The winning work of Alfonso Trujillo Research Awardwhich organizes every two years the Department of Education and Culture of the Town Hall of La Orotavalocate and detail the existence of at least 55 Guanche burial sites within the municipal areafrom the coast to the summit. A huge archaeological heritage and wasted that the researcher Jesus M. Fernandez Rodriguez and the Consistory itself want to value now through the book that includes this study, Prehistoric Orotava. Death and the Guanchespresented this Friday and now available, with a print run of 500 copiesin the Town Hall.
Jesus M. Fernandez Rodriguezwhat is PhD in Prehistory from the University of La Laguna and professor at the IES San Andrés, explained yesterday that this analysis of the existing burials in the ancient Guanche menceyate of Taoro demonstrate its importance and opens innumerable lines of research for the future, since “The archeology of death is one of the most privileged windows to get closer to the knowledge of the past”.
Apart from a detailed inventory of the pre-Hispanic funerary sites, this research reviews the existing information on the funerary rituals of the Guanches and offers a very complete vision of the treatment of death in pre-Hispanic times, in which not everyone said goodbye to their loved ones. life in a burial with mummification, but rather secondary deposits abound, made up of jumbles of bones, and it is even possible that a part of the population did not receive a formal burial.
The mayor of La Orotava, Francisco Linares (CC)valued the importance of this work, which he predicted would become a reference book, and advanced that the call for a new edition of this historical research contest will be opened shortly, endowed with a prize of 6,000 euros and the edition of the winning job.
A detailed investigation
According to its author, this work aims to offer the most detailed cataloging possible of the written, oral, graphic and museum information of the different burial places in La Orotava. It also includes an update of the bibliography and an overview of the phenomenon of Guanche funeral rituals, the set of materials and contexts of the burial caves and necropolises of La Orotava and the rest of the island.
