Throught a glass darkly: illuminating the conflict between historical and archaeological interpretations of ancient populations of the Canary Islands

              Almogaren XXXVI / 2005 Wien 2005 191 - 203
Lawrence Stewart Owens*
Through a glass darkly:
llluminating the conflict between historical and
archaeological interpretations of ancient
populations of the Canary Islands
Key words: Canary lslands, contact period, conquest, archaeology, history
Abstract:
Canarian archaeology has been dominated by a set of historical texts that
have been used to interpret archaeological remains and to contextualise al­most
all aspects of investigation into the archipelago's prehispanic popu­lations.
The current author believes these texts to be heavily flawed in terms
of their coverage, biased authorship or date of production, and that the ob­servations
contained therein are too readily assumed to be representative
of earlier groups. This assertion is explored in the context of Canarian
historiography and wider studies of island archaeology.
Zusammenfassung:
Kanarische Archäologie wurde von einer Reihe von historischen Texten
dominiert, die dazu benützt wurden, archäologische Funde zu interpretieren
und um nahezu zu allen Aspekten der Erforschung der altkanarischen Be­völkerung
einen Zusammenhang herzustellen. Der Autor dieser Zeilen ist
der Meinung, dass diese Texte in Bezug auf ihre Berichterstattung, ihre
voreingenommenen Urheber oder ihr Entstehungsdatum höchst fehlerhaft
sind, und dass die enthaltenen Informationen allzu bereitwillig als reprä­sentativ
von frühen (prähispanischen) Gruppen angesehen wird. Diese
Annahme wird im Kontext der kanarischen Historiographie und erweiterter
Studien der Insel-Archäologie untersucht.
Resumen:
La arqueologia canaria ha estado dominada por una serie de textos hist6ricos
que han venido siendo utilizados para interpretar hallazgos arqueol6gicos y
para establecer una conexi6n de practicamente todos los aspectos de Ja in­vestigaci6n
con Ja poblaci6n aborigen canaria. EI autor de) presente trabajo
considera que estos textos presentan errores de peso en cuanto a Ja transmi-
* Birkbeck FCE, University of London, 26 Russell Square, London WClB SZX, UK;
e-mail: lawrence_owens@yahoo.co.uk
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si6n de informaciones, a los prejuicios de que fueron objeto sus autores o las
fechas en que se redactaron, y que las informaciones que contienen han sido
asumidas con excesiva complacencia como representativas de grupos (prehis­panicos)
tempranos. Esta suposici6n se analiza en el contexto de Ja historio­grafia
canaria y de amplios estudios de la arqueologia insular.
General Background
The generalities ofthe Canarian contact period are well known to all with
research interests in the archipelago's history/prehistory. Relations between
the Prehispanic Canary Islanders (PCis) and the Norman/Spanish invaders
began with slavery and sporadic stability, followed by genocide and deporta­tion,
then an uneasy peace. While relations were at least superficially cordial
between rulers and ruled, the PCis became extinct as a biocultural entity as a
direct result of European activity. From an estimated population of between
30,000 and 50,000 (Owens 2003: 79-83), only a handful of PCis remained by
the time chroniclers started to take an active interest in reliably recording their
cultural and biological characteristics. The language(s) all but disappeared,
along with the majority of material culture and social practices, so that all that
can truthfully be said to remain of the PCis are some cultural traditions and
certain NorthAfrican genetic markers (Cavalli Sforza etal. 1994). During this
period, various slavers, traders, travellers, priests and other interested parties
recorded their observations of the fast-vanishing PCis. What has come down
to us consists of fragmentary word/name lists, descriptions and ruminations
about the Canary Islanders and their environment, which have been treated
with often surprising reverence by past and present generations of archae­ologists.
The Classical Tradition in Canarian Scholarship
Like most 191h century historians/antiquarians, early Canarian researchers
were raised in a classical academic tradition that placed a high value on tex­tual,
typological and stylistic evidence. The discipline was then developed by
several generations of antiquarians and 'gentleman archaeologists' who used
a strongly historical emphasis for the interpretation of archaeological remains.
However, this emphasis on history-based studies has proven tobe remarkable
durable, and many scholars of Canarian archaeology continue to focus upon
historical information as the central narrative for studying any topic from
population dynamics to zooarchaeology, despite the fact that the historical
sources are often patently inappropriate for such work.
