A. JOSÉ FARRUJIA DE LA ROSA

A HISTORY OF RESEARCH INTO CANARIAN ROCK ART: OPENING UP NEW THOUGHTS

Summary. Research into the history of Canarian rock art presents major problems, both theoretical and methodological. This paper analyses the evolution of research into Canarian rock art from a historical and diachronic perspective. It also addresses the connection established between the Canary Islands, North Africa and the Atlantic area, focusing on the theoretical models developed to explain these relationships. The analysis therefore covers a period of seven centuries (fourteenth–twentieth centuries).

introduction

In Europe and, to a lesser extent, in the Spanish mainland there is a certain tradition of research into the history of archaeology and archaeological thought (Farrujia 2004, 20–82; Deamos and Beltrán 2007, 18–32; Moro 2007, 9–34). In the case of the Canary Islands, some works provide a brief outline of the history of our archaeological research (González and Tejera 1990; Arco et al. 1992; Navarro 1997; Mederos and Escribano 2002), whilst others emphasize the nineteenth century institutional theme of a nascent Canarian archaeology (Diego 1982; Ramírez 1997; Mederos 1997; Fariña and Tejera 1998) or consider the work of the Comisarías Provinciales de Excavaciones Arqueológicas (Provincial Commissioners of Archaeological Excavations) in the Canary Islands, particularly in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Cuenca et al. 1988; Ramírez 2000). However, all these contributions avoid analysing the political-cultural aspects of the period in question and fail to consider the influence of different (insular and extra-insular) social contexts on the development of Canarian archaeological research. They are, therefore, distanced from research approaches to the history of archaeology and archaeological thought, given the way in which these areas of archaeological research are conceived (Trigger 1992; Farrujia 2004; Fernández 2005). This paper is based on the belief that the history of Canarian archaeological research presents major problems of substance.

The study of rock art – from this historical and theoretical-methodological approach – presents the same problems. It is true that there are contributions which consider the history of the main Canarian rock art findings¹ and specific rock art sites or areas,² but the bulk of Canarian

1	Examples of this research include works of Valencia and Oropesa (1990, 25–35), Hernández Pérez (1996) and
	Mederos et al. (2003, 23–52).
2	Some illustrative works include Beltrán’s research (1971) into the rock art site of Balos, Beltrán and Alzola’s

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scientific work in recent decades has focused specifically on the study of rock art, while underestimating the theoretical and methodological aspects and rejecting any historicist analysis related to archaeological thought.

These inadequate approaches mentioned in the previous paragraph are defined by: a) the emergence of numerous publications, in many cases produced outside research programmes and divorced from theoretical discussion; b) the study of certain isolated rock art sites consisting of small-scale historical units (district, ravine, etc.); c) the failure, in most cases, to incorporate the perspective of spatial archaeology; and d) the development of research limited to the formal description of rock art which does not consider the inherent cultural or interpretative issues from a diachronic perspective.

Given the current state of research in the Canary Islands, the history of archaeology – including the study of rock art – and of archaeological thought, analysed on the basis of theoretical reflection, has not been a priority. However, despite this situation, the interest in this theme that has begun to emerge in the islands in recent years is directly linked to: a) the weak development – from a quantitative point of view – of fieldwork in the Canary Islands, leading to a reorientation of research strategies, and b) the development in Spain of studies of the history of archaeological thought and of the discipline itself, particularly since the 1990s.³

Taking these issues as a starting point, I will develop the links between modern historiographical advances and the interpretation of Canarian rock art. That is to say, I will use archaeological history as a framework for the discussion, paying special attention to the theoretical models and ideological principles developed between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries in the Canarian context. I will thus analyse the evolution of Canarian rock art studies from a diachronic perspective, focusing on the current situation and on the theoretical and methodological problems associated with this area of archaeological research and the use of the concept of ‘indigenous knowledge’. I will also consider the connection that has been established between the Canary Islands and North Africa, focusing on the various theoretical models that have been formulated to explain this relationship over three different periods: the first phase, between the fourteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, the second from the second half of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century (1936), and the third and final period extending from 1939 to the present day. The argument therefore covers a period of seven centuries (fourteenth–twentieth centuries), but will focus mainly on the scientific research generated from the late nineteenth century up to the present day, as it is during this recent period when increased interest in the past has led to a surge in the number of foreign and national scholars devoted to the study of the Canarian past (Berthelot, Verneau, Bethencourt, among others), and to increased politicization of the past. Given the extent of the chronological period analysed, this paper presents a general outline that will be developed in future research.

the connection between the canary islands and north africa

From a historiographical perspective, the relationship between the indigenous Canarian population and North Africa dates back to the second half of the fourteenth century when,

research (1974) into the Painted Cave of Galdar; the monograph by Martín Rodríguez (1998) on La Zarza, the monograph by Hernández Pérez on El Júlan (2002) and the research by Valencia Afonso (2006) into the San Miguel de Abona area (Tenerife).

