Abstract
The introduction establishes the proposal and thematic structure of the book and outlines the archaeological situation in the Canary Islands, namely the types of sites, chronologies, material culture, and relationship to the North African Amazigh. It also deals with the importance of deconstructing colonial archaeologies in order to establish the case of the Canary Islands within an international context. In addition, it describes the problematic of the Canary Islands heritage, which has echoes in other parts of the world where indigenous heritage is underrepresented. It shows how the course of history, colonialism, and the politics of the past still have an excessive influence on the way in which the present-day archaeological heritage is interpreted and managed.
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Notes
- 1.
The Canary Islands form an archipelago of volcanic origins consisting of seven major islands situated northwest of the African continent on a level with the Sahara desert. The island closest to Africa (Lanzarote) lies approximately 100 km from its shores, and the farthest (Hierro) is 500 km away. The islands have a total area of 7,800 km2. In administrative terms, they are divided into two provinces: Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (which includes the islands of Gran Canaria. Fuerteventura, and Lanzarote) and Santa Cruz de Tenerife (which includes Tenerife, La Palma, La Gomera, and El Hierro).
- 2.
The word Amazigh is the name chosen by the Berbers to refer to themselves. It signifies “nobility” and “magnanimity” and its use has been documented since the time of Ramses III (in the thirtieth century BC). There is also evidence of variations used as ethnonyms in ancient times and in the present day, which differ according to the period and source in question, as Chafik (2005, p. 14) and Tilmatine (2008, p. 36) have noted. Since the mid-nineteenth century, researchers have used the ethnonym Guanche to refer to the indigenous Canarian societies, although this is nowadays restricted to the ancient Tenerife populations (Farrujia 2005).
- 3.
Autochthonous (E-M81) and prominent (E-M78 and J-M267) Amazigh Y-chromosome lineages were detected in Canarian indigenous remains, confirming the northwest African origins of their ancestors, thus validating previous mitochondrial DNA results (Fregel et al. 2009) .
- 4.
The present-day situation is unpromising because, although research in recent decades has consolidated the Canarian–African relationship, it is clear that there is still no consensus in terms of origins. (How did the islands become populated and colonized? How did the first settlers arrive?) In addition, isolated radiocarbon dates obtained recently, which are not representative of the entire archipelago (e.g., those from the Buenavista site in Lanzarote, which produce a date of C-14 for the 10th century BC), suggest an earlier occupation of the archipelago (Atoche 2011) , specifically in the case of Lanzarote, which is closest to the African coast.
- 5.
In the islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, Latin-Canarian inscriptions have been documented near the Lybico-Berber inscriptions, which enable reference to be made to the presence on these islands of a Romanized Amazigh culture, which may have extended to El Hierro, Tenerife, and Gran Canaria as well.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
Obviously, at that time the term “European” did not have the same connotations as it has nowadays. In using it, following Stevens (1997, p. 86) , I am referring to a concept of Europe which is synonymous with Christendom. It is, therefore, a term used with cultural connotations rather than geographical implications and describes a homogeneous world in which people believed in one sole religion and were all governed by the same laws and moral criteria. The opposite term, “Islam,” designated the religion of the great majority of the inhabitants of Africa and the Mediterranean region of Asia.
- 9.
Indigenous female lineages have survived in present-day populations since the conquest, experiencing only a moderate decline, whereas indigenous male lineages have fallen consistently and have been replaced by European lineages (Fregel et al. 2009) .
- 10.
In North America indigenous people may be called by general names such as “American Indians,” “Native Americans,” “Native Alaskan corporations,” or “Native Hawaiians.” In Canada they may be referred to as “First Nations” or “Meti,” in Australia “Aboriginals,” in New Zealand, “Maori,” and in Scandinavia “Sami.” In the Canary Islands, they can be called indigenous Canarian people or insular Imazighen.
- 11.
La charte d’Agadir is available online.
- 12.
See also http://www.congresmondial-amazigh.org/.
- 13.
An imagined community is different from an actual community because it is not (and, for practical reasons, cannot be) based on every face-to-face interaction between its members. A nation, therefore, is a socially constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group (Anderson 2006) . Imagined communities can be seen as a form of social constructionism on a par with Edward Said’s concept of imagined geographies (Said 1997) .
- 14.
The Canary Islands Independence Movement (CIIM), also known as the Movement for the Independence and Self-Determination of the Canaries Archipelago (MPAIAC, from Spanish Movimiento por la Autodeterminación e Independencia del Archipiélago Canario), is a defunct independentist organization that had a radio station in Algiers and resorted to violence in attempts to force the Spanish government to create an independent state in the Canary Islands. The Canary Islands Independence Movement was started by Antonio Cubillo (1930–2013) in 1964. Based in Algeria, the MPAIAC was recognized in 1968 by the Organization of African Unity. Its armed struggle was carried out by the group’s armed wing, the Fuerzas Armadas Guanches (FAG), which in 1976 bombed a mall in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The CIIM or MPAIAC ceased activity after the Spanish government created the Autonomous Community of the Canarian Archipelago in 1982. The political wing of MPAIAC was known as Canarian Workers Party, Partido de los Trabajadores Canarios (PTC). It did not manage to rule any municipality in the islands before disbanding. The movement has recently undergone a modest renaissance, but only from the political wing (Gari 1992; Farrujia 2004) .
- 15.
For example, most of the Algerian delegates were prevented from taking part in the conference at the very last moment, and the delegates from Libya ran the risk of being sanctioned by the Libyan state on their return.
- 16.
The major Amazigh language groups are Tarifit, Tamazight, and Tashelhit in Morocco (from north to south), Kabyle and the Choaui varieties in Algeria.
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Farrujia de la Rosa, A. (2014). Introduction. In: An Archaeology of the Margins. SpringerBriefs in Archaeology(). Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9396-9_1
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