The guanche mummies they are always an attraction per se, and from time to time they come back to the fore, either because there is some new investigation that goes into depth about them and that is reflected in books, documentaries or journalistic information, or because claims arise about bringing the ones that are found in the diaspora, those that were plundered at the time and taken beyond the Archipelago, especially the one that is preserved in the National Archaeological Museum (MAN), in Madrid. It is the best preserved specimen and a replica His chair since this week is the new module of the Guanche funerary world area, at the Museum of Archeology and Nature (MUNA) of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, dedicated precisely to the mummies found outside the island territory, which are 14 in total of which there is reliable evidence, although others are known to exist but are unknown. your location.
The exact copy of the MAN mummy, presented this Wednesday by the Minister of Museums of the Cabildo de Tenerife, Concepción Rivero, and the director of the Archaeological Museum and the Canarian Institute of Bioanthropology, Conrado Rodríguez-Maffiotte, serves as a magnificent example of the system of aboriginal mummification, known as myrtle, and that has nothing to envy to the Egyptian techniques in this area.
The original mummy that has been treasured by the MAN since 2015 -and previously kept in the National Museum of Anthropology-, which was found in the second half of the 18th century in a burial cave in the Barranco de Herques (or Erques), located between the municipalities of Güímar and Fasnia, and which was given to King Carlos III, is the best known of the specimens that are abroad. This specimen – a man over 30 years old, more than eight and a half centuries old, dated, according to the studies carried out, between 1154 and 1260 after Christ – is the spearhead of the island’s claims, whose Demands for him to “return home” date back to 1976. The Cabildo de Tenerife has been unsuccessfully demanding his return on seven occasions. The last one, in 2021, in a joint petition carried out with the Government of the Canary Islands. The Island Corporation considers that, in this case, there is no “justification whatsoever” for not executing its return and believes that it is a simple matter of “good will” to carry it out.
UNDETERMINED NUMBER OF COPIES
It is difficult to know how many Guanche mummies currently exist far from the Canary Islands, taking into account that it is practically impossible to determine with certainty the number of mummified specimens of the aboriginal population that were transferred to other places outside of Tenerife (the island of the Archipelago in the one in which the phenomenon of mummification was more advanced); specifically, at the end of the 18th century and in the 19th century, under the lee of the winds of archaeological and anthropological knowledge that were spreading throughout the West. Many of them ended up in museums or private collections, which later ended up in this type of center and, in addition, suffered vicissitudes of various kinds throughout history, such as world wars and other types of misfortunes. At the beginning of this century, two from the Museum of Natural Sciences of Necochea (Argentina) and three, in 2011, from the Reverte Museum (School of Legal Medicine, Complutense University, Madrid) were returned to Tenerife.
In the new module of the MUNA, in which the replica of the famous mummy of Madrid is housed, details are given of how the embalmed Guanche human remains are distributed throughout the world, most of which are in Europe.
The MUNA, a center dependent on the Autonomous Organism of Museums and Centers (OAMC) of the Cabildo de Tenerife, has a total of 14 mummies recorded abroad, including whole bodies and remains, spread over eight cultural and scientific institutions, six in Europe (Spain -Madrid-, France, United Kingdom, Germany, Austria and Russia) and two in America (Canada and Cuba). Likewise, there is testimony that other aboriginal Guanche mummies have been kept in other centers, such as in the Medicine faculties of Montpellier (France) and Geneva (Switzerland), but it is not known where they are, and also in Necochea itself, of which the whereabouts of another that was taken to Argentina at the end of the 19th century, together with the two that were returned to Tenerife in 2003, is unknown.
IN EXHIBITION OR IN STORE
Regarding the cultural and scientific institutions that currently guard Guanche mummies, either on display or in storage, apart from the aforementioned one that is in the Archaeological Museum of Madrid and that is exhibited within the Canary Islands in that museum center, The Museum of Ethnology and Archeology of the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) has another magnificent example of a Guanche mummy, which was transferred to the Perfidious Albion in the year 1722, although its exact location on the island of Tenerife is unknown, as indicated in an article Conrado Rodríguez-Maffiotte. The Institut für Zoologie und Anthropologie Georg-August-Universität-Göttingen (Germany) has had a mummy from Tenerife since 1803, which was deposited by the German researcher Johann-Friedrich-Blumembach, who acquired it on the island during a scientific trip. Relatively close to this place, in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien (Austria), there is another mummy, although there is not much information about it. In Russia, the Kunstkámera, in the city of Saint Petersburg, preserves a complete Guanche mummy, which is in a good state of preservation and was given as a gift in 1808, as well as the fragmentary remains of another.
The Musée de l’Homme (Trocadero, Paris, France) is the museum institution outside the Islands that has the largest number of remains belonging to pre-Hispanic Canarian cultures, deposited there by the famous Gallic anthropologist René Verneau at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the XX. Its six mummies from Tenerife stand out. “With the changes in the regulations of French museums and the relocation of their collections at the beginning of this century, they were moved out of the Museé de l’Homme and we know little more about them”, explains the archaeological director of MUNA.
Outside of Europe, there is the Redpath Museum, of McGill University, in Montreal (Canada), which houses a mummy found in the Barranco de Santos, in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, which arrived there at the hands of the doctor and antiquarian British EI Lambert in 1892. “It is in a very poor state of preservation and its chronology (using carbon-14) is estimated around the seventh century after Christ,” says Rodríguez-Maffiotte. And the last institution that has been known to preserve a Guanche mummy is the Montané Museum in Havana (Cuba). It is a complete specimen, a male between 30 and 35 years old, which had been cataloged as the remains of a pre-Columbian Peruvian miner. The opinion as an aboriginal mummy was made by the researcher Dolores Delgado, a member of the Institute for Scientific Studies on Mummies (IECIM), according to information from the Efe agency in March of this year.
The Museum of Archeology and Nature of Tenerife currently has in its facilities some twenty complete Guanche mummies and a hundred fragmented or incomplete mummified remains.