3 In relation to the historiographic research developed in the Spanish mainland and the Canary Islands in recent decades, see the volumes edited by Arce and Olmos (1991), Mora and Díaz-Andreu (1997), Farrujia and Arco (2004) and Cabrera Valdés and Ayarzagüena (2005), in addition to the monograph Ab initio (Farrujia 2004).

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following the rediscovery of the Canary Islands, the indigenous people of the islands were first linked to the inhabitants of the neighbouring continent through the Jewish–Christian tradition and the establishment of ethnographic and linguistic parallels. European sailors and religious writers played an important role in establishing these parallels. This approach would remain relatively stable until the mid-nineteenth century. In the second half of that century, the emergence of evolutionism, archaeology, physical anthropology and raciology would make ‘race’ the defining element in the diffusionist models subsequently outlined, a feature that had a decisive impact on the Europeanization of the Guanches⁴ and the dismissal of the Canaries– African connection. In this context, a relationship was advocated between the Guanches and certain (Celtic and Iberian) European cultures, as this was the only way to link the indigenous Canarian people to world history. As Fernando Estévez has pointed out (1987, 100–63), the evolutionist theory developed in Europe – and assimilated by the Canarian authors – placed non-Western societies outside history. From this standpoint, only the great ancient civilizations could claim an honourable position in the history of the human race, which is why Canarian authors emphasized the relationship between the indigenous Canarian people and the founders of the great civilizations.

Later, after the Spanish Civil War, the rise of culture-historicism and the changes affecting archaeology in the Canary Islands as a result of nationalization and institutionalization (Farrujia 2007) were factors that would eventually enable diffusionist models to emerge which were more archaeographic in nature than the previous models. This led to the establishment of the concept of ‘archaeological culture’. However, the issue of race had not disappeared, since this was another defining feature of the diffusionist thesis in vogue at the time. As a result of this eminently ‘racial’ perception of the prehistory of the Canary Islands and of the nationalization of the archaeology that had developed in the islands, the Canarian–African connection was revived, although it now focused on the Sahara and on links with Iberian–Mauritanian and Iberian– Saharan cultures.

After Franco’s dictatorship, the scenario is bleak, since the research developed offers disparate solutions to the problem of locating the ancient inhabitants of the archipelago. Some works advocate North African origins but locate the homeland in areas other than those proposed by the Francoist archaeologists, whilst others still insist on the Saharan roots of the first settlers

– especially for islands such as La Palma and Tenerife, on the multiethnic nature of the indigenous Canarian people, or represent attempts to revive the Phoenician–Punic option first developed in archaeological terms in the late nineteenth century. Therefore, despite the consolidation of the Canarian–African relationship in recent decades, the fact remains that nowadays there is no consensus on the problem of origin (when the islands were settled and colonized, where the first inhabitants came from and how they arrived).

4 Although this ethnic name is used to designate the ancient inhabitants of Tenerife, in the nineteenth century it was used as a general term to designate the inhabitants of the Canarian Archipelago. The first general histories written about the Canaries also related the colonization of other islands to other North African human groups defined by, among other aspects, their ethnic names. This is the case in the relationship established between Gran Canaria and the Canarii or between La Gomera and the Gomeros. Nevertheless, until now archaeological data have not supported such a hypothesis for Gran Canaria and La Gomera. Nowadays there are no doubts as to the Libyan– Berber origins of the ancient inhabitants of the Canary Islands (Farrujia 2004; Farrujia and García 2005; Pichler 2007).

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the first phase: examples of rock art, jewish–christian tradition and degenerationist views

As already stated, from a historiographical perspective the relationship between the indigenous Canarian population and North Africa dates back to the second half of the fourteenth century when, following the rediscovery of the Canary Islands, the indigenous people of the islands were first linked to the inhabitants of the neighbouring continent through the Jewish– Christian tradition and the establishment of ethnographic and linguistic parallels. This approach would remain relatively stable until the mid-nineteenth century. There are virtually no specific references to rock art in the sources for this period, a fact that can be explained by the nature of the sources in question as well as the degenerationist and Jewish–Christian world view they reflected.

