A boom of bones and books: The “popularization industry” of Atapuerca and human-origins research in contemporary Spain

Hochadel, Oliver

doi:10.1177/0963662512437329

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Even in the context of a discipline that easily attracts public attention such as human origins research, the sheer mass and breadth of ways of communicating with the general public seems unique. To continue with this discourse of superlatives, there is no other project in human paleontology where the three co‐directors have in sum written or coauthored more than thirty popular science books since 1998 including a stone age novel, a children's book, and several histories of their own research project (Hochadel ). Between 1999 and 2011, several traveling exhibitions were shown in all major Spanish cities, with well over one million visitors.…”

Section: Atapuerca: a Spanish Success Storymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The audiences which media and other sites of popularization such as museums and science centres cater for largely overlap with the population of a country. Because the popular genre is not restricted by the ‘scholarly straightjacket’ (technical language, methodology, brevity, sobriety, scholarly apparatus), it might be more revealing to learn about the motives and self‐understanding of the scientist (Hochadel ; Lewenstein ). Addressing issues of national achievements and national identity is bound to the imperative of marketing popular science for ‘one's own’ audience.…”

Section: Introduction: Science and Nationalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Fossils of Atapuerca: Scientific Nationalism and the New Beginning of Spanish History

Hochadel

2015

Studies Ethnicity & National

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Numerous studies have shown how closely nation‐building accompanies research into human prehistory. While these studies primarily focus on the period before 1945, the example of the Spanish site Atapuerca demonstrates that the strong link between hominid fossils and national identity still exists in the twenty‐first century. The article argues that there are different ways of appropriating prehistoric human remains. One may distinguish the concept of ‘biological continuity’ in which the fossils represent some kind of ancestor from the concept of ‘scientific nationalism’. The latter consists in the pride in the scholarly achievement and international recognition of ‘our own’ scientists. The Atapuerca project was crucial in overcoming the Spanish ‘inferiority complex’ with respect to scientific prowess. In Atapuerca we may even discern a third concept: the marketing of origins in order to lure tourists to the site – nationalism enterprised‐up. The Spanish researchers created a multifold ‘popularization industry’ and forged a close alliance with the national media. Thus, this article will try to explain how Atapuerca turned within less than ten years from a little known archaeological site to the – however imaginary – starting point of Spanish history at the turn of the millennium.

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Section: Atapuerca: a Spanish Success Storymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introduction: Science and Nationalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Fossils of Atapuerca: Scientific Nationalism and the New Beginning of Spanish History

Hochadel

2015

Studies Ethnicity & National

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“…It is fleshed out and complemented by additional work published elsewhere and will hopefully stimulate further attempts to paint a larger and more detailed picture. Further pieces of the picture have emerged, partly in exchange and collaboration with authors of this issue: some of the Polish organs and uses of popular science (Zasztowt 2009; Włodarczyk 2009; Zasztowt et al 2012), some of particularly French kinds of popular and public science like song and cabaret (Raichvarg 2009), and some of Spanish popular paleontology, which analyzed the remains of the oldest Homo sapiens and declared him a “Spanish national” (Hochadel 2009 and 2013). Another fascinating case study combining a truly European understanding of scientific culture with a peripheral geographic location and a host of efforts to communicate science to a diverse people is Israel, which established two different popular science programs on TV, one in Hebrew and one in Arabic, thus representing a rather different national approach to science communication (Katz-Kimchi 2012 and 2013).…”

Section: National Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Communicating Science: National Approaches in Twentieth-Century Europe

Schirrmacher

2013

Sci Context

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In a recent book on The Publics of Science; Experts and Laymen Through History, Agustí Nieto-Galan introduced his subject of a (mostly Western) history of public science, covering the times from the Scientific Revolution to the twenty-first century, with reference to Sigmund Freud. In one of his essays of cultural critique, Freud had, so to speak, put culture itself on his couch, and this session also featured talk about science and technological application. Civilization and Its Discontents identified a factor of disillusionment in the progress of science and technology, which gave rise to “The Uneasiness in Culture” (the literal translation of the title of Freud's German essay Das Unbehagen in der Kultur), and this uneasiness tainted a great deal of the happiness science and technology were intended to cultivate (Nieto-Galán 2011; Freud 1930). New technology and inventions like telephones, ocean liners, or drugs, Freud argued, were mostly remedies for negative developments technology had just created; for instance, without modern transportation people would stay close to each other and not need any telephone. (However, he did not address the issue of whether scientific knowledge itself may have provided some satisfaction.) The modern individual, as analyzed by Freud, was therefore constantly ill at ease with modern scientific and technological culture.

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Atapuerca: evolution of scientific collaboration in an emergent large-scale research infrastructure

2013

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We study the evolution of scientific collaboration at Atapuerca's archaeological complex along its emergence as a large-scale research infrastructure (LSRI). Using bibliometric and fieldwork data, we build and analyze co-authorship networks corresponding to the period 1992-2011. The analysis of such structures reveals a stable core of scholars with a long experience in Atapuerca's fieldwork, which would control coauthorship-related information flows, and a tree-like periphery mostly populated by 'external' researchers. Interestingly, this scenario corresponds to the idea of a Equipo de Investigación de Atapuerca, originally envisioned by Atapuerca's first director 30 years ago. These results have important systemic implications, both in terms of resilience of co-authorship structures and of 'oriented' or 'guided' self-organized network growth. Taking into account the scientific relevance of LSRIs, we expect a growing number of quantitative studies addressing collaboration among scholars in this sort of facilities in general and, particularly, emergent phenomena like the Atapuerca case. Keywords Emergent large-scale research infrastructures Á Scientific collaboration dynamics Á Co-authorship Á Network analysis Á Atapuerca Sergi Lozano and Alex Arenas are members of the COMPATHEVOL Research Group.

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A boom of bones and books: The “popularization industry” of Atapuerca and human-origins research in contemporary Spain

Cited by 4 publications

References 6 publications

The Fossils of Atapuerca: Scientific Nationalism and the New Beginning of Spanish History

The Fossils of Atapuerca: Scientific Nationalism and the New Beginning of Spanish History

Introduction: Communicating Science: National Approaches in Twentieth-Century Europe

Atapuerca: evolution of scientific collaboration in an emergent large-scale research infrastructure

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