Prehistoric Plant Use on La Palma Island (Canary Islands, Spain) An Example of the Disappearance of Agriculture in an Isolated Environment

Abstract

© 2014 Taylor & Francis.La Palma is a mountainous and remote island placed in the Canarian Archipelago (Spain) (Figure 17.1). e earliest colonisers arrived to the island from northern Africa approximately in the 1st millennium B.C.E., but it is assumed that they stayed practically isolated from the rest of the archipelago and the mainland for almost two thousand years. When modern Europeans rst made contact with the indigenous people from La Palma, in the 15th century C.E., they reported that the indigenes, ‘Auaritas’, did not practise navigation or cultivation. At this time, they obtained food mainly from the livestock and gathered plant resources (Abreu [1602] 1977; da Zurara [1448] 1998). By contrast, farming was reported as practised in the rest of the archipelago during the pre-Hispanic times (Morales 2010).