Regarding the written sources, their partial nature must be taken into consideration since, as Tejera et al. have pointed out (1987, 23–4), they only reflect a moment or phase in the life of the indigenous communities and it is impossible to know what kind of changes or setbacks had taken place during the period between their arrival on the islands and their demise as distinct ethnic groups during the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Moreover, we should not lose sight of the fact that a language barrier existed and scant attention was paid by the new colonizers to the indigenous people. The latter were distrusted and rejected for religious reasons, which meant that the majority of chroniclers and ethnohistorians (particularly those with religious convictions) issued personal assessments of the indigenous world on the basis of their own cultural values. The crux of the matter was that the ‘West’ had never expressed interest in listening to ‘the other’, because he/she had always been assimilated into their own culture, both before and after Christianity, meaning that there was no cultural tradition in the Western world of understanding and respecting ‘the other’, or the outsider. This helps to explain the difficulties the Spaniards faced in understanding the Canarian, or even Amerindian, cultures and also the vacillations, doubts and hesitations, sometimes expressed by a single individual, concerning the nature of the indigenous people and their role, on a human and international level, as a people and as individuals in organized societies (Farrujia 2004, 65–71). In this sense, and as Fernando Estévez has pointed out (1987, 69), for our first historians the indigenous people did not represent a specific knowledge but instead existed as they were colonized.

The first written sources did not therefore reflect ‘indigenous knowledge’, a concept which designates a set of specific cultural beliefs – in this case those of the indigenous Canarian societies – existing prior to the territorial invasion of the Canary Islands, in this case by the Normans and Castilians amongst others, leading to the imposition of a distinctive dominant culture.⁵

5 Academic interest in the concept of ‘indigenous knowledge’ is recent and emerged as a result of the politicization of indigenous groups and the emergence of the indigenous rights movement in the mid-1970s in countries such as Australia and the United States (Grenier 1998). This knowledge has been used by indigenous communities to demand that their rights to land and resources should be recognized and formally acknowledged. The concept obviously has a spatial dimension, as it is applied to geographically defined populations whose knowledge and specific practices are reflected in their socio-economic, ecological and spiritual behaviour. The development of indigenous knowledge systems covers all aspects of life, including management of the natural environment, and has ensured the survival of the peoples who created it. These systems of knowledge are therefore cumulative and represent generations of experience, careful observation and continued experimentation. A theoretical reflection on the concept of ‘indigenous knowledge’ and its application to archaeology can be found in the work of Horsthemke (2008) and Green (2008).

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This underlying problem in the historiographical sources of the period coexisted alongside degenerationist views. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries marked the beginning of the exploration and colonization of much of the world by Western European countries. Sailors had begun to meet groups of hunter-gatherers, tribes and farmers in America, Africa and the Pacific, as well as the indigenous Canarian people. Descriptions of these people and their customs started to circulate around Europe and their tools and clothing, brought back by travellers, were displayed as curiosities. At first, the discovery of human groups who did not know how to work with metal and had customs that totally contradicted Christian teachings seemed to confirm the traditional medieval vision which claimed that groups from outside the Middle East, the cradle of humanity, were those who were furthest from the divine revelation and therefore the most morally and technologically backward (Trigger 1992, 58–61; Farrujia 2004, 36–8). In the case of the Canary Islands, the idea of the technical and moral degeneration of the indigenous people, reflected in the 1341 testimony of Nicoloso da Reco, would be a recurring theme in all later written ethnohistoric sources (Farrujia 2004, 38).

The degenerationists therefore viewed native cultures as the corrupt survivors of a patriarchal lifestyle of divine revelation as described in Genesis. Thus, the technological backwardness and the alleged cultural degeneration of the Native American cultures compared with those in Europe would be interpreted in theological terms as manifestations of divine anger (Trigger 1992, 73) and this interpretation was extended to the Canary Islands.

The nature of the written sources and the concept of the indigenous Canarian people as barbaric, savage and technologically backward implied that they could not know how to write or engrave on stones. Therefore, in almost all the historiographical sources written between the fourteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries there are no references to Canarian rock art, with the exception of the historical studies by Leonardo Torriani, Antonio Sedeño, Marín de Cubas, Viera y Clavijo and Juan Antonio de Urtusáustegui. Even in these cases, the gulf between ‘Western’ thought and indigenous Canarian knowledge prevented these writers from understanding the nature and significance of the examples of rock art they described.

Referring to the painted caves of Gran Canaria, Leonardo Torriani, heavily influenced by ethnocentrism, commented that ‘the painting is not of human figures or animals, such as we are used to, but beautiful motifs to ornament the interior of the houses’ (Torriani 1978 [1592], 112–13). In other words, he simplified the interpretation of the painted motifs to aesthetic criteria, drawing a clear contrast between the Western and the indigenous ‘style’ and dismissing any possible alternative reading. Another author, Antonio Sedeño, in a similar discourse, refers to the house of the Guanarteme (chief) of Gáldar noting that ‘it was lined with planks of bundled twigs, fitted so tightly that no joints could be seen, painted in white with earth, in red with almagra and in black with ground coal. Some planks, close to the roof, had a chessboard motif, whilst others displayed motifs that were round as cheeses’ (1993 [s. XVII], 375–6).

