Exploring the Indigenous Roots of the Canary Islands’ Sugar Industry (Gran Canaria and Tenerife, Spain, 15th-16th Centuries)

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "In Small Islands Forgotten: Insular Historical Archaeologies of a Globalizing World", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Canary Islands were the first European colony in the Atlantic that had an Indigenous population. The colonial written records show that the Indigenous inhabitants of the archipelago built large hydraulic systems to irrigate their farming areas. However, it is still unclear whether and how the European invaders repurposed the local irrigation networks for building the earliest colonial plantations. This paper discusses the first results of a project that combines the analysis of archival sources with the study of agricultural landscapes to identify the remains of Indigenous hydraulic systems in Gran Canaria and Tenerife and to assess how they allowed for the quick development of the Canarian sugar industry in the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• In Small Islands Forgotten: Insular Historical Archaeologies of a Globalizing World   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow