A year after presentation was launched by Irulegi, the piece is back in the media spotlight. The Historical Heritage Service of the Government of Navarre is initiating the declaration of the piece as an Asset of Cultural Interest, the highest category of legal protection for an archaeological object. Indeed, as stated in the documentation prepared for this purpose, the piece is "unique for the History of Navarre" and demonstrates that the Vascones made a "use of writing, if not extensive, at least not negligible". 

Almost at the same time, the Aranzadi Science Society presents the results of the longest excavation campaign ever held at the Irulegi oppidum. In the grade press release provided by Aranzadi, it is insisted that the findings -with products, construction techniques and clearly Roman imports in an indigenous urban context- show that the Romanization of the Vascones -for so long denied by that part of public opinion that now turns Irulegi into the authentic sancta sanctorum of the Vascones- was "less abrupt and more complex than previously thought". In the statements of the archaeologists responsible for such an interesting excavation, it is added that at the time of the destruction of the settlement, in the 70's of the first century B.C., "the Vascones were seeing what Rome meant and wanted to enter into that orbit", and it is even pointed out that the Vascones, in the war that resulted in the destruction of this enclave, "were part of a side", either that of the rebel Sertorius or that of the Roman Pompey.

The same day of the press conference of presentation of these conclusions, we celebrated in the framework of the Diploma of Archaeology of the University of Navarra a roundtable on the "Basque controversy" with specialists of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and of our University. In it we talked about the social reception of what in the last years the research has been affirming -and also discussing, because this is how History is written- about the Basques. We are not doing something right if, after decades of intense research, we still do not assume that among the Vascones there was a great Roman presence, at least since 179 B.C., when, on the ancient Ilurcis -not far from being called ager Vasconum-, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus founded a city to which he gave his name, Gracchurris, replacing a purely Basque toponym. No less than one hundred years before the destruction of Irulegi. If Irulegi was destroyed, if the hand of Irulegi was engraved and placed by a local inhabitant in his own house, it was because, by then, the Roman presence among the Vascones and the influence of their culture were greatly consolidated. Otherwise, the inhabitants of Irulegi would not have known the epigraphic medium, nor would they have taken sides in the conflict and, most probably, neither would the contenders -Pompey and Sertorius- have settled in the Basque territory to form a coalition with the cities of the former that accepted the diplomatic conditions that they, looking for collaborationist clients, offered.

Rome had already done that twenty years earlier in the area, in the 90s of that century, to incorporate horsemen with Basque names to their armies of the so-called Bellum Sociale Italico. Another test of the secular integration of the Basques. In the wars of Sertorius, among the Basques there were Sertorians -like the Calagurritans- and Pompeians -perhaps the inhabitants of Pamplona or the federates of the city that we continue to excavate in Los Bañales de Uncastillo, in Zaragoza, also Basque territory- and that they were involved in the conflict can only be explained by that solid Romanization that was not abrupt because, by that time, it had been permeating for a century, by then, it had been permeating for a century in a process that we owe, precisely, to the state that took care to give the inhabitants of some specific points of present-day Navarre, La Rioja and the Cinco Villas of Aragon the name of Vascones, perhaps underlining the only element that research is clear about them today: their mixture with Iberians and Celtiberians, their cultural heterogeneity. That is what Irulegi's hand tells us and what, now, is confirmed in the excavations of the most mediatic of Navarre's archaeological sites. The most mediatic, but, it is worth remembering, not the only one, which will shed light on the exciting Romanization of our land.