Carthaginians. According to the 1st century CE Roman author and philosopher Pliny the Elder, the archipelago was found to be uninhabited when visited by the Carthaginians under Hanno the Navigator in 5th century BCE, but ruins of great buildings were seen.[1]
This story may suggest that the islands were inhabited by other peoples prior to the Guanches.
At the time of medieval European engagement, the Canary Islands were inhabited by a variety of indigenous communities. The pre-colonial population of the Canaries is generically referred to as Guanches, although, strictly speaking, Guanches were originally the inhabitants of Tenerife. According to the chronicles, the inhabitants of Fuerteventura and Lanzarote were referred to as Maxos, Gran Canaria was inhabited by the Canarii, El Hierro by the Bimbaches, La Palma by the Auaritas and La Gomera by the Gomeros. Evidence does seem to suggest that inter-insular interaction was relatively low and each island was populated by its own distinct socio-cultural groups who lived in relative isolation separated from each other.
Historical background
The origins of the Canarian indigenous people remain the subject of debate. Numerous theories have achieved varying degrees of acceptance.
Various
Mogador (historical name of Essaouira, Morocco) in the early 1st century,[2]
Juba's naval force was subsequently sent on an exploration of the Canary Islands, using Mogador as their mission base.
The Romans named each of the islands: Ninguaria or
Nivaria
(Tenerife), Canaria (Gran Canaria), Pluvialia or Invale (Lanzarote), Ombrion (La Palma), Planasia (Fuerteventura), Iunonia or Junonia (El Hierro) and Capraria (La Gomera).
From the 14th century onward, sailors from
Castilian
and Portuguese missionaries and pirates on Canarian shores became relatively common and the prehispanic populations experienced a long and ongoing process of Westernisation before formal colonization took place.
A variety of theories regarding the origins of pre-colonial Canarians explain them by the hypothesis of a more recent immigration. Some scholars (mainly from the
Punic-Phoenician in origin. Professor D. Juan Álvarez Delgado, on the other hand, argued that the Canaries remained uninhabited until 100 BCE, when Greek and Roman sailors began to explore the area. In the second half of the 1st century BCE, King Juba II of Numidia abandoned North African prisoners on the islands, who eventually became the pre-Hispanic Canarians.[citation needed
] If the first inhabitants were abandoned prisoners, this explains, according to Álvarez Delgado, their lack of navigational acumen.
Genetic analysis using
Berbers as the African population most closely related to the Guanches.[3]
. They also brought with them a set of well-defined socio-cultural practices that seem to have originated and been in use for a long period of time elsewhere.
Today,
Berber tribes from the Atlas Mountains region who began to arrive in the Canaries by sea around 1000 BCE or earlier. However, there is no archaeological or historical evidence to prove that either the Berber tribes of the Atlas Mountains or the Canarian pre-colonial population had knowledge or made use of navigation techniques.[4] The peak of Tenerife is visible from the African coast on the very clearest of days, but the currents around the islands tend to lead the boats southwest and west, past the archipelago and into the Atlantic Ocean
.
Most scholars[who?] would now agree that the earliest reliable dates related to permanent human occupation can be traced back to about 1000 BCE, but different absolute dating technologies such as carbon-14 and thermoluminescence have provided variable results. Inadequate methodologies and an insufficient number of absolute datings carried out throughout the archipelago have yielded inconsistencies and information gaps.[5]
Studies of precolonial Canarian society illustrate both agricultural and pastoral ways of life in the Canaries.[6]
Archeological research in Gran Canaria has found a relatively high prevalence of
auricular exostosis
among Pre-Hispanic craniums, reaching 34.35% in coastal burial places.
Not all coastal craniums presented exostosis but there were no differences between sexes.
Researchers thus proposed a social
male or female, specializing in fishing by immersion and swimming.[7]
Population genetics
A 2003 genetics research article by Nicole Maca-Meyer et al. published in the
U6b1 is Canarian-specific[9] and is the most common mtDNA haplogroup found in aboriginal Guanche archaeological burial sites.[8]
Lineages of
Berber Y-chromosome lineages (E-M81, E-M78 and J-M267) prominent in the indigenous remains, confirming the North West African origin for the Guanches deduced Nicole Maca-Meyer et al. from mitochondrial DNA results. "However, in contrast with their female lineages, which have survived in the present-day population since the conquest with only a moderate decline, the male indigenous lineages have dropped constantly being substituted by European lineages." They conclude that the European colonization of the Canary Islands changed the local gene-pool most dramatically in the male line.[10]
Although denied by certain scholars (cf. Abreu Galindo 1977: 297),
Mencey, although, by the time the first Spanish incursions in the Canaries took place, Tenerife had already been divided into nine menceyatos (i.e. separate regions of the island controlled by its own Mencey),[11] namely Anaga, Tegueste, Tacoronte, Taoro, Icod, Daute, Adeje, Abona and Güimar. Despite the fact that all Menceys were independent and absolute owners of their territory within the island, it was the Mencey of Taoro who acted, according to the chronicles, as primus inter pares. Gran Canaria
, on the other hand, appears to have been divided into two guanartematos (i.e. functionally, politically and structurally differentiated regions): Telde and Gáldar, each governed by a Guanarteme.
Little information has survived regarding the religious and cosmological beliefs of the Guanches. Indigenous Canarian people often performed their religious practices in places marked by particular striking geographical features or types of
