por LAWRENCE GUY STRAUS, University of New Mexico

     Lluís (“Luis” in Castilian) Pericot (1899-1978) is best known for two things: his excavation of the extraordinary Upper Paleolithic site of El Parpalló (Valencia) before the Spanish Civil War and for being the international face of Spanish prehistoric archaeology in the decades following the war. He was the most significant disciple of famed Catalán archaeologist and ethnologist Pere Bosch Gimpera, himself a student of the legendary Hugo Obermaier. Both Obermaier and Bosch were tragic exiles (the former from Germany during World War I and from Spain at the outset of the Spanish conflict until his death in Switzerland soon after the end of World War II, and the latter -as a lawyer who had been the Justice Secretary of the autonomous Government of Catalonia- from Spain at the fall of the Republic until his death as a Mexican citizen in 1974). As indicated by the book’s subtitle, Pericot, a Catalán who received his doctorate from the University of Madrid in 1923 for a dissertation on megaliths of the Catalonian Pyrenees (with Obermaier a member of the defense jury), spanned two very different epochs in the development of Spanish prehistoric archaeology, which before the rise of Obermaier and Bosch had been outmoded in the extreme (read: still “creationist” in the cases of some professors).

     With 600 + pages of dense, highly detailed, and at times chronologically confusing text, interrupted by only a few photos, this book will only be comprehensible by real cognoscenti of Spanish prehistory and politics. The writing is dry, frequently repetitious, and loaded with long lists of names of (often the same) now little-known prehistorians. It is sparse in actually describing Pericot the man (though his affable, diplomatic, low-key, modest nature is stated, but with few anecdotes -save the fact that he wore a very “low-class” beret during a high-power visit to Moscow at the height of the Cold War), or, more importantly, without telling readers much about his actual field work and its importance in several significant debates (which are mentioned in the book, notably in the epilogue). Parpalló was most significant for Pericot’s “bombshell” discovery of stemmed/winged (“corner-notched”) points that were clearly of Solutrean (i.e., Last Glacial) age despite their similarity to Chalcolithic points and the recovery of some 5.600 engraved stone slabs with geometric and animal images from the Gravettian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian levels. Also only minimally explained were Pericot’s roles in the debate with the Abbé Henri Breuil (also one of Pericot’s mentors) over the age of Levantine rock art (he and others argued for post-Paleolithic versus Breuil’s older -incorrect- attribution). Although Pericot became one of Spain’s foremost authorities on African and American archaeology, he never actually did research there, and this book only obliquely explains how he became an “expert” (namely by attending many congresses, visiting sites, and viewing museum collections, perhaps rather impressionistically rather than analytically, as was often typical in early-twentieth-century archaeology). It is a shame that the book does not give more of a sense of how Pericot managed to acquire such a wealth of information (particularly given the precarious conditions under which Spanish archaeology functioned during the Franco regime).

     This biography, by a professor of prehistory at the University of Barcelona, where Pericot had first studied under Bosch and to which he returned in 1955 as a full professor after stints at the universities of Santiago de Compostela and Valencia, is heavily concerned with the academic politics of the 1930s-1970s and how they were intertwined with Spanish national politics from the time of Franco’s coup d’état in 1936 until his death in 1975. Pericot clearly was a survivor; though neither a radical Republican nor a Catalán separatist, he went along with the Republic and may (or may not) have actually signed manifestos in support of the embattled Republic, for which he underwent a political process of doctrinal “cleansing” to keep his university position after the war, having changed his mind about following Bosch into exile. A conservative Catholic monarchist (but not a member of Opus Dei), Pericot had friends in high places in the early Franco regime (notably the Marqués de Lozoya, Director General of Fine Arts) and rapidly fell in line with the new post-1939 situation and rose through the ranks of Spanish academia. He built alliances and carefully dodged what could have been logical rivalries, notably with Martin Almagro Basch, who, though an Obermaier disciple, would first occupy Bosch’s chair in Barcelona before moving on to Madrid and becoming the omnipotent figure in late Francoist archaeology as the official occupant of Obermaier’s chair at the University of Madrid, director of the National Archaeological Museum and National Commissioner of Archaeology. Only then would Pericot occupy Bosch’s chair and assume de facto leadership of the “Barcelona School of Prehistory” in a kind of amicable condominium with Almagro.

