La Gomera was the only island that did not have a stone canvas with Libyan-Berber letters, the writing brought from North Africa by the people who colonized the Canary Islands during the first centuries of the Common Era. One afternoon in the winter of 2005, archaeologist Juan Carlos Hernández and anthropologist José Miguel Trujillo discovered the site that has revolutionized the archeology of La Gomera: Las Toscas del Guirre. This small cave houses the largest alphabetical panel in the Archipelago and a mysterious hole that years later was proven to have been built to establish a precise marker for the winter solstice, with which the ancient Gomerians controlled the passage of time. It is the only archaeological site in Spain that combines letters from an ancient North African alphabet with an ingenious astronomical instrument.
The most immediate consequence of the discovery of that work of rock art “is that I did not sleep for three days,” he tells Canary Islands Now-eldio.es Hernandez. “We archaeologists,” reflects the director of the Archaeological Museum of La Gomera (MAG), “we dream of a great discovery that allows us to see beyond; So, when you verify that your ancestors had writing, the impact was tremendous”, a convulsion that justifies that vigil. The discovery, he adds, “truly revolutionized the archeology of the Island.” His colleague Trujillo did not lose sleep that night because the next day he had to return to the bank where he worked. What he will never forget was the commotion that was experienced when the most important specialists in Libyan-Berber writing in Spain began to arrive in La Gomera.
From a scientific perspective, the discovery of the letters of Las Toscas del Guirre allowed the Island to “get on the train of alphabetical manifestations of the rest of the Canary Islands. A society that codifies what it speaks connects us to that infinite North of Africa,” says Juan Carlos Hernández. The Islands’ top expert in this discipline is the philologist and archaeologist Renata Springer, a Canarian who was born in Germany. She deciphered each of the letters and has cataloged a total of 105 signs. From being the only island without writing to having the most spectacular alphabetical site in the Archipelago. Since then, two more alphabet stations have been located. “We were the last in the Canary Islands to incorporate stations with alphabetic rock engravings into our collection,” but with the hundred Libyan characters chiseled into the rock, this site is now the reference for the writing that pre-Hispanic society bequeathed.
Despite its great relevance, Las Toscas del Guirre is in danger. Dr. Juan Francisco Navarro Mederos, one of the leaders of Canarian archeology, warns: “It is an extremely fragile site due to the instability of the rock in which the engravings are found.” Although access is complicated, on a remote cliff in the southwest of La Gomera, this relic is exposed to the elements, in an archaeological complex with natural habitat and burial caves. To get to know it, the ideal is to visit the MAG and enjoy a well-produced audiovisual.
sacred place
On the floor of the cave there are some holes and a channel, some engravings with a certain resemblance to bowl stations that the aborigines, as the chronicles reflect, carved for cultural rites featuring libations. La Gomera archaeologists, however, are clear that it does not respond at all to this profile; In fact, they consider that they were “holes to place posts, while the channel was to fit a type of wooden partition.” It is not the only cave on the Island with this type of footprints. There are bowl and canal stations on all the Islands and also in the Iberian Peninsula, such as La Cava de Garcinarro – the largest complex in the country with nearly 8,000 bowls. From the first moment, archaeologists were clear about the sacred component of Las Toscas del Guirre, but what they did not know in 2005 was that they were also facing a unique archaeoastronomic site in the context of the cultural astronomy of the Canary Islands.
The existence of a strange hole in the upper part of the wall in front of the alphabetic panel caught the attention of specialists. With dimensions of only 18 centimeters wide by 15 centimeters high, researchers saw signs that the contour was chiseled. That is, the hole is artificial. For what purpose did they do it? To answer this question, the MAG technicians contacted the mathematician José Barrios, author of the first doctoral thesis – and for now the only one – on archaeoastronomy in the Canary Islands.
Investigating through the hole, Barrios observed “that its plane is inclined with respect to the vertical of the cave floor, so, due to perspective, a person standing in front of the hole can see a small strip of the mountainous horizon.” to the west of the Island, framed in a small elongated oval. The visible strip of the horizon is about thirteen azimuthal degrees.” But the landscape through the viewer determines nothing, until the researcher discovers that “in the weeks immediately before and after the winter solstice” the Sun hides behind a mountain aligned with the center of the hole.
If it wasn’t an exact marker of the solstice, it was at least a seasonal marker. But the professor of Mathematical Analysis at the University of La Laguna was not satisfied. He wanted to know what would happen on December 22, because in the year in which he carried out the research that was the day of the winter solstice. José Barrios will never forget what happened on the date the Christmas Lottery draw was held. It was his turn a fat archaeoastronomic: “At sunset, sunlight enters through the hole, projecting a ray that runs along the floor of the cave and up the opposite wall, just to the right of the place where the Libyan-Berber text is located. The path of the ray is such that, before the light goes out, the last ray of the last day of autumn fits perfectly into a small oval bowl excavated in the eastern wall of the cave. From that moment on, science establishes that this bowl is the precise marker of the winter solstice in Las Toscas del Guirre, centuries after, presumably, Ghomara astronomers, coming from the north of present-day Morocco, opened a hole to establish their calendar.
That December 22 was very special for Barrios and for the two MAG professionals who had discovered the wonderful indigenous writing panel years before. The next objective was to investigate the mountain profile through which the sun was hidden during the days of the winter solstice.
Las Nieves Hermitage and sacrificial altars
The discoveries fell into a chain. Archaeologists found a set of sacrificial altars right at the height behind which the winter Sun sets. And from that point, it connects with other emblematic mountains and rocks of the Island that also house ritual altars in their watchtowers. On one side of that mountain, after the Conquest, the new settlers built the hermitage of Las Nieves, the scene of Christian pilgrimages today. For Barrios, it is not a coincidence: “The construction of the hermitage, one of the oldest, right where the Sun sets, allows us to read the religious space of the Island in an absolutely new way and informs us of the process of syncretism. religious event that occurred after the Conquest.”
The acculturation that we saw in La Fortaleza de Chipude, in the first installment of this trilogy, is repeated here. Juan Carlos Hernández adds: “As the evidence suggests, the location of the Las Nieves sanctuary was chosen for its position with respect to the cave, which would be decoding the ritual space of the Island in a way never before observed in the Canary Islands.”
For the head of the MAG, this symbiosis between the spectacular alphabetical engraving and the solstitial viewer of Las Toscas del Guirre is “a totally exceptional case in the studies of the archeology of the ancient Canary Islands, which opens new and important avenues of research for the entire Archipelago”. Is there a relationship between the meaning of the letters on the panel with the astronomical nature of the cave? The director of the MAG responds: “It is an issue that we do not know at the moment. Now, it would be strange that in such a small place, any of the uses that the cave had were outside the meaning of the other element.”
The mesh or network of sacrificial altars that dot the geography of La Gomera will be the protagonist of the last chapter of this trilogy, in which the experts will raise the diachrony, the evolution of that mesh “of sacred places that are hierarchical.” In this sense, Hernández and Trujillo have no doubt that Las Toscas del Guirre “was one of those places where the religious power of that culture was put into practice.”
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