A team of archaeologists linked to the Cultania company has discovered five sepulchral deposits with thermalized human remains. The origin of the cremation of the remains is not known, but the main hypothesis is a ritual with fire after death. The necropolis are located in the Barranco de Agua de Dios, which runs through the Tenerife municipalities of Tegueste and La Laguna. These possible cremation rituals have also been documented in other regions of Tenerife and also in four other islands of the archipelago. After more than a decade of prospects and excavations in that ravine, the specialists have invented 104 deposits in caves, 48 of them are sepulchral. The investigation has been disseminated in the last issue of Atlantic Studies Yearbook and is signed by Francisco Pérez Caamaño, Agnés Lourt and Javier Soler.
The authors of The Guanche communities of the Barranco Agua de Dios and its funeral rituals. A ravine for life and death in Tenerife They argue that this territory, along five kilometers in the cape of the Zanjón, “is the most densely occupied archaeological zone of the island.” Of the 104 quantified deposits-some inventoried by other archaeologists-all in caves, 64 are in Tegueste and 40 in La Laguna; 52 are caves of room, 48 sepulchrals, two coats, an outdoor settlement and a sporadic frequency place. BIC since 2006, this set aspires to be declared archaeological park; It would be the first of Tenerife, an island that, unlike Gran Canaria, La Palma, El Hierro and Fuerteventura, has no archaeological enclosure to show its indigenous heritage.
The burning of human remains in the pre -Hispanic society of the Canary Islands is a phenomenon that began to be mentioned in the last quarter of the last twentieth century. Today, he raises questions. Why were bodies incinerated? Were they burn in their entirety or just some parts? Was the rite immediately after death or later? Was it a ritual or were bones incinerated to enable more space in the necropolis?
“We don’t know why they burned, but we believe that this practice, at least in God’s water, is cultural.” For the remains they have found, he informs Canary Islands now-eldiario.es Archaeologist Francisco Pérez Caamaño, “only fragments were burned; We have observed some vertebra, a humerus … “bones selected ultimately. “This tells us that it was a ritual because if it were a cleaning of funeral deposits,” already in aboriginal or historical times, “they would all be burned.” “We believe,” explains this professor at a lagoon institute, “that the rite was done much after death, once the decomposition of the body was consummated; They burned certain parts of the deceased and then transferred them to another cave, perhaps by desire of the ancestor or by family tradition. ”
The first identification of thermoalterned remains in water of God was in 2011, in the XL cave. There they located many bones affected by fire. Although they published the finding, “we did not give it too much importance,” the authors of The Guanche communities of the Barranco Agua de Dios and its funeral rituals. A ravine for life and death in Tenerife“Given the low representativeness within the set of ravine deposits.” But twelve years later, after discovering four more caves, “we saw that this phenomenon was not accidental, we concluded that it was part of a ritual.”
After tracking Palmo, the caves of this large archaeological zone of the northeast of Tenerife and certify that the combustion rite is not an isolated phenomenon, the researchers conclude the need to expand investigations to contribute light to the questions that still have no answer . Therefore, they propose “a project for the study and analysis of the thermalized bio -anthropological remains discovered to date”, with the objective that incineration experts determine, among other aspects, the temperature at which they were burned or if the fire was intentional or fortuitous, which would question, in the latter case, the thesis of the ritual.
Of the five caves, one “is clearly without altering; The bones had to burn because there could not be incinerated as they were a very small grotto. ” Archaeologists had to climb ten meters. The difficulty of access has prevented it from being looted by plunders.
The authors of this research on the archaeological set of water of God have identified two characteristics common to almost half a hundred burial caves: “They are collective and are related to the domestic sphere.” They have also verified “the predominance of thermalized remains in secondary deposits,” that is, the place bones were transferred once burned. The cremation is not generalized, since fragments burned in five of the 48 funeral cavities have been detected. In these five spaces, part of the bone remains appear, a combustion with several intensity levels because some bones are only slightly shame.
Very old practice
What the authors of the investigation have no doubt is that “it is a very old practice.” The proof of this statement was found in the stratigraphy of a cave of the Barranco de la Arena, in La Orotava (Tenerife). According to the report (published in 1982) of the excavation, directed by the archaeologist and anthropologist Lorenzo Perera, “the thermalterated bone remains were at the lower level of stratigraphy. The upper level contained the revolt remains of 43 individuals of different ages ”and none had signs of combustion. This circumstance induces to think that the cremation ritual was abandoned, at least in that region of the north of the island.