By being located in the 'Mediterranean-Atlantic' (Chaunu 1979: 106) on the
fringes of the history-rich Mediterranean, it is perhaps understandable that
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early academics would wish to relate their observations to this font of ready
kn,bwledge. While there are certainly links to the classical world insofar that
the geographical position of the archipelago would make it impossible to be
otherwise, the Canaries have little if anything in common with the Mediterra­nean
thalassocracies. The only coherent 'classical' reference to the Canarian
archipelago is that in which Pliny the Eider gave the archipelago it's name in
77 AD, while a Roman presence on the archipelago has been confirmed ar­chaeologically
(Atoche Pefia et al. 1995; Escribano Cobo and Mederos Martin
1996). Other than this fragment and some understudied Arab references (see
Owens 2003: 53-55), the only written sources were recorded by the French
and Spanish invaders as they witnessed the slow death of indigenous Canarian
society in the 151h and 161h centuries AD.
The Historical Materials
There are parts of the world where written histories are so extraordinarily
comprehensive that the whole ofthe lands' occupation can be examined from
its earliest days, almost without a break (i.e. the 'Landnam' oflceland - Smith
1995). However, the Canarian texts are nowhere near as robust. They were
written by the invaders rather than the islanders themselves, refer to a short
period oftime, and are erratic, patchy and incomplete. Even the earliest sources
refer to earlier, unrecorded slaving missions that could have acted as a 'post­contact
contamination factor' (Broodbank 2000: 15), altering islander behav­iour
and thus devaluing other contact-period historical observations (see
Boutier and Le Verrier 1872: 74, 75 and 123; Mercer 1980: 157-8). Assuming
that this was not a factor, however, early Canarian sources are amongst the
first mediaeval European records of foreign lands ever made. As comparative
anthropology was hardly a late mediaeval speciality, the chances of observers
having over /mis-interpreted what they saw are higher than in the case of more
culturally-aware explorers, artists and writers from later periods. Even the
most close-to-the-events chronicles were recorded by monks whose role it
was to baptise the surviving PCis, and who often relied upon hearsay from
soldiers of the conquering forces. As the European soldiery only met the PCis
in battle rather than in their domestic setting, one might legitimately question
the accuracy of their reports on social/cultural reports. Lastly, most of the
sources were in fact written substantially after the events they describe, while
- in nearly all cases - the chroniclers had an agenda, be it evangelistic, apolo­getic
or romantic.
The fact that the early chroniclers relied primarily upon second-hand infor­mation
comes across very strongly in what are presumably the soldiery's
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clumsy justifications for their maiming or slaughter ofthe islanders (such as
the nine foot giant who had to be killed because ' ... if they had spared him
they would perhaps have been all defeated and slain' Boutier and el Verrier
1872: 148; see also 1872: 135). lt has also been suggested that the Spanish and
French chroniclers deliberately emphasised what they believed to be charac­teristics
of cultural impoverishment in the Canarians, so as to ' ... justify the
Castilian annexation, presenting it as a civilizing favour given by the Europe­ans'
(Morales Mateos 2003: 2). Finally, the fact that the early authors pos­sessed
what might charitably be described as missionary zeal does not augur
well for the detachment oftheir writings. Much ofthe most famous text - by
Boutier and Le Verrier - is couched in biblical or classical terms that are pat­ently
designed to glorify the islanders as some kind of classical ideal, ripe for
evangelistic conversion, while also praising the Christian values of the con­quistadors.
Despite some humanitarian sentiments, therefore, it is very evi­dent
that they supported the mission and believed in the rightness of its core
values, despite the social cost paid by the indigenous Canarians. In the past
few hundred years, furthermore, as interest in the pre-colonial past has bur­geoned,
the myth of the 'noble Guanche' (Cionarescu 1961) has worked its
way into many histories of the islands, leading to a narrative that is often
more romantic mythology than historical/archaeological fact (del Arco Aguilar
et al. 1992).