The author Marín de Cubas commented that the indigenous Canarian people, ‘having harvested their crops, made stripes on tables, walls and stones, which they called “tara” and “tarja”, as a record of this’ (1986 [1694], 254). This citation, which is not accompanied by any graphic material, can be explained by the fact that the ethnographic aspect of Cubas’ work is much more detailed than the historical aspect, in which the description of the conquest itself is generally poor and confused. Thus, the information on the indigenous people which he complied in his book provides us with facts about many areas that did not feature in other written sources. Cubas’ information is still imbued with an ethnocentric approach – in describing the rock motifs as simple stripes, for example – but it represents a qualitative leap forward in relation to Torriani or Sedeño’s view or the silence of his contemporaries, given that he at least vaguely relates the production of the rock motifs to the agricultural cycle.

Nearly a century after the work of Marín de Cubas, Viera y Clavijo explored Canarian rock art in more detail, in particular the engravings in the Cave of Belmaco (La Palma), becoming the first author in Canarian historiography to specify the physical location of a rock art site. However, his opinion on the engravings remained faithful to the world view described in the preceding pages (degenerationist, Jewish–Christian): the Canarian indigenous people were barbaric shepherds and, therefore, illiterate. According to Viera y Clavijo,

It was believed that certain motifs that can be found inscribed on a tombstone in a beautiful cave in the Ravine of Belmaco on the island of La Palma (the house of Prince Tedote) proved that these indigenous people had some knowledge of the art of writing, but one erudite person who has examined these characters, engraved not on a movable tombstone but on a firm rock in the shape of a tomb, categorically states that the motifs are merely scribbles, games of chance or the fantasies of the ancient barbarians (Viera 1967 [1772], Vol. I, 156).

With regard to Viera’s interpretation it is important to stress that he explicitly provided technical information, albeit vague and imprecise, on the engravings (type of support, technical execution), but no graphic information.

In 1779 another contemporary author and friend of Viera, Juan Antonio de Urtusáustegui, referred in his Diario de Viaje a la isla de El Hierro to the El Júlan engravings. However, Urtusáustegui, who had travelled to the island to take charge of the military government, did not show much interest in studying these examples of rock art, as he only commented that ‘I have been assured that in some of these sites there are certain engraved characters that I have not been able to see, as this expedition needs to be undertaken in a different season’ (1983 [1779], 41–2). His ignorance of the correct location of the rock art site led the author to place them in El Tagoror,⁶ whereas the rock site is, in fact, located in its vicinity, in the so-called promontories of Los Letreros and Los Números.

In the Canary Islands, archaeological interest in the indigenous past began nearly half a century after the works of Viera and Urtusáustegui, and this period will be analysed in the next section.

the second phase: rock art, race and archaeology

Coinciding with the development of European archaeology and physical anthropology in the second half of the nineteenth century, the European, and particularly the French, frame of reference played a crucial part in the emergence of Canarian archaeology. The presence of French authors (such as Sabin Berthelot or René Verneau) on the Canary Islands helped disseminate the main trends in French archaeology (both theoretical and methodological) amongst Canarian authors. Sabin Berthelot lived in the Canary Islands for more than 25 years and published some of his articles in Canarian journals (Revista de Canarias, for example). René Verneau spent some time at El Museo Canario (Gran Canaria) where he studied

6 Tagoror is the indigenous name for the circular structures built by the indigenous Canarian people to celebrate their meetings with the chief to discuss political, economic and social problems.

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anthropological and archaeological material from the ancient Canarian populations and published some of his articles in a local journal, Revista de El Museo Canario. At the same time, some Canarian authors, such as Gregorio Chil y Naranjo, Juan Bethencourt Alfonso and Rosendo García Ramos, had been to Paris, where they had visited academies and cabinets and established relationships – continued later in epistolary form from the islands – with the leading scientific figures of the day, such as Boucher Crèvecoeur de Perthes, Armand de Quatrefages, Teodore Hamy and Paul Broca. This ensured that French publications circulated widely throughout the Canaries.

Canarian archaeological literature of the nineteenth century was, therefore, broadly defined on the basis of a combination of evolutionist and diffusionist arguments, as in the rest of Europe. For this reason, the foreign and Canarian intellectuals responsible for studying the indigenous Canarian people appealed to both diffusionist and evolutionist theories to explain cultural change. It was considered inexplicable that human groups who had lived in isolation could evolve at the same pace and in the same way as groups from the African or European continents and therefore diffusionist theses, starting with the mechanism of migration, provided explanations for the similarities observed between the archipelago and the place of origin or diffusion, which was usually located in Europe. But why in Europe and not in Africa? There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, the discovery of the Cro-Magnon race in La Dordogne (France) in 1868, and the anatomical similarities observed between this race and the indigenous Canarian people, led to the establishment of a nexus between both races, and therefore between their material culture. This ensured that Guanche material culture was overemphasized, justifying its incorporation, since ancient times, within the most progressive trends in human evolution. It should not be forgotten that the French anthropologists, especially Paul Broca, conceived of the Cro-Magnon race as an intelligent and perfectible race who had developed art, a reflection of their fine intellectual powers (Schiller 1979, 156), and the Canarian authors naturally supported this thesis as it implied the extrapolation of the Guanches to the heights of European civilization. Indigenous Canarian cultures were, in effect, treated as if they shared the same evolutionary development as cultures from other parts of Europe. In this sense, the cultural evolutionist models simplified indigenous Canarian societies, as they did other former societies (Johnson 2000, 178). It seemed that all societies evolved inexorably towards the formation of a state.

The adoption of these premises, although archaeologically unfounded, explains to a large extent the relationship that some Canarian authors – such as Gregorio Chil y Naranjo (1876) or Juan Bethencourt Alfonso (1999 [1912]) – proposed between the Guanche people and the major (Iberian or Celtic) European cultures, since it was the only possible way to link the indigenous people of the islands with universal history. As Fernando Estévez has pointed out (2001), this application, devoid of any traces of evolutionary theory as elaborated in Europe and therefore absorbed by Canarian intellectuals, placed non-Western societies outside history. Within these coordinates, only the great ancient civilizations could claim an honourable position in the history of humanity and this goes a long way towards explaining the importance for the Canarian authors of associating the ancient Canarians with the founding of the great civilizations. In connection with this, another fact should be borne in mind: the concept of race developed by Broca and his colleagues implied that other non-white races were unable to achieve the same level of development in science, technology and art (Schiller 1979, 137–8).

Rock inscriptions, the Maghreb and the Canary Islands

The study of rock art was also embedded in the French intellectual tradition. French authors, such as Sabin Berthelot, Louis Leon Cesar Faidherbe and René Verneau, were interested in the study of Canarian rock engravings, mainly the Libyan–Berber inscriptions, influenced by the North African frame of reference and, above all, the methodology developed by French archaeology in the Maghreb. The development of archaeology in this area cannot be understood unless it is closely related to the French conquest of the country and to the colonial politics this inaugurated, since political power found in archaeology a source of information on conquest and a model for colonization. In fact, in institutional terms, the French Ministry of War had requested the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres to set up a research programme in 1833 into the history and archaeology of Algeria. Consequently, the fieldwork became the property of the colonial army, the official administrators and the civil servants – many of whom were fond of archaeology – who took charge of locating ruins and copying down the numerous inscriptions (Sheppard 1990). Between 1830 and 1850, it was basically military officials who provided the necessary impetus for field archaeology. Nevertheless, many of these functionaries had been instructed by Karl Benedikt Hase, a professor at the Polytechnic School of Paris since 1830, who had given them lessons on ancient history and had taught them how to reproduce inscriptions. This meant that the archaeology of the Maghreb was founded mainly on the basis of epigraphic texts rather than excavations and it was not until 1890 that the archaeological study of North Africa began to take on a separate existence (Haoui 1993; Sibeud 2001).

In the Canary Islands, therefore, authors such as Berthelot, Faidherbe or Verneau focused on the study of Canarian inscriptions, influenced by the scientific context of the time and also by the rediscovery of the El Júlan alphabetic inscriptions by Aquilino Padrón, in 1873. Faidherbe (1874), Berthelot (1874) and Verneau (1887) identified these inscriptions as Numidic (Libyan), relating them to the blond (pre-Aryan) populations that had invaded North Africa, and extended their conclusions to the study of other inscriptions in El Hierro (La Candia, La Caleta).⁷ In the case of national or Canarian authors, this thesis was adopted by Grau-Bassas (1882) and Millares Torres (1977 [1893]), amongst others, but these views are largely regarded as inaccurate and misleading nowadays.

In addition to inscriptions, rock paintings were also studied by foreign and national researchers, following the rediscovery in Gran Canaria of the Gáldar Cueva Pintada in the 1860s and, later, the Cueva del Rey or del Guayre in Tejeda (Mederos et al. 2003, 36–8; Farrujia 2004, 307–35).