     Almost obsessively, the book is concerned with the battle between a group of “progressive” university professors of archaeology and Franco’s Commissioner of Archaeological Excavations, Julio Martínez Santa-Olalla, who had been Obermaier’s student and who extra-legally seized his mentor’s University of Madrid chair at the close of the Civil War because of his militancy in the Falange, his strong Nazi sympathies (literally as an associate of Himmler), and his Francoist general father. Pericot (despite his affable, low-key manner) was one of the leaders (along with Almagro) in the long process of defenestration (the term used in this book) of Santa-Olalla and his catastrophic administration of Spanish archaeology (which included appropriation of most of the meagre available funds for his projects and those of his cronies, reliance on local amateurs for the conduct and “control” of excavations in the provinces, and disdain for university professors of archaeology). A significant portion of the book is devoted to this subject, which could have been summarized rather than detailing every aspect of the multi-year manoeuvers and intrigues to undermine and defeat Santa-Olalla. Ironically, Pericot’s prehistory was highly Spanish-nationalistic in the decades after the Civil War, stressing in his widely- and long-read textbooks and articles that the roots of the modern Spanish people lay in the Upper Paleolithic, despite invasions at different times from Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. The difficult position of this Catalán born, bred, and educated scholar could not be more poignant in the present political situation of Catalonia and Spain.

     As a favorite of the regime, especially after obtaining and then successfully organizing the International Congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences (later UISPP) in Madrid in 1954 -one of the first de facto international academic recognitions of the pariah Franco government after World War II- Pericot became a fixture at international meetings and on the academic lecture circuit almost up to the time of his death. The politics of Spanish archaeology and of Spanish foreign policy to rejoin the family of non-communist nations during the Cold War were intertwined, and Pericot was one of the chief protagonists. His circle of influential archaeological acquaintances expanded throughout the 1950s to include the likes of Louis Leakey and Desmond Clark in Africa, notable Latin American figures from Oswald Menghin (the postwar Austrian Nazi refugee in Argentina) to Pedro Armillas (a Republican refugee colleague of Bosch in Mexico), and, in the United States, Hallam Movius, Robert Braidwood,W.W. Howells, and Sol Tax, among many others. The book overlooks the importance of the Tax-Pericot relationship in terms of not only the latter’s participation in the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences and its congresses, but also access to the Wenner-Gren Foundation (mistakenly given as “Werner Green” in the book, along with other errors such as “Harward University,” “Dartmouyh College,” “American Archaeological Association,” and “Viking Found Publicacios” that copy-editing should have caught), which helped enable Pericot and E. Ripoll to organize and publish the Burg Wartenstein symposium on the Prehistoric Art of the Western Mediterranean and the Sahara.

     The role of Pericot as both synthesizer (with a classic diffusionist or even invasionist, culture-historical perspective) and as promotor of Spanish prehistory is stressed, though the opportunity to focus more attention on his major, enduring research contributions (many of which preceded the Civil War, notably Parpalló) is missed. There is considerable text devoted to Pericot’s many administrative responsibilities in universities and in both Spanish and international organizations, as well as to his prestige, honors, and recognitions. A deeper analysis of the research bases of his renown would have enhanced this vast biography. Ultimately, this is the story of a deft survivor who used personality, relationships, and wide knowledge (archaeological and political) to keep both himself and Spanish and Catalán prehistory alive through the violent years of the Civil War and the four dark decades of Franco’s rule. As a side note, Pericot visited New Mexico during his first American trip in 1952, writing a very a propos description of Santa Fe (p. 364) after his meeting with Marie Wormington in Denver and before his reunion with Bosch in Mexico City. (By way of full disclosure, as a graduate student, I met Pericot in Chicago at the IUAES Congress in 1973 and Almagro on several occasions in 1972-1974 in Spain. My wife was a student in one of Santa-Olalla’s last courses after he had clawed his way back into the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in a chair of art history; he only came to the first class meeting, never to return, leaving the class in the hands of an incompetent assistant).