Dating of the texts
So far we have speculated upon the reasons why we should be cautious
about the sources written at or near the time ofthe original occupation. How­ever,
the fact remains that much of the current dogma about ancient Canarian
lifestyle is based upon 'chronicles' written well after the events they purport
to describe, that are themselves based on rather shadowy (or vanished) sources
that have been reproduced and embellished by various generations of Canarian
historians and archaeologists. This inevitably diminishes their value for tell­ing
modern historians anything about contact period Canarians, much less
their antecedents. Anything recorded about the Native Canarians from the early
161
h century onwards is particularly suspect, as this was the period that saw the
extinction of the Canary Islanders as a biocultural entity, with doubtless pro­found
effects on their descendants' behaviour. In 1541 Girolamo Benzoni met
one of the last Canary Islanders to have lived through the conquests: then in
his 80s, he was establishing the sorry precedent of degradation and alcohol­ism
that came to define numerous aboriginal societies in the wake ofEurope's
colonial expansion (Mercer 1980: 237). By this time, accounts ofthe conquests
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were starting to assume a quasi-mythological character. The texts written by
Torriani (1590), Frutuoso (1590), Alonso de Espinosa (1594) and Antonio de
Viana (1604, in Martin de Guzman 1984) date to approximately a century
after the last island had fallen to the French, and nearly three centuries after
the first European incursions into the archipelago. One of the most widely
used texts is even later, written by Friar Juan de Abreu de Galindo in 1632
(translated by George Glas in 1764). Tue sporadic reappearance of similar
pieces of information in various texts suggests that facts were borrowed from
earlier tomes; one example of this is Abreu de Galindo's reiteration of
Espinosa's rather poetic prose style (Hooton 1925: 4). Continual cross-refer­encing,
reiteration and reliance upon lost works all increase the <langer of
breeding factoids by recycling half-remembered, selective or inaccurate in­formation,
further underlining the vital necessity of exercising caution in se­lecting
historic sources.
Cultural Laboratories, Fossilised Natives and the Isolation Myth
The reliability of historical records aside, we must ask ourselves exactly
how accurately they can reflect the actualities beyond (i.e. before) the events
they describe. This is the main division point in Canarian research, for while
history always has its flaws, these are to be expected, and allowances can be
made for subjective bias. However, historical issues should not be allowed to
spill over into the - literally - prehistoric sphere. There has been a decided
tendency for historians and archaeologists to view contact period populations
as conveniently fossilised representatives of their ancestors, thus denying
' . .. their past the potential to be substantially different from the ethnographic
present' (Broodbank 2000: 15). This tendency is particularly strong in the in­habitants
of island environments, which are often assumed to act as sterile
'laboratories', preserving unchanged the cultural, behavioural and biological
characteristics of the very earliest inhabitants (Evans 1973). While the mani­fold
weaknesses in this argument have come under stringent attack, the myth
that the ancient Canarians possessed a ' ... manifestly conservative character'
(Diego Cuscoy 1968a: 212, in Del Arco Aguilar 1998), that their society and
culture was caught in' ... a Neolithic time warp' (Spence 2000: 1) and that ' . .. the
ethnobiological picture that they possessed in the 6th, 7th, 9th or 11 th centu­ries
is the same as when they arrived on the island and the same that was
found by the Conquistadors in the 151h century' (Diego Cuscoy 1968: 212, in
Dei Arco Aguilar 1998) has proved to be remarkably durable. There are in fact
many indications suggesting that Canarian culture was both spatially and tem­porally
variable, even during the period when the contact period texts were
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recorded. For instance, the 'Menceyato' system of government and accompa­nying
ancestor worship on Tenerife only appeared in the early/mid 151h cen­tury,
as the previous system had seen the island ruled by a single leader (Mer­cer
1980: 197). Gran Canarians are reported to have netted fish in the first
decade ofthe 15th century, but were using fishhooks (made from Spanish metal)
by 1443. The Spanish were taken aback in 1468 when they attempted to invade
Gran Canaria and were attacked by islanders wielding exact wooden copies
of European metal weapons left behind in an earlier raid (Mercer 1980: 186).
Another example is the cult that sprang up around the Virgin and Child figure
washed up on Tenerife in 1390-1400, as this is clearly outside the remit of
ritual behaviour (such as the worship of celestial bodies) observed by earlier
historians (op cit 177). Archaeological signatures also support temporospatial
behavioural dynamism, such as the clear cultural discontinuities in the ce­ramic
traditions at El Bebedero (Atoche Pefia et al. 1995), inter-period differ­ences
in burial practices on Lanzarote, Tenerife and Gran Canaria (Owens
2003: 67), and the major discontinuities in ceramic traditions on La Palma
(Navarro Mederos 1998). Economic variability is also notable, such as the dif­ferences
in economic signatures between the islands and inland/coastal sites
(La Palma - Pais Pais 1996), sites hinting at over-exploitation of natural re­sources
by a steady decrease in the size of gathered limpets through time at
the La Palma site of EI Tendal (Pais Pais 1996) and differing prevalence of
external auditory exostoses (bony ear pathology caused by cold-water expo­sure,
implying diving/swimming) between two major sites of different peri­ods
in Gran Canaria (Betancor Rodriguez & Velasco Vazquez 1998; personal
observation). lt is rather likely that what was seen, heard and recorded in the
Canaries during the late mediaeval period was " ... merely (a) recent configu­ration(
s) among a vast spectrum of alignments that have come and gone over
the millennia" (Broodbank 2000: 15). lt would therefore be exceedingly un­wise
to generalise about pre-contact lifestyles on the basis of contact period
histories.
