Beyond death: funeral rituals of mediterranean origin in the Canary proto-history

Abstract

Upon the arrival to the Canary Islands in the first millennium B.C. of the first colonizers, a suggestive interaction was established between continental settlers and oceanic islands that gave rise to cultural adaptation phenomena and the appearance of specific characters in the Canary Island Cultures. The changes affected both socio-economic and technological patterns as well as religious beliefs and funerary rituals, scope of the latter in which we analyze two of the practices witnessed among the protohistoric canaries that incorporated symbolic norms in which their origin can be traced Mediterranean and the transformations that they experienced after their implantation in the Canary Archipelago mummification or ‘mirlado’ and the new-borns sacrifice.