Neolithic Survival in the Atlantic
Archaeologists from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria have uncovered a collection of stone tools at a site on Roque Bentayga, including one never before documented among the ancient Canarians: a stone flake used as a sickle for harvesting cereals. The North African peoples who colonised the Canary Islands during the time of the Roman Empire were forced to literally return to the Neolithic in technological terms due to the lack of minerals suitable for metalworking on the islands. Without iron, or copper and tin to smelt bronze, they crafted their picks, knives, and scrapers from rocks sourced from the surrounding mountains and lava flows, such as basalt, trachyte, phonolite, or obsidian, the natural volcanic glass.
A Unique Find in a Sacred Landscape
El Museo Canario and the Cueva Pintada in Gáldar, the two leading centres for the pre-Hispanic period in Gran Canaria, display extensive collections of stone tools that attest to this. However, neither possesses one like that just found in a cave on Roque Bentayga, in Tejeda. The cave was used as a granary between the 10th and 12th-13th centuries and later as a burial site. On an island where sustenance relied on cereals like barley or durum wheat, the agricultural techniques of its first inhabitants are well known. To this day, the quality of the granaries they excavated in volcanic tuff continues to amaze; these structures have preserved seeds and other organic elements, now pure gold for archaeology, almost intact for a thousand years.
Microscopic Clues Reveal Ancient Tasks
The journal Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports publishes this month a discovery made possible precisely by the quality of one of those granaries, C008 at Roque Bentayga, in the highlands of Gran Canaria. It has preserved the edges of the stone tools abandoned there so well that it allows researchers to determine their use through microscopic wear patterns. Researchers Idaira Brito and Amelia Rodríguez, along with Jonathan Santana, Jacob Morales, and the other authors of the work, describe trachyte picks used to excavate caves in volcanic tuff, basalt flakes used for cutting or polishing skins, and edges of basalt, trachyte, and phonolite that were used over 900 years ago to cut meat.
The Cereal Harvesting Sickle
This is a total of 46 lithic tools, 23 with use marks. Among them, one basalt flake stands out, with microscopic wear marks from having been used to cut cereal stems. This is significant because until now it was assumed – as chronicles from the time of the Conquest relate – that the ancient Canarians harvested barley or wheat by pulling the entire plant from the ground or separating the ears from the straw by hand. This flake now provides the earliest direct evidence of cereal harvesting with lithic tools in the Canary Islands.
Rewriting Agricultural History
The discovery of a basalt tool with traces of cereal cutting implies the existence of additional methods of harvesting and processing not previously documented in Gran Canaria. “One hypothesis is that the tool was used as a sickle to harvest cereals in the fields,” the authors elaborate. There is another, also undocumented, alternative: “It is possible that it was used in the cave to process cereal plants harvested by uprooting, making cuts to separate the ears or reuse the straw as construction material.”
From Granary to Tomb
From the 12th or 13th century onwards, this Roque Bentayga granary was converted into a collective burial site, where corpses wrapped in skins and rushes were deposited. This raises another question: Were those stone tools placed there as an offering, in some type of funerary ritual? The authors do not believe so. They rather lean towards the idea that they are blades used in that place to process cereal harvests and other types of food in an initial stage, or to cut skins and rushes used in shrouds, in a later stage.
A Collaborative Investigation
The fieldwork was carried out within the framework of the research agreement ‘Origin and evolution of human settlement within the cultural landscape of the cliff settlements and sacred mountains of Gran Canaria’, funded by the Institute for the Management of the Cultural Landscape and Sacred Mountains of Gran Canaria, part of the Cabildo de Gran Canaria.
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