Dating Evidence for the Canarian Archipelago
The problem of representation discussed above worsens according to the
temporal lapse between the archipelago's earliest occupation and the arrival
of reliable chroniclers. Logically, therefore, the !arger the lapse, the less use­ful
historical sources become as mirrors of very early occupation. Because
the facilities for dating Canarian archaeological remains were not available
until fairly recently, the field Jacks chronological structure. To compound
matters, most large museum collections of Canarian artefacts and human re-
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mains were gathered rather than excavated, with geographical and stratigra­ph
· c provenance rarely recorded beyond the area or even island level. Conse­quently,
it is not clear if observed variation is temporal, spatial or social in
nature (see Navarro Mederos 1998). lt should be noted that while modern
Canarian archaeologists employ fully modern methods and techniques, there­fore,
most of the important collections available for research purposes were
not made under such exacting standards and are consequently oflimited worth
for developing a temporospatial perspective on Canarian occupation.
While the coverage is less than ideal (most resources have been directed at
large, flagship sites on the two main islands, and comparatively little atten­tion
being paid to smaller sites or islands - see Owens 2003: 68-69), these
dates provide a general idea of the date span for the Canarian archipelago,
although it should be noted that there is considerable controversy over the
earliest occupation of the islands. Some of the very early dates for the archi­pelago
(including Las Palomas, Tenerife, at 5500-6890 BP) were originally
believed to have been derived from contaminated samples. Tue only inde­pendent
verification of such an early colonisation event was the replacement
ofFuerteventura's 'Lava Mouse' by the house mouse around 5,000 BC (Castillo
et al .. 2001 : 289-290), but while the species is certainly a human commensal,
non-anthropogenic colonisation was also a possibility. However, further sus­picions
of a very early human presence were raised by the discovery of goat
bones dated to between 5,000 and 10,000 BP (Zöller et al. 2003) on Lanzarote,
which - as goats could not have travelled to the islands unaided - are incon­trovertible
proof that humans visited the island at some point during this pe­riod.
While these results are not unequivocal (Carracedo et al. 2004 vs. Zöller
et al. 2004), the fact that dates are constantly occurring in this general range
seem to suggest that at least some human activity (possibly a failed colonisa­tion)
preceded the bulk of dates that appear in the late 1 st millennium BC. The
position of the Canary Islands in the global forum of island settlement and
archaeology/history will be discussed in future work by the current author.
Having considered these dates, it was decided to present these data as a
chart (fig. 1 next page), to depict the actual amount of time to which the
historical (written) sources refer. Calculations were carried out using tak­ing
the ballpark figure of 500 BC for first human habitation (Onrubia
Pintado 1987; Del Arco Aguilar etal. 1992: 74; Navarro Mederos 2001) and
records kept by Bethencourt's retinue as the first available detailed histori­cal
source, disregarding the rather vague Roman references and several
fragmentary 14th century references (i.e. da Recco 1341). All the historical
information we possess therefore comes from a period lasting from 1402
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Historie Information Availability for the Canaries
Figure 1: The maximum percentage oftime (4,7 %) covered by historical sources in
the Canaries (taken from Owens 2003: 62)
till 1496, which constitutes only 4. 7% of Canarian occupational history. This
is the percentage shown in Figure 1. However, if Zöller et al. (2003) are
correct in asserting that initial colonisation may have taken place at some
point between 5,000 and 10,000 BP, the amount oftime covered by the his­tories
would constitute between only 1.8% (5,000 BP) and 0.9% (10,000
BP) of Canarian human occupation.
These historical sources have provided a bonanza of information for histo­rians
of the contact period, and rightly so. The manner in which the native
Canarians and Europeans adapted to one another is a dynamic and interesting
field (Hemandez Marrero 2001). However, a 94-year-long slice of history -
anywhere in the world - would be a nugatory sample from which to make any
measured assessment of traditions in the populations' antecedents. If some­thing
similar were done for Britain, for example, it is vanishingly unlikely
that we would be able to derive anything pertinent about the Late Iron Age, the
Roman occupation, the Anglo Saxons, the Vikings or the Normans from a
scatter of fragmentary observations made in the late Mediaeval period: If
Zöller and associates are correct in their re-dating of the archipelago's origi­nal
inhabitation to 5,000 to 10,000 BP, however, it would be tantamount to
trying to use 94 years' worth of mediaeval information to understand the Brit­ish
Late Neolithic (5,000 BP) or the Mesolithic (10,000 BP) as weil as all sub-
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sequent periods. This exercise serves to re-emphasise the fact that only the
m@st tentative conclusions about ancient Canarian society can be drawn from
the records of its destruction.
Dangerous Histories - Further Implications
Because of this unreasoned adherence to historical texts, and the way in
which the islands' past has been studied, the ancient populations of the Ca­nary
Islands have failed to rise to their deserved prominence in the academic
sphere. This is doubly unfortunate, for not only are we failing to attain our
potential understanding of the PCis and their world, but we have thus reduced
the variety of islandscape lifestyle variants that are available to island archae­ology.
We thus lose the chance to enrich the intellectual topography of a field
dominated by Pacific - and, increasingly, Mediterranean - research agendas
and issues (Broodbank 2000: 37). Island archaeology's major 'hotspots' are
therefore in <langer of becoming literally 'insular' in the most pejorative sense
of the term. Based on a review of island geography, archaeology and history
(Owens 2003: 34-36), it is evident that the Canaries are virtually unique in their
configuration and relationships with continental landmasses, as well as in terms
of their colonisation/occupation history and oftheir populations' cultural herit­age
and environmental adaptations. lt is of course true that many modern re­searchers
into ancient Canarian society are using more archaeological evidence,
but their work nonetheless continues to be heavily influenced by historical in­formation.
As a result, the Canaries have been overlooked by researchers who
aim to examine cultural chronologies and population historyin order to estab­lish
cultural parameters for island archaeology. For example, in the classic edi­tion
of World Archaeology (ed. Cherry 1995), which deals with colonisation
and settlement of islands throughout the world (including the Hebrides, the
Bahamas, Iceland, Madagascar, the Pitiussae, the West Indies, Hawaii and Poly­nesia),
there is of the Canary Islands not a mention.
Discussion and Conclusions
The Canary Islanders' place in history is an uneasy one. One of the first
native peoples to be driven over the brink of cultural extinction by the bur­geoning
European thalassocracies, their fate served as the template for much
of Europe's colonial development throughout the late mediaeval period
(Crosby 1986). While it is true that the Europeans = entropy argument has
become dogma in island archaeology (it has been demonstrated that some
island societies - including, it has been argued, some Canarian groups -
thrived in contact with outsiders) it is the unfortunate reality that the cultural
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chasm separating western explorers from the indigenous societies with which
they had contact generally proved fatal for the latter. This has been brought
into particularly sharp focus where record keeping was both detailed and com­prehensive,
but should not be assumed to be any the less impactive in cases
(such as the Canary Islands) where records were erratic at best. The current
author would submit that the boundaries between Canarian archaeology and
Canarian history have become inappropriately blurred, and that while the lat­ter
field is decidedly buoyant, it has been permitted to intrude too far on the
academic studies of pre-contact peoples.
Semantics of record-keeping and chronology are, however, not the sole is­sue
at stake in this debate. lt is interesting to note that even if archaeological
information is available, it is often ignored in favour of more familiar histori­cal
precepts. Even when it is utilised, however, the social aspects of archaeo­logical
information are often overlooked. Papers on Canarian material are
often limited to description and basic comparison, while even the more wide­ranging
research (especially concerning inscriptions and epigraphy) tend to
search for mainland parallels without sufficient thought for the society from
which they come, and unmindful of the possible time lapse between cultural
manifestations in their place of origin and elsewhere. We need toset up chrono­logical
structures, and to make greater efforts to contextualise human society
within them. The narrative of Canarian prehistory has remained two-dimen­sional
at a time when research on other island groups is burgeoning methodo­logically
and with increased emphasis on social aspects. The "big" questions
cannot be answered if we continue to recycle historical texts and make first­level
inferences about cultural influence. We need tobe focusing upon inves­tigations
of temporo-spatial trends in socially relevant aspects oflife, such as
human ecological adaptation through time, social stratification, the status of
the sexes, trends in economy, inter-island socio-economic variation, the evo­lution
of power structures, the development of urbanism, the effect of differ­ing
island ecologies on settlement, health patterns and many others that need
to be addressed if we are to have a truly holistic image of ancient Canarian
society.
Acknowledgements:
This paper is based upon a doctoral thesis written by the author at the Insti­tute
of Archaeology, University College London. The research was funded by
the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and directed by Professor
Simon Hillson, Dr Cyprian Broodbank and Dr Daniel Antoine. The author would
like to express his appreciation and gratitude to his supervisors, the staff of the
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host institutions visited and Ms Carolyn Swan. All errors are sole responsibil­itylof
the author. This paper is dedicated to the memory of John Southam.
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