Since last December, and after two years of social, political, but above all, positively scientific controversy, the Hand of Irulegi has been on display in the Prehistoric conference room of the Museum of Navarra. Although there may be objections to this somewhat eccentric location -it is a written document from the first quarter of the first century B.C.E.- it is clear that this will not be its final position in the Museum's permanent exhibition .

Anyone who has come to visit it during these weeks, as the media have highlighted these days, will have observed how this bronze plate attracts, no matter the day, dozens of curious people and visitors who discover with it the Antiquity of our Navarrese land. The Institución Príncipe de Viana and the Museum of Navarre have succeeded in taking advantage of the appeal of the Hand to dynamize the extraordinary archaeological collection of the Museum that includes, among others, very singular pieces like the mosaic of Andelo, the head of Augustus divinized of Cara or the togado in bronze of Pompelo, icon already of the hispanoroman statuary in this material.

The labeling that accompanies the already, undoubtedly, most mediatic of all the Paleo-Hispanic inscriptions, is as modern as it is clear. It is made clear that if we have knowledge of the Vascones, it is because of the Roman authors and the identification Vascones/Navarrese or Vascones/Basques, which has been so much abused lately, and always has been. Surprisingly, according to what has been read about the piece since its presentation in society in November 2021, it is noted that a good issue of the texts attested in the Basque territory were written in Celtiberian language -several, in fact, can be seen on coins and teapots in that same conference roomand only a few, in the easternmost part of the territory, were written in the Basque language .

It is true that it is omitted that the now called Basque signarius is in reality only a subsystem of the Iberian signarius and that, for lack of space, the diverse cultural affiliation of the way in which the document was composed on the bronze plate that bears it is not emphasized either. Likewise, no emphasis is placed on the intense Romanization that the Basque territory must have shown at the time when the Hand was engraved for one of its inhabitants to compose this piece asking fortune to protect his home in unstable times, such as those of Sertorius' war.

I am sure that when the document occupies its proper place in the Museum of Navarre, closer to the Roman materials, these questions will become evident. Until then, we can only congratulate ourselves because this piece has been recovered from the bowels of the Navarrese soil, a piece that we will surely understand better as the years go by and that, as no other document had done so far, has contributed to reactivate questions that we thought were closed, raising hitherto unsuspected questions. And that is a revulsive for science and for knowledge. Now it is time to discover 'hand in hand' the promising Archaeology of Navarre and its Museum, which brings us closer to it in an exceptional way and through the way Archaeology writes History: the materiality of the past.