Emiliano Aguirre’s scientific archive arrived at the Atapuerca Foundation in 2018, as the result of an agreement between the Atapuerca Foundation and the Emiliano Aguirre Paleontological Foundation, owner of the documentary collection, for its preservation, cataloguing, and dissemination.
The work of preservation, cataloguing, and dissemination is made possible thanks to the support of the Círculo Burgos and Ibercaja Foundations.
Some of the books from Emiliano Aguirre’s bibliographic collection. Photo: Susana Santamaría / Atapuerca Foundation
This documentary collection of the “father of Atapuerca” is made up of an extensive body of academic and scientific material, which is currently in the process of being catalogued. Among the documents that will be available for consultation on the Atapuerca Foundation’s website are personal correspondence, telegrams, press clippings, original manuscripts, corrected typed copies, doctoral theses, teaching preparation materials, scientific articles and conference papers, as well as field notebooks from different sites such as the Nubian archaeological mission of 1963, study visits on bone materials in Kenya and South Africa in 1968, notes on the study of East African hominids in 1977, and field notebooks from sites in Spain: Gándaras de Budiño (Pontevedra) and Torralba and Ambrona (Soria) in the 1960s, as well as the notebooks and field diary from the Atapuerca (Burgos) excavations between 1978 and 1990.
Oil on canvas. Author: A. Salamanca, 2008
As a result of his other passion, painting, high-quality drawings from Natural Sciences courses at the Complutense University of Madrid have been preserved; as well as zoology class drawings from 1952 and 1953; notebooks with notes and bird drawings from 1954; sketches painted from life of African ethnic dances from the 1960s; and several caricatures of Spanish, European, and American paleontologists from the 1950s and 1960s.