La Gomera was the only island that did not have a stone canvas with Libyco-Berber letters, writing brought from North Africa by the peoples who colonized the Canary Islands during the first centuries of the Common Era. One afternoon in the winter of 2005, archaeologist Juan Carlos Hernández and anthropologist José Miguel Trujillo discovered the site that revolutionized the archeology of La Gomera: Las Toscas del Guirre. This small cave is home to the largest alphabetical panel in the archipelago and a mysterious hole that, years later, turned out to have been built to establish a precise marker of the winter solstice, with which the ancient Gomerians controlled passage time. It is the only archaeological site in Spain that combines the letters of an ancient North African alphabet with an ingenious astronomical instrument.
The most immediate consequence of discovering this work of rock art “was that I didn’t sleep for three days,” he says. Canary Islands Now-eldio.es Hernandez. “We, archaeologists,” reflects the director of the Archaeological Museum of La Gomera (MAG), “we dream of a great discovery that allows us to see beyond; So, when we verify that our ancestors had writing, the impact was enormous”, a convulsion which justifies this vigil. This discovery, he adds, “truly revolutionized the archeology of the island”. His colleague Trujillo did not lose sleep that night because the next day he had to return to the bank where he worked. What he will never forget is the turmoil that reigned when the most important specialists in Libyan-Berber writing in Spain began to arrive in La Gomera.
From a scientific point of view, the discovery of the letters of Las Toscas del Guirre allowed the island to “fall into the train of alphabetical manifestations of the rest of the Canary Islands. A society that codifies what it says connects us to this infinite north of Africa,” says Juan Carlos Hernández. The Islands’ best expert in this discipline is the philologist and archaeologist Renata Springer, a Canarian born in Germany. She deciphered each of the letters and cataloged a total of 105 signs. From being the only island without writing to having the most spectacular alphabetical site in the archipelago. Since then, two other alphabetical stations have been located. “We were the last in the Canary Islands to include stations with alphabetical rock engravings in our collection,” but with the hundred or so Libyan characters engraved in the rock, this site is today the reference for the writing bequeathed by the pre-Hispanic society.
Despite its great importance, Las Toscas del Guirre is in danger. Dr. Juan Francisco Navarro Mederos, one of the leaders of Canarian archaeology, warns: “This is an extremely fragile site due to the instability of the rock in which the engravings are located.” Although access is complicated, on an isolated cliff southwest of La Gomera, this relic is exposed to the elements, in an archaeological complex with natural habitat and burial caves. To get to know it, the ideal is to visit the MAG and enjoy a well-produced audiovisual.
sacred place
At the bottom of the cave there are holes and a channel, carvings with some resemblance to bowl stations that the aborigines, as chronicles reflect, dug for cultural rites involving libations. The archaeologists of La Gomera, however, are clear that it does not fit this profile at all; Indeed, they consider that these were “holes for placing posts, while the canal must have accommodated a sort of wooden partition”. This is not the only cave on the island with these types of footprints. There are bowl and canal stations on all the islands and also in the Iberian Peninsula, such as La Cava de Garcinarro – the largest complex in the country with almost 8,000 bowls. From the first moment, archaeologists were aware of the sacred component of Las Toscas del Guirre, but what they did not know in 2005 was that they were also facing a unique archaeoastronomical site in the context of the cultural astronomy of the Canary Islands.
The existence of a strange hole in the upper part of the wall in front of the alphabetical panel attracted the attention of specialists. With dimensions of just 18 centimeters wide by 15 centimeters high, researchers saw signs that the outline was chiseled. This means that the hole is artificial. For what purpose did they do it? To answer this question, MAG technicians contacted the mathematician José Barrios, author of the first – and so far only – doctoral thesis on archaeoastronomy in the Canary Islands.
Examining the hole, Barrios observed “that its plane is inclined to the vertical of the bottom of the cave, so that, thanks to perspective, a person standing in front of the hole can see a small strip of mountainous horizon up to ‘at the end’. to the west of the island, framed by a small elongated oval. The visible band of the horizon measures approximately thirteen azimuthal degrees. But the landscape perceived by the viewer determines nothing, until the researcher discovers that “in the weeks immediately before and after the winter solstice”, the Sun hides behind a mountain aligned with the center of the hole.
If it wasn’t an exact marker of the solstice, it was at least a seasonal marker. But the professor of mathematical analysis at the University of La Laguna was not satisfied. He wanted to know what would happen on December 22, because the year he was researching it was the day of the winter solstice. José Barrios will never forget what happened on the day of the Christmas Lottery draw. It was his turn A fat archaeoastronomical: “At sunset, sunlight enters through the hole, projecting a ray that travels across the bottom of the cave and up the opposite wall, just to the right of where the Libyco-Berber text is located. The path of the ray is such that before the light goes out, the last ray of the last day of autumn fits perfectly into a small oval cut carved into the eastern wall of the cave. From this moment on, science establishes that this bowl is the precise marker of the winter solstice at Las Toscas del Guirre, centuries after, presumably, the Ghomara astronomers, coming from the north of present-day Morocco, opened a hole to establish their schedule.
This December 22 was very special for Barrios and for the two MAG professionals who had discovered the wonderful indigenous writing panel years before. The next objective was to study the profile of the mountain through which the sun was hidden during the days of the winter solstice.
Hermitage of Las Nieves and sacrificial altars
The discoveries kept coming. Archaeologists have discovered a set of sacrificial altars just at the height behind which the winter sun sets. And from there it joins other iconic mountains and rocks on the island that also house ritual altars in their watchtowers. On one side of this mountain, after the Conquest, the new settlers built the hermitage of Las Nieves, today a place of Christian pilgrimages. For Barrios, this is no coincidence: “The construction of the hermitage, one of the oldest, where the sun sets, allows us to read the religious space of the island in an absolutely new and informs us about the process of syncretism. . religious event occurring after the Conquest.
The acculturation that we saw in Chipude’s La Fortaleza, in the first part of this trilogy, is repeated here. Juan Carlos Hernández adds: “As the evidence suggests, the location of the sanctuary of Las Nieves was chosen for its position in relation to the cave, which would allow decoding the ritual space of the island in a way never before possible. observed in the Canary Islands. »
For the head of the MAG, this symbiosis between the spectacular alphabetical engraving and the solstitial spectator of Las Toscas del Guirre is “a completely exceptional case in studies on the archeology of the ancient Canary Islands, which opens new and important avenues of research for the entire archipelago”. Is there a connection between the meaning of the letters on the panel and the astronomical nature of the cave? The director of the MAG responds: “It is a problem that we does not know at the moment However, it would be strange if in such a small place, one of the uses of the cave was outside the meaning of the other element.
The mesh or network of sacrificial altars that dot the geography of La Gomera will be the protagonist of the last chapter of this trilogy, in which the experts will raise the diachrony, the evolution of this mesh “of sacred and hierarchical places”. In this sense, Hernández and Trujillo have no doubt that Las Toscas del Guirre “was one of those places where the religious power of this culture was put into practice.”
