 tacos and decided that I wanted to dedicate myself to the study of the origin and evolution of Humanity . To do this, it was necessary to travel to the African continent in search of the fossil remains of our most archaic ancestors and, not without many adventures and misadventures along the way, the dream came true with my first scientific expeditions in the Great Rift Fault .

Working in the archaeological and paleontological sites of Lake Natron, in Tanzania – and as I had already experienced before in several prehistoric European settlements – I verified that the work of the modern researcher is very far from the treasure hunters of up to the mid-20th century. Even having replaced the sun hat of childhood B2B Email List dreams with the fedora hat, the current archaeologist and anthropologist is light years away from the methodology used by those adventurers on whom George Lucas based himself to build the character of Indiana Jones, the Hiram Binghams, Roy Chapman Andrews, Belzoni and etc. Jordi Serrallonga on the Great Rift Fault The author on the Great Rift Fault (Tanzania, East Africa). © Jordi Serralonga Today, the detective of the past does not dig large holes or destroy funerary complexes in search of beautiful and valuable objects destined for private collections or sumptuous colonial museums. No, the contemporary investigator follows protocols much closer to another of my heroes: Sherlock Holmes. Every little fossil or evidence is important.



Therefore, paraphrasing Holmes' words in A Study in Scarlet, just as from a simple drop of water we can infer – through the science of deduction – the existence of an ocean, by looking at the bone fragments, analyzing the microscopic traces of use on a stone knife or measuring the disposition of all the fossil vestiges of an occupied land can lead us to recreate a scene that occurred millions or thousands of years ago. This was one of the great contributions of prehistory and paleontology to the New Archaeology. But at the beginning of the 20th century, and returning to the romanticism of archeology in Egypt, there was a man who was ahead of his time. An enthusiast whom I have always admired thanks to those unforgettable Saturday readings: Howard Carter. Just as the Frenchman Champollion, precisely in the Napoleonic era, imagined visiting Egypt and would make it a reality - in addition to deciphering the Rosetta Stone -, from the Sant Jordi library - in the working-class neighborhoods of L'Hospitalet - I wanted to go to the land of the Nile to see the place that made a clever English Egyptologist famous. Devoid of money and social position, Carter fought until he obtained providential financing from Lord Carnarvon.