From a methodological point of view, it is important to stress that the first graphic reproductions of the inscriptions made at the time were freehand rather than traced and that the French authors who studied them did not know the rock art sites at first hand. The first drawings of the El Júlan engravings, for example, were done by Aquilino Padrón (1874), who passed them on to Berthelot.

Despite these methodological deficiencies, the examples of rock art were soon used for sequencing Canarian prehistory. Berthelot, in his Antiquités Canariennes for example, identified two population waves, stressing the importance of rock art. Following Antigüedades

7 Contrary to the beliefs of the French authors, which were also common amongst their European contemporaries, there was no past European influence on the racial and cultural configuration of the Berbers (Desanges 1983, 430–7).

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prehistóricas de Andalucía (2005 [1868]), by Manuel de Góngora, and the phases which this author established for Andalusia, Berthelot defined an initial prehistoric phase for the Canaries, represented by the El Hierro and La Palma (Belmaco) inscriptions which are identical to those found in the southern mainland (Berthelot 1980 [1879], 134). This phase would have been followed by a phase of megalithic construction or protohistoric phase (p. 134). For Verneau, the Semite population wave would have been responsible for introducing Libyan inscriptions to the Canaries, although in the case of Gran Canaria, the French author identified a Numidian population wave, influenced by his interpretation of the engravings in the Ravine of Balos (Tirajana) (Verneau 1996 [1886]). Manuel de Ossuna used the inscription on the Anaga Stone to argue for a Semite presence in the Canary Islands (Farrujia 2002).

The French authors also insisted on considering the inhabitants of islands such as Tenerife and La Gomera as not responsible for the Canarian Libyan inscriptions since, in strictly evolutionist terms, the Guanches, who came from a more archaic culture than the Libyans, were related to the Cro-Magnon race and were therefore illiterate and could not have produced these inscriptions (Farrujia 2004, 256–68). This thesis was also shared by Canarian authors such as Millares Torres (1977 [1893], 6).

Rock inscriptions, Europe and the Canary Islands

The French scientific frame of reference, the prominence given to the study of Canarian inscriptions in connection with the initial colonization of the islands, and the regionalism present in the work of authors like Manuel de Ossuna and Juan Bethencourt Alfonso are factors that explain the links established by these two authors between the Guanches and the Celts and Iberians on the basis of the Canarian inscriptions, in particular the El Júlan and La Dehesa (Hierro) engravings and the inscriptions in the Ravine of Balos (Gran Canaria).⁸ Dismissing the African option and relying on the conclusions of a Canadian philologist, John Campbell, they claimed that the El Hierro and Gran Canaria inscriptions proved that the ancient Iberians and Celts were present on the Canary Islands and that the indigenous language spoken on the islands was common to all of them.

the third phase: rock art, culture-historical theory and field archaeology

Following the work of Ossuna and Bethencourt, Canarian archaeological research experienced profound changes as a result of Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War. The changes introduced after the nationalization of Spanish archaeology and the establishment of the Comisarías Provinciales de Excavaciones Arqueológicas (Provincial Commissioners for Archaeological Excavations) had clear implications for the future of Canarian archaeology,

8 The regionalist authors from Tenerife, such as Ossuna and Bethencourt, were against the politics of León y Castillo (the leader of the Gran Canarian Liberal Party), and defended Tenerife and its political interests, and not the division of the Canary Islands into two provinces. This is why they argued for the original ethnic unity of the archipelago and the presence of an Atlantic civilization on the islands that was strongly Iberian-Celtic in character, thus developing the discourse used by Castilian nationalism in its centralist politics. The important point was to show that, despite the initial cultural diversity on the islands, they constituted a single cultural entity. In this sense Ossuna and Bethencourt did not speak of island cultures, but instead considered the archipelago to be populated by a general Atlantic civilization (Farrujia 2004, 396–404).

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particularly in the field of rock art or prehispanic rock art, as it was called in those days (Farrujia 2007).⁹

From a methodological point of view, the archaeological fieldwork carried out by the two Canarian Commissioners (Eastern/Western) led to an increase in the discovery and recording of rock art sites in the broadest sense since, apart from the Libyan inscriptions, other sites with different types of motifs featuring different techniques were also documented. In addition, archaeological sites began to be documented more scientifically; their geographic coordinates and the form, nature and type of engravings were specified and the panels were traced and photographed.

From a theoretical point of view, race continued to have an impact on contemporary studies and the concept of ‘archaeological culture’ was introduced for the first time. Culturehistoricism and the guidelines of Official Archaeology developed during Franco’s regime enabled Canarian rock art to be used to support a nationalist discourse, by relating the spiral engravings of La Palma to those in Galicia (Atlantic Bronze I Hispanic), and an ultra-nationalist discourse, by linking the ‘first’ examples of rock art in the Spanish Sahara to certain rock art sites in the Canaries (Iberian–Saharan Culture). On the basis of this interpretation, the Canary Islands would have been part of the great Hispanic–Saharan cultural circle. The Atlantic area (Britain, Ireland, Scotland and Galicia) was also linked to the Canaries, mainly through the rock art sites of La Palma, emphasizing the Canarian–Celtic or Aryan connection. This pro-Germanic vision ultimately enabled a relationship between the Canaries and the Atlantic cultural circle to emerge (Farrujia 2007).

As in the nineteenth century, examples of rock art were also used to sequence diachronically the prehistory of the Canary Islands, although the absence of BC radiocarbon dates and the inability to read and interpret the stratigraphy of certain archaeological sites created obstacles that led to the development of diachronic sequences with no solid archaeological basis. Contributions within this context include those of José Pérez de Barradas (1939), who included the ceramic industry in his sequence, and Juan Álvarez Delgado (1949) who, in an attempt to develop a definitive work from a graphic point of view, defined four phases or horizons from criteria such as the overlap and formal parallels observed with other relatively dated foreign sites. However, the Canarian philologist did not consider the techniques used to execute the engravings and thus an analytical criterion with possible cultural implications was disregarded.

Luis Diego Cuscoy (1968) also took rock art into consideration when sequencing Canarian prehistory. However, as in the work of Pérez de Barradas and Álvarez Delgado, the anteriority or posteriority of new cultural horizons was not established on any factual basis and, of course, other elements of the indigenous material culture were disregarded. Needless to say, the theoretical presuppositions remained the same: culture-historicism and diffusionist theory.

The ‘absence’ of rock art sites in Tenerife and La Gomera was attributed to the archaic culture of these islands, which had been populated mainly by the Cro-Magnon race. Thus a

9 The concept of prehispanic rock art is incorrect and had an obvious ethnocentric focus. In connection with the connotations of the term ‘art’, as Teresa Chapa has pointed out (2000) we should bear in mind that this concept is derived from an approach that emanates from researchers and does not reflect a similar concept in the types of societies in question. A theoretical discussion on the use of the term ‘art’ can be seen in the work of Searight (2004) and Fraguas (2006). With regard to the attribute prehispanic, I have already argued its ideological implications and the chrono-cultural inconsistency arising out of its use in the field of Canarian prehistory (Farrujia 2007). However, according to Mauro Hernández (1996, 26), we must continue using the concept prehispanic rock art, simply because it belongs to a long-standing research tradition.

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nineteenth century perspective was adopted, influenced by evolutionism. However, unlike the nineteenth century French authors, Pérez de Barradas attributed rock inscriptions directly to the Guanches rather than the conquerors (Numidians). This made Pérez de Barradas the first author to argue that these cultural manifestations were indigenous (Farrujia 2007).

In 1964, Álvarez Delgado focused on the study of Canarian petroglyphs with no intention of analysing the diachronic sequence of Canarian prehistory. On this occasion he studied only the Libyan inscriptions found in El Hierro and Gran Canaria and those of dubious Libyan nature in Tenerife, Fuerteventura and La Palma. However, the purpose of the study was to provide a corpus of Libyan inscriptions found in the Canaries, rather than to further knowledge of the origin, nature and dating of such inscriptions.

Continuity after the Franco dictatorship

The study of Canarian rock art has not changed significantly since Franco’s regime, a fact that can be explained by theoretical continuity and an impasse in certain areas of research, as Hernández et al. (2004–2005) have also pointed out. In the field of space-time contextualization, for example, absolute dates – though scarce and unevenly distributed among the islands – have ‘rejuvenated’ the indigenous Canarian people, whose arrival on the islands now dates back to the mid-first millennium BC. In addition, the identity of the indigenous Canarian people has been fragmented due to the development of a new concept of island colonization in which those who populated each island ‘seem’ to have been colonizers with a well-defined ethnic entity (Guanches, Canarios, Majos, Gomeros, Bimbaches and Auaritas)of African descent (Libyan–Berber). From a research standpoint this has turned the islands into small Taif kingdoms, with all the underlying interests, not only scientific, of a new politicaladministrative reality in which the cabildos (the local government institutions on each island) play a significant role. It should be noted at this point that archaeology is a form of discourse that is directly related to the identity of the group which creates and maintains it, and is therefore one of the discourses most directly involved in the overall advance of current capitalist society (Hernando 2006).

In the specific case of rock art, the number of documented sites has increased greatly as a result of fieldwork, mainly due to the programmes of archaeological work developed since the early 1980s. This has resulted in: a) the documentation of rock art sites on islands such as Tenerife and La Gomera, thus eliminating the belief that the absence of such archaeological evidence on these islands was due to the predominance of the Cro-Magnon race; b) an increase in recorded sites of various types; c) the documentation of Libyan–Berber inscriptions on all the islands; and d) the documentation of Latin and Neo-Punic inscriptions, especially in Fuerteventura and Lanzarote. It has been accompanied, from a methodological point of view, by the use of new technologies, particularly since the late 1990s (computerized databases of archaeological sites, use of GPS, digital photography and digital layers).

From a diachronic point of view, examples of rock art have also been studied with the aim of sequencing the prehistory of the islands. Illustrative examples include the work by Manuel Pellicer (1971–1972, 53–66) which, developed in the aftermath of the Franco dictatorship, reaffirmed the Saharan option, the work by Mauro Hernández (1973), which is the first Ph.D. thesis on Canarian rock art and once again emphasizes the Saharan and Atlantic options, and, more recently, the work by Martín Rodríguez (1998) on La Palma, which proposes a periodization for the island’s rock art on the basis of the evolution of decorative motifs in stratigraphically documented ceramics.

Equally, from the early 1980s onwards, examples of rock art have played an authentic role in defining the Guanche identity (Libyan–Berber and Latin inscriptions, the Zanata Stone, anthropomorphs, podomorphs, spirals, etc.). This has been generated, to a large extent, within a scientific context in which the historical-cultural paradigm is still dominant and theoretical reflection plays a minor role.

conclusions

Scientific research into the rock art of the Canary Islands has been characterized by an interest in issues such as timing and significance, in some cases from evolutionist approaches and, more recently, from a culture-historicist perspective. In recent years this has been accompanied by the emergence of numerous publications, in many cases produced outside research programmes and divorced from theoretical discussion, the isolated study of certain rock art sites consisting of small-scale historical units (district, ravine, etc.), the failure – in most cases

– to incorporate the perspective of spatial archaeology, and the development of research limited to the formal description of rock motifs that does not explore the inherent chrono-cultural or interpretative issues.

This problem in recent Canarian archaeology is a direct consequence of how the Canarian scientific community deals with the study of rock art and, when trying to unravel such questions as origin and meaning, the scenario remains quite bleak. Currently there are no research programmes that provide for systematic surveying and excavation. As long as there is no provision for this, the study of rock art will remain at a standstill. Moreover, whilst it is true that theory is essential to the study of rock art, it is no less true that until it is supported by sufficient archaeological evidence, all efforts will be futile. Obviously, the theoretical lag in Canary Island archaeology is another factor that works against any attempts to define the many other problems relating to the ‘Balkanized’ archaeology of our islands, which currently lack any cooperation and research programmes with the African continent. Scientific understanding of Canarian prehistory will only be advanced if we take the neighbouring continent into account, not only as a frame of reference but, more importantly, as an active element in the research process, developing academic collaborations. We must bear in mind that the relationship between North Africa and the Canary Islands (considering the islands to be an ‘integral’ part of the West) is a power relationship, built on the subordination of the idea of Africa to the strong Western collective mind, founded on the centralist superiority of ‘us’, as opposed to ‘them’, the non-Western, experienced as ‘the outsider’.

The interpretations of Canarian rock art from a historiographical point of view need to take this fact into consideration because in most cases rock art cannot be ‘read’ directly because the motifs it represents are the result of cultural distillation, which is itself the result of the habitus of the group. Surprisingly, in contexts where direct ethnographic data do exist and where it is easier to interpret the motifs, the art never means what is directly shown. Therefore, if we consider the situation in the Canaries, where ethnographic data progressively disappear as a consequence of the conquest and colonization of the archipelago in the fifteenth century, it is possible to understand how complex the interpretative study of Canarian rock art becomes. In other words, the study or approach to the meaning or function that the engraved panels contained for the society that generated them is a daunting task, but one that must be done together with our

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African colleagues. This Canarian–African knowledge will help to steer the discipline in the right direction, especially in its interpretative phase.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Richard Bradley, Muiris O’Sullivan and Víctor Fernández Martínez for their comments on this work, which have helped to improve its final version.

Sociedad Española de Historia de la Arqueología (SEHA) Avda. Primo de Rivera, s/n Edf. El Cristo, p. B, 1° J-22 La Laguna, 38208 Tenerife Canary Islands SPAIN E-mail: afarruji@hotmail.com

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