“It has been quite a discovery,” says Dolores Delgado Miranda, a researcher at the Institute for Scientific Studies on Mummies (IECIM), specifically from the Department of Archeology and Bioanthropology of the Canary Islands, when referring to the finding, still pending dating, that the The mummified body of a male deposited in the Montané Museum in Havana for more than a century and a half, where it had been cataloged as the remains of a pre-Columbian Peruvian miner, is actually a Guanche mummy that arrived in Cuba in the 19th century at instances of the Gran Canarian doctor Miguel Gordillo, like many other remains of pre-Columbian Canarian aborigines.
According to Delgado, the origin of the man has been certified by mitochondrial DNA tests, which also reflect that the man died between 30 and 35 years of age and his origin, according to the studies of the professor of Prehistory at the ULL, Antonio Tejera, is the Ajabo ravine between Guía de Isora and Adeje.
Precisely, a group of experts from the IECIM attended the International Congress on Mummies organized in Lima and noticed that in one of the presentations slides were projected of a mummified body of a Peruvian male deposited in Havana that had the same physiognomy as the mummies guanches. From there, Dolores Delgado began to study, together with other members of the center, the mummy of the alleged Peruvian miner, which is on display at the Luis Montané Anthropological Museum of the Faculty of Biology of the University of Havana. This led to the signing of an agreement between the IECIM and the National Council of Cuban Heritage to facilitate the investigation “and we began to go back in time to find out how it had gotten there.” Since then, the IECIM collaborates financially with the Cuban museum to “keep the mummy in the best possible conditions, given the scarce resources they have in Cuba”, although the transfer of the mummy to its place of origin, Tenerife, is ruled out. because, according to the researcher, “how are we going to ask for repatriation, when in our own country they don’t let us bring the mummy that is in Madrid,” she stresses.
Dolores Delgado lamented that there are still dozens “and even hundreds” of Guanche mummies outside the Islands, in private collections or museums and universities in Saint Petersburg, Paris, Cambridge, Montreal, Germany or California “although 20 years ago we managed to repatriate two of the Casilda Collection of Buenos Aires”.
The Peruvian mummies
The mummified remains had characteristics similar to those of the bodies of the ancient inhabitants of Tenerife, such as the supine position, the hands extended along the body and parallel to it, the toes joined with signs of pressure from some sort of ligament, head tilted slightly over right shoulder, clavicles depressed by gravity in moments after death.
The mummy had passed through various institutions during the convulsive times that the Caribbean island experienced at the end of the 19th century and in the 20th century, and in one of those changes it was labeled as the remains of a Peruvian miner.
However, most of the pre-Columbian mummies of ancient Peru were buried with other characteristics, in a squatting position or seated in funerary bundles, and this one had an atypical position for Andean mortuary rituals, which was attributed to the fact that this man of pre-Columbian times he had suffered an accident in a mine, which prevented a “traditional” burial.
Grancanarian doctor
This discourse was maintained until in 2015 “a reasonable doubt” was raised about the origin of the mummy. Meanwhile, Dolores Delgado found out that, after the death of her father, the son of the Canarian doctor established in Cuba, Miguel Gordillo, had donated the Guanche mummy that had been the property of his father to the Anthropological Museum of the Havana Academy of Medical Sciences, according to shows a document dated June 6, 1899.
In order to arrive at this data, it was necessary to search the minutes and records of various museum centers in Cuba until finding a study by Luis Montané y Dardé (1849-1936), who, on the occasion of his admission to the Anthropological Society of Cuba, presented a work entitled The skull in the anthropological concept: a Guanche skull. “But… what Guanche material had Montané studied? How had it come into his hands as a researcher? What was its origin? These were the unknowns that we had to solve”, points out the researcher Dolores Delgado, now anxious to know shortly the dating of the Guanche mummy and not of a Peruvian.
four ounces of gold
The direction of departure of this material in the Canary Islands was sought and for this the study of the professor of Prehistory of the ULL Antonio Tejera was fundamental, who, when compiling notes from the historian José Antonio Álvarez Rixo, discovered the story of how in the Ajabo ravine of Guía de Isora at the end of 1876 or 1877 a farmer found a very well preserved mummy and sold it for four ounces of gold.
As the story continues, this mummy was taken to Havana on the Trinidad frigate, which sailed from the Canary Islands in January 1878, “to be placed in a natural history cabinet.” She was installed, as was the custom among anthropology scholars of the time, in the home of the doctor Miguel Gordillo in Havana, where she also possessed Guanche skulls that were sent to the Anthropological Society of Cuba.
Miguel Gordillo was born in Guía (Gran Canaria) in 1824 and, although his family was well situated, after a period of drought and famine in the Archipelago he was not in a good financial position, so his parents decided to send him, with 12 or 14 years, to Cuba under the care of his uncle Pedro, who was archpriest in the Cathedral of Havana.
The young Miguel studied medicine and practiced his profession always linked to his native Canary Islands, since he continued the epistolary relationship and made commissions, such as those referring to the remains of island aborigines. After spinning the story of his arrival in Cuba, now the results of the genetic tests remained to be determined, and for this a study of the mitochondrial DNA was carried out from a bone sample and a molar from the mummy.
The mitogenome was successfully contrasted using a unique sequencing approach with a coverage of 99.07%, which determined that the “Peruvian miner’s mummy” could not be native to Peru as it did not show any of the haplogroups in the area, but H1, that it is of European origin and that it is present in Guanche populations.
The tests were carried out at the Laboratory of Biological and Molecular Anthropology at Masaryk University in Brno (Czech Republic) by specialists in working with ancient DNA and where dating is also carried out. A first result of this investigation is that the Faculty of Biology of Havana has eliminated the cataloging of the mummy as “Peruvian miner” and has replaced it with “Guanche mummy”, and continues with the project to review all existing mummified remains. in Cuban scientific centers.
The Cuban Mummy Project is the international and multidisciplinary project signed between the Institute for Scientific Studies on Mummies and the National Heritage Council of Cuba to study “and contextualize” all the mummies deposited in the country, which has Andean and Egyptian remains, Delgado points out. , who recalled that “since 2018 I have not seen that mummy, but I can assure you that it is still in good condition, although it has already undergone some touch-ups in its original color, due to the varnish and an incision in the abdomen, with a very carefully placed patch” , pointed out the researcher, who took the opportunity to thank the Montané Museum of Havana for its great collaboration in achieving “this great find”, still pending dating, “being a carbon copy of the mummy that has been in the National Archaeological Museum of Madrid since 1763” and that, according to recent studies, could be 850 years old.
