BARCELONA: A Spanish archaeologist has been sentenced to more than two years in prison and fined €12,490 (over $14,000) for forging some of his most famous findings. In 2005 and 2006, Eliseo Gil announced that his team had found pieces of clay at the site, near the city of Vitoria-Gasteiz in Spain’s Basque Country. The artifacts, he said, dated back to the third century AD and contained Egyptian hieroglyphic references, representations of the crucifixion and signs of the Basque language. However, two years later, a multidisciplinary committee of linguistics, ancient history, archeology, chemistry and philology experts deemed the discovery to be a fake.