The first site discovered in Tenerife with signs of rituals with fire is the aforementioned La Orotava, but there is more. In Icod de los Vinos, Carmen del Arco Aguilar, archaeologist and professor of the ULL, documented “primary and secondary funeral rituals among the Guanches” in the Cafoño crack. In Buenavista del Norte, a municipality in which the oldest indigenous vestiges on the island have been dated – see Buenavista, the Guanche cradle of Tenerife-, burning of human remains has also been detected.
This phenomenon has been documented in other islands. La Palma treasures, next to Tenerife, the greatest number of deposits with thermalterado archaeological material, also in La Gomera and Gran Canaria, but on the island of El Hierro there is a site in which bones were incinerated both for a cultural practice and to enable More space in the cave for new burials. It is about the necropolis of Lajura.
The El Hierro Historical Heritage Inspector, Maite Ruiz, participated in the excavation of Lajura. “We documented,” informs this newspaper, “the use of fire for a ritual act. The generalized fire [para limpiar el enterramiento] It occurred when the remains were in different phases of decomposition. ” That is appreciated, adds the archaeologist, “in how the bone reacts to the fire, fracturing the oldest or dry and bending the most recent or fresh.” Ruiz highlights the interest of the bimbapes so that “their ancestors will rest on that site. Therefore, after the fire it continued to be used as necropolis. ”
That excavation was directed by Javier Velasco. The main hypothesis is that “they were burned to enable more spaces for other burials.” Velasco, with extensive experience in funeral deposits of the archipelago, acknowledges that “except in the cockroach [necrópolis en La Palma]there are practically no study of cremated remains in the Canary Islands. ” Regarding the ritual use of the fire that Ruiz quotes, Velasco clarifies that “they are remains of combustion at the base of the deposit, with deposits of animal remains and lithic industry. They were interpreted as a result of a ritual activity aimed at enabling the place as a grave. ”
The cockroach, in the town of Mazo, was the first field of the Canary Islands in which burned human remains were found. In fact, in 2023 the 60th anniversary of the discovery of this unique enclave, ephemeris that was commemorated with an exhibition was fulfilled. Felipe Jorge Pais, director of the Benahoarita Archaeological Museum, has no doubt of the “ritual use of cremation in Benahoarita society,” the archaeologist Palmero told this newspaper, who adds that “that ritual practice was carried out from the first centuries of the occupation of the island ”. In La Palma, half a dozen caves have been located with thermoalterate human remains.
As we have indicated in this report, deposits are known with human combustion remains on five islands, but as Velasco, an archaeological heritage inspector of the Cabildo de Gran Canaria, “are difficult to explain without having intervened.”
The published article Atlantic Studies Yearbook Describe the entire troglodite set of the Agua de Dios ravine. Its authors point out that there is no unique pattern in the 48 inventoried sepulchral caves, since there are “narrow, dark and single cavity” caves, but there were also burials in “luminous, spacious and subdivided internal spaces”. They have also observed that access to cavities are oriented to the four cardinal points.
Most of the deposits “are piled up, scrambled” and plundered in some cases. Caamaño, Agnés Lourt and Javier Soler located “ceramic remains and loose lithic pieces of obsidian or basalt.” Some cavities retain remains of enclosure durets and in one of them an trousseau was located, “a polished basalt spheroid.”
What dates have these human remains recovered from the first excavations that Luis Diego Cuscoy performs in the mid -twentieth century? It is another of the pending subjects because they have been very few. In any case, carbon analysis 14 have registered an antiquity that ranges from the end of the seventh century to the IX of the common era. All the human remains of Canarian aboriginal dated to date are after the birth of Christ, a fact that reinforces the majority thesis of the scientific community that the settlement of the archipelago, understood as settlement and subsequent creation of a society, began around to the second century of the era. There were contacts before that date, as the Roman vestiges excavated in the Islet of Lobos and in Lanzarote demonstrate, with a maximum age of the middle of the 1st century before the common era; This data is known for the study of the ceramics found in both deposits.
Regarding the domestic organization of the population that inhabited water of God, “the Guanches were structured from tribal entities that occupied and exploited the ravine; They were organized from local domestic and group units, to grow gradually. ” The study collects, as the ethnohistoric sources reflect, “the high degree of social hierarchy and deeply segmented stratification”, at least in the last two previous centuries at the end of the conquest, in the year 1496 in Tenerife.
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