Until now, mummified human remains found in the Montané Museum in Havana were labeled “pre-Columbian Peruvian miner.” Until the researcher Dolores Delgado has arrived and has clarified that this is not the case. It is a Guanche mummy brought to the capital of Cuna in the Trinidad frigate by the Canarian doctor Miguel Gordillo in the 19th century.
The mummified body of a male deposited in the Montané Museum in Havana, where it had been cataloged as the remains of a pre-Columbian Peruvian miner, is actually a guanche mummy who arrived in Cuba in the 19th century at the request of the doctor from Gran Canaria Miguel Gordillo, as determined by the researcher Dolores Delgado. The origin of the man has been certified by mitochondrial DNA tests, which also reflect that the man died between the ages of 30-35, and now his dating is being established, Dolores Delgado, who is a member of the Institute, indicates in an interview with Efe. of Scientific Studies on Mummies (IECIM), based in Madrid.
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 man deposited in Havana who had the same physiognomy as the guanche mummies. Dolores Delgado, head of the Department of Canarian Archeology and Bioanthropology of the IECIM, began to study together with other members of the center the mummy of the supposed “Peruvian miner”, which is on display in the Luis Montané Anthropological Museum of the Faculty of Biology of the University from 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 backwards [en el tiempo] to find out how he got there. The mummified remains had characteristics similar to those of the bodies of the ancient inhabitants of Tenerifethe Guanches, such as the supine position, the hands extended along the body and parallel to it, the toes joined with signs of pressure from some type of ligament, the head slightly tilted over the right shoulder, the clavicles sunken by the effect of gravity in moments after death.
The mummy’s journey
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 the pre-Columbian mummies of ancient Peru were buried with other characteristics, in a squatting position or sitting on funerary bundles, and this one had an atypical position for Andean mortuary rituals, which was attributed to the fact that this pre-Columbian man had suffered an accident in a mine, which prevented a “traditional” burial. This discourse was maintained until in 2015 “a reasonable doubt” was raised about the origin of the mummy.
How did you get to Cuba?
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 A document dated June 6, 1899 demonstrates. In order to obtain this information, it was necessary to search the acts 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 at the Anthropological Society of Cuba, he presented a work entitled The skull in the anthropological concept: a Guanche skull.
«But… what Guanche material had Montané studied? How had it gotten into the hands of his investigator? What was the origin of it? These were the unknowns that we had to solve, “says Delgado. 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 University of La Laguna Antonio Tejera, who, while collecting notes from the historian José A. Álvarez Rixo, discovered the story of how in the Barranco de Ajabo de Guía de Isora (Tenerife) at the end of 1876 or 1877 a farmer found a very well preserved mummy and sold it for four ounces of gold.
On the frigate ‘Trinidad’
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.” And she was installed, as was the custom among anthropology scholars of the time, in the home of doctor Miguel Gordillo in Havana, where she also had 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, aged 12 or 14. , to Cuba under the care of his uncle Pedro, who was archpriest in the Cathedral of Havana.
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 99.07% coverage, 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.
Investigating the DNA
The tests were carried out in the Biological and Molecular Anthropology Laboratory of the Faculty of Sciences of the 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 research is that the Faculty of Biology of Havana has eliminated the cataloging of the mummy as a “Peruvian miner” and it has been replaced by “Guanche mummy”, and the project continues to review all the existing mummified remains in Cuban scientific centers.
