The contrast between the ager and the saltus of the Vascones remains anchored in the collective imagination of Navarre. According to this belief, the ager would be the cultivable and Romanized space of these -south of Navarre- and the saltus its mountainous space, due to its geomorphological conditions, not very permeable to the Romanization and where the badly called Basque tribes would have survived preserving their language in front of the advance of the Latin.

For some scholars of past centuries, the ager and the saltus were the visualization, in the classical sources, of the two Navarras, the Mediterranean of the Ribera and the Atlantic of the Mountain. Science advances and although its conclusions permeate society very slowly, it has been clear for decades that we cannot contrast the ager with the saltus, among other things because the first accredited specialization is due to Titus Livius, who wrote towards the change of Era, in the time of Augustus, and the second, very localized, moreover, around Oiasso -the current Irun- and the western Pyrenees, is due to Pliny the Elder, who held an important position in the provincial economic administration at the end of the first century A.D., in the time of Vespasian, at the time of Vespasian. Moreover, it has been known for years that saltus is the term used in official Roman sources -such as those to which Pliny had access during his prefecture in Astorga, in León- to refer to the mining districts.

Also for decades, and already studied by M. Unzu and Mª Á. Mezquíriz, the presence in Lantz of Roman mines was known, which may have been part of this mining saltus. Their exploitation must have begun in Augustus' time when, as a result of the map of the whole Roman orb that his son-in-law Agrippa made, the first inventory of the peninsular economic resources was undertaken. In one of its cavities, Aierdi VIII, a team of the Institución Príncipe de Viana has discovered three signs in paleohispanic signario that reproduce the sequence ikae or igae that, as it is assured, could connect with the term ik(h)ai of the Basque language of the XVII century, attested in the old scholar of the Vascones, Arnaldo de Ohienart.

Just as thirty years ago, the finding of the bronze of Aranguren, near Irulegi, whose famous hand resembled in terms of execution and where several lines in Paleohispanic writing appeared, was interpreted as clear evidence of the multilingualism of the Vascones region without any allusion to Basque. In the epigraphic science after Irulegi everything refers to this language and the connection formulated by the experts for this registration rupestrian of Lantz already walks as historical truth by the social web. It is sustained, in addition, in that to have appeared in Basque territory it should be written in language Basque, equation that does not always work. It is advisable to be cautious.

Decades ago, not even those Vascones of the old saltus were considered Romanized and now, displaying a consolidated use of the epigraphic medium, they even wrote in one of the mines in which, perhaps, They even wrote in one of the mines where, perhaps, they worked, warning with their text - time will tell in which language it was really composed - of the very conditions of the cave and highlighting how, at the time of the zenith of the expansion of the Roman way of life, between Augustus and Vespasian, when the registration could be recorded, the vernacular languages of Navarre - languages, in the plural - still enjoyed a certain